Solar advance for hydrogen fuel

Innovative solar technology that may offer a “green” solution to the production of hydrogen fuel has been successfully tested on a large scale at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

The technology also promises to facilitate the storage and transportation of hydrogen. The chemical process behind the technology was originally developed at Weizmann, and it has been scaled up in collaboration with European scientists. Results of the experiments will be reported this month at the 2005 Solar World Congress of the International Solar Energy Society (ISES) in Orlando, Florida.

Hydrogen, the most plentiful element in the universe, is an attractive candidate for becoming a pollution-free fuel of the future. However, nearly all hydrogen used today is produced by means of expensive processes that require combustion of polluting fossil fuels. Moreover, storing and transporting hydrogen is extremely difficult and costly.

The new solar technology tackles these problems by creating an easily storable intermediate energy source form from metal ore, such as zinc oxide.