Artificial Photosynthesis

When it comes to sustainable energy, hydrogen is the ultimate fuel – combining harmlessly with oxygen to produce pure water. And when it comes to producing hydrogen, photosynthesis is the ultimate process – using sunlight to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen. Put the two together and you have a system that’s not only sustainable, but environmentally neutral – which is why artificial photosynthesis has become the holy grail of carbon-neutral energy production. And recently, engineers found a material that may bring it one step closer to reality.

It turns out that mimicking what plants do naturally is not a simple task. Developing devices to gather light efficiently requires expensive manufacturing techniques which stack up thin layers of material (such as silicon) to create a band gap that can trap energy without absorbing it (ala solar cells). The new discovery simplifies the material into a single layer of manganese oxide, making it cheaper to manufacture as well as more efficient. As a result, less sunlight is needed in order to carry out the process of generating fuel.

The discovery has some very exciting potential for creating new energy sources. In theory, a rooftop made of the new material could turn rain water into energy using nothing but the sun, and hydrogen-powered vehicles could recycle their own by-products to generate more fuel.