Renewable Energy & Sustainability Heroes by GineersNow Engineering GineersNow Engineering Magazine Issue No. 017, Ren | Page 22

New Research Could Turn
Water Into The Fuel Of The Future
Researchers from Caltech and Berkeley Lab has found that water, along
with Solar energy, could potentially be the best alternative to fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels have been the world’s go-
to source of energy for the past several
decades. Unfortunately for us, oil is
expensive, hard to find, takes millions of
years to create, and most of all, it’s the
number one cause of climate change.
With so many downsides of using such
fuels in our society, scientists have been
working for years to find better alternative
sources of energy; and their findings seem
promising.
Currently, the most efficient source of
alternative energy source is solar power,
one variant of which is called solar fuel,
which is basically using solar power to
convert – you guessed it- water and
carbon dioxide into chemicals that could
be used for fuel (which is usually splitting
the hydrogen from water and using those
as a fuel source). Sadly, these chemical
reactions can’t be triggered by using solar
power alone. There needs to be other
materials to catalyze the reaction- and
that’s exactly what a team of researchers
are trying to find.
For years, scientists have been working
to create practical solar fuels by using
inexpensive materials as photoanodes,
which are similar to the anodes found in
batteries, which then create solar fuel by
helping the electrons flow from one end to
the other. This year, researchers from the
Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
have doubled the list of potential materials
that could be used as photoanodes in the
span of only 2 years.