Scientists make breakthrough on "artificial leaf"

http://futureoftech.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/30/8064321-artificial-leaf-makes-real-fuel?chromedomain=cosmiclog

I was talking about just this thing the other day, seems that somebody else had the same idea.

Even if hydrogen will never make a good replacement for gasoline (there are several reasons, the two big ones being that its highly volatile and difficult to store, the second being that water vapor, the byproduct of hydrogen combustion, is a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide), being able to chemically store solar power fixes a lot of the problems with the technology.

Really, this is a huge leap forward, so its nice to see it come sooner than I expected it would.

So it's an integrated, solid state hydrolizer/photovoltaic cell? Kinda neat I guess. I hate it when the word "breakthrough" gets thrown around though.

edited 3rd Oct '11 10:09:04 PM by Deboss

^Well, they've been trying to pull this off for twenty years now, and the best that any group has come up with involves a bunch of expensive rare-earth materials. Then these guys come along and figure out how to do it with what amounts to "sandy soil". I'd call that "rapid and sudden progress", at least.

Well, I didn't catch, did they say they can mass produce it right now?

^Main issue now is developing a catchment system. The thing can trigger hydrolysis just fine, but they still need a way to siphon off the hydrogen gas as it forms. To be honest though that doesn't seem like such a technical hurdle, so I can see this going to commercial production fairly rapidly.

Basically this achievement is not unlike if someone were to announce that they had figured out the chemical formula for a room-temperature superconductor - artificial photosynthesis has been a biologist's wet dream now for a long time, its cool to see it becoming practical.

I'd point out that it's not really like photosynthesis, but that's just being pedantic. Nor is this anything biologically oriented from what I can tell.

I'm not concerned with the process of capturing the hydrogen, I'm concerned with the process of producing the panels. Just because it's made of common materials does not mean it's ready for production. Example: carbon nanotubes.