I was struck by an article in a recent New Yorker about a scientist who has
invented what might be a solution to the energy needs of the second and third
world (he calls them “the non-legacy world; the “first world” is the “legacy
world). While his “artificial leaf” won’t recharge your Tesla roadster, it has
the potential to make a huge difference to billions of people all over the
world. The following is an abstract from
The New Yorker website, with a link
to the full article.
The New Yorker:
Dept. of Invention
The Artificial Leaf
Daniel
Nocera’s vision for sustainable energy.
by
David Owen
May 14, 2012
Daniel Nocera was a science-minded
high-school junior in New Jersey at the beginning of the Arab oil embargo, in
1973. At the end of the decade, the Iranian revolution, followed closely by the
outbreak of war between Iran and Iraq, precipitated a second oil crisis. By
then, Nocera was a graduate student in chemistry at the California Institute of
Technology. Within a short time, he had decided to devote his science career to
energy.
Most of the energy we use comes from
photosynthesis. Green plants store energy from the sun in certain chemical
bonds, and we exploit that energy when we eat plants, or when we eat animals
that have eaten plants, or when we burn either plants or substances ultimately
derived from plants: firewood, peat, coal, oil, natural gas, ethanol.
Nocera decided in the early eighties
that the chemistry of green plants was the likeliest place to seek an answer to
civilization’s long-term energy difficulties. When the price of oil dropped in
the mid-eighties, alternative-fuel research declined in popularity as an
academic pursuit. But he persisted in his research, seeking a way to
inexpensively replicate solar-energy conversion as performed by vegetation.
At the 2011 national meeting of the American
Chemical Society, Nocera announced a tangible breakthrough: a cheap,
playing-card-size coated-silicon sheet that, when placed in a glass of tap
water and exposed to sunlight, split the water into hydrogen and oxygen. The
process that Nocera calls “artificial photosynthesis” could be described more
precisely as solar-powered electrolysis of water: using energy from the sun to
electrochemically split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Nocera isn’t the only scientist working on
artificial photosynthesis. The field is at least four decades old, and interest
in it has grown in recent years. The
article mentions the work of John Turner, a scientist at the National Renewable
Energy Laboratory, which is funded by the Department of Energy.
Owen visited Nocera’s lab at M.I.T.
and discussed the challenges of adapting the artificial leaf for household use.
Since the early eighties, Nocera has focused on providing energy for the
world’s poorest people. “If there’s one thing that’s unique to the technology
development I’ve done, it’s been doing science with the super-poor in mind.”
His emphasis is largely humanitarian; it also arises from his belief, as a
scientist, that the only way to meet the world’s projected energy needs without
causing intolerable environmental harm will be to work, in effect, from the
bottom up—an approach that’s very different from the ones that dominate energy
research.
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