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I’ve got some Big Green News for you:
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scientists at the University of Waterloo in Canada
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have come up with a new design for an artificial leaf.
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That means a whole new way of making cleaner burning fuels
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using a process that mimics photosynthesis!
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But...what’s an artificial leaf?
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And could it really help us move away from the fossil fuels that are getting us into so much trouble?
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We’ve always been interested in figuring out how to copy plants,
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because they do a great job creating energy from the bare minimum.
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They take in water from their environment and absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.
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Add the energy boost of sunlight and voila,
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they’ve made glucose, or sugar that they use for energy (plus oxygen, and some leftover water).
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But instead of producing glucose and oxygen like plants do,
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artificial leaf tech aims to alter that process to produce fuel that we can use.
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The idea behind these bio-inspired technologies is to produce cleaner burning fuel
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while also scrubbing CO2 from the air and producing oxygen,
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so it’s no wonder that scientists have been trying to create one since the 70's.
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But there’s also a really good reason why they haven’t quite managed to make
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a fully-functioning commercial one yet.
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There are many parts of photosynthesis that are really hard to do if you’re not a plant.
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One is that you need a catalyst that interacts with light energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen,
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a process called photolysis.
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Plants do this in their chloroplasts,
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the little energy production factories inside them that also hold the pigment that makes them green.
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Some teams have pursued this route, creating systems that just take light energy and make hydrogen,
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which can then be used as a fuel.
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But that’s slightly problematic not only because the actual process is really difficult,
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but because we don’t actually use hydrogen to power all that much yet.
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That’s why other teams are working to not only tackle photolysis,
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but to also come up with catalysts for the second hard thing:
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converting that resulting hydrogen and CO2 from the air into an alternative fuel.
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You know, something that could realistically be used as fuel now.
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And then after you do that, you just have to make sure the whole thing is scalable and cheap.
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So many groups around the world are vying to be the first to figure this out,
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or at least add something new to this growing body of knowledge.
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Recent work out of Cambridge University, for example,
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uses cobalt to turn water and CO2 into something called syngas,
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an industrial product that’s essential for making everything from plastics and medicines
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to agricultural products and alternative fuels.
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They hope to continue refining this process to eventually produce ethanol in just one step
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from only carbon dioxide and water.
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Can you beLEAF it?!
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But the latest breakthrough comes in red, not green.
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A Waterloo University-based team uses cuprous oxide as a catalyst
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that when mixed with CO2 and water and then exposed to light,
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turns into methanol (with a little oxygen on the side).
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And guess what?! We can use methanol as a fuel, and we do—often.
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It’s used in race cars, ocean freight shipping, some buses, lots of stuff!
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Importantly, this whole reaction occurs with no input of electricity,
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which makes it different from some previous efforts that have required electricity
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and so can be kind of inefficient and way too expensive to scale up.
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So the artificial leaf itself doesn’t take much energy to make and it absorbs CO2 from the air.
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And methanol, the fuel it produces, emits far fewer greenhouse gases and pollutants than gasoline.
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Even at their peak efficiency, plants only actually convert about 1% of the sunlight they absorb into stored energy,
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so there’s certainly room for improvement.
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And this latest artificial leaf tech is 10 times more efficient than plant photosynthesis,
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and is relatively simple, so the team hopes it could be easily scaled up.
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They hope to start using this tech to capture carbon from industrial power plants to make methanol,
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giving us a double whammy of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and providing an alternative fuel.
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Various iterations of artificial leaf technologies are unfurling all over the world,
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building on each other and branching out in different directions.
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Not only does research like this provide us with alternatives to petroleum and petroleum byproducts,
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it could also decrease our demand for them altogether—
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an incentive we’re going to need more of as we grow into an uncertain future.
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If you want even more on alternative energy technologies,
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then check out this video here on how carbon nanotubes could revolutionize our solar energy,
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and make sure you subscribe to Seeker for all news leafy and green.
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Let us know what other topics like this you want us to cover down in the comments below,
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and as always, thanks for watching.
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I’ll see you next time.
