Cheap, Clean Ways to Produce Hydrogen for Use in Fuel Cells?

[Joanne98]

ScienceDaily (Jan. 28, 2011) — A little disorder goes a long way, especially when it comes to harnessing the sun's energy. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) jumbled the atomic structure of the surface layer of titanium dioxide nanocrystals, creating a catalyst that is both long lasting and more efficient than all other materials in using the sun's energy to extract hydrogen from water.

Their photocatalyst, which accelerates light-driven chemical reactions, is the first to combine durability and record-breaking efficiency, making it a contender for use in several clean-energy technologies.

It could offer a pollution-free way to produce hydrogen for use as an energy carrier in fuel cells. Fuel cells have been eyed as an alternative to combustion engines in vehicles. Molecular hydrogen, however, exists naturally on Earth only in very low concentrations. It must be extracted from feedstocks such as natural gas or water, an energy-intensive process that is one of the barriers to the widespread implementation of the technology.

"We are trying to find better ways to generate hydrogen from water using sunshine," says Samuel Mao, a scientist in Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division who led the research. "In this work, we introduced disorder in titanium dioxide nanocrystals, which greatly improves its light absorption ability and efficiency in producing hydrogen from water."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110128165212.htm

The important sentence in this article......

"They found that 24 percent of the sunlight absorbed by the photocatalyst was converted into hydrogen, a production rate that is about 100 times greater than the yields of most semiconductor photocatalysts."

And GUESS WHO supported the research?

>
This research was supported by the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Transmission electron microscopy imaging used to study the nanocrystals at the atomic scale was performed at the National Center for Electron Microscopy, a national user facility located at Berkeley Lab.
>

So bookmark this article and use it against the thugs when they start trying to starve the Department of Energy.

[Chemical Bill]

1. Any hydrogen that escapes...

will quickly rise in the atmosphere and destroy the ozone layer. Got any other ideas?

Bill

[Joanne98]

3. No

[bhikkhu]

2. "24 percent of the sunlight absorbed...was converted into hydrogen"?

That's pretty high. I wonder if they were taking the sunlight by volume or by weight...

[swilton]

4. With electric cars

the infra-structure is closest to being a reality vis a vis 'filling stations' available to recharge batteries....With this available, we are a breath away from solar powered cars...The only thing keeping us from making this a reality is distractions such as bio-fuels and hydrogen fuel cells. Both require up front energy investing with minimal energy output as dividends. They serve as a suitable distraction so that bigwigs can keep milking the country with tax subsidies for as long as possible and American consumers remained tied to their combustion engines....

The hydrogen fuel cell business is designed to keep electric cars - fueled by renewable solar energy from becoming a reality...total waste of tax dollars.

I might also add that this is a major distraction from investing in mass transit.