Fossil fuels won't last forever, so scientists and engineers are looking for new and effective ways to capture solar energy to produce liquid fuel. One promising technique relies on a common material about people have never heard of - the element cerium.
Sunlight pours a lot of energy onto the rise of the Earth. But one huge challenge is to project out how to get that vigour and turning it into fuels to force our cars and trucks.
Fossil fuels won't last forever, so scientists and engineers are looking for new and effective ways to capture solar energy for fuel. One promising technique relies on a common material most people have never heard of: the element cerium.
Cerium "is chemiclaimy similar to what we call the rare earth metals, but it turns out not really to be rare," says Sossina Haile, a professor of materials science and chemical engineering at Caltech. It's almost as abundant as copper, and is quite useful.
Haile has been experimenting with cerium because, at the correct temperature, it can turn carbon dioxide and water into energy-rich fuels.
But there is one hang-up: "The view is sure that the temperatures have to be high," she says. Really high - nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Obviously, this action would be utterly useless if you had to use an energy guzzling furnace to make fuels.
A Scratch On U.S. Energy Production?
So before this year, Haile got together with some colleagues in Switzerland and figured out how to put cerium inside a twist that can get those tremendous temperatures by concentrating solar energy.
And they did it - they were able to produce synthetic fuel from just water and carbon dioxide. As they study in the journal Science, the system wasn't very efficient - less than 1 percent of the solar energy got converted into fuel. But there is hope.
"If we had a perfect reactor," Haile says, "we should easily get 10 percent efficient."
And because the cerium doesn't get used up in the reaction, it can be victimized over and over again.
"We went through the big numbers and said, 'Would this have any dent on U.S. energy production?' And the result is yes," she says.
The illusion with any technology, though, is to flesh out whether you can prepare it in a pragmatic and comparatively cheap way. A few days ago, the Department of Energy recognized the promise - and the perils - of technologies that use solar energy to have liquid fuels rather than electricity, as solar panels do. It constituted an organisation called ARPA-E - the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy.
Better Than Plants?
Eric Toone, a chemist at Duke University, directs an ARPA-E program that supports research on ideas that incorporate biology to achieve what Haile is stressful to do with straight chemistry and engineering.
"The ultimate end is the same, right? The ultimate end is to say, 'How can we take solar photons and change that into a liquid fuel at higher efficiencies than we acknowledge we can do using plants?' " Toone says.
Plants right now are grown to grow biofuels, like ethanol from corn. But green plants typically convert far less than 1 percent of sunshine into fuel.
"So the list of the plot is to say, 'Well, can we do better than that?' " he says.
To get out, ARPA-E has pumped research dollars into more than a dozen universities and small companies across the country. Most projects are barely getting under way, and Toone says it's clearly too early to begin picking winners and losers. But he is good of optimism.
"This is utterly a solvable problem. Realistic time frames? I suspect we are 10 to 15 years off from actual fuels that you can buy at a heart and put into your vehicle," he says. "But I do very, very, very strongly believe that this is leaving to happen."
Caltech professor Haile says she's not saying her attack is the best, but it is an exercise of something that could pan out.
"I personally view that the challenges that remain are very surmountable," she says.
The crux here, like all technologies, is that person needs to put the considerable time and money to get out what's really leaving to work. Intriguing ideas, like hers, are but the starting point for innovation.
"This is something that a party would want to be concerned to bring it forward," she says.To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
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