Artificial photosynthesis offers clean source of hydrogen

The idea of a hydrogen economy, where currently oil and its derivatives underpin much of every day life but could be superseded using hydrogen as a fuel, has been around for decades.

It is delayed, however, by two factors: the lack of a distribution structure for hydrogen and the difficulty in making the gas.

There are two ways of producing hydrogen: decompose water into its constituent gases, which requires electricity; or make it from natural gas, which does not reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

Researchers have been trying for many years to develop a method to use the sun’s energy to power water decomposition, mimicking the natural process of photosynthesis whereby green plants convert solar into chemical energy, but nature’s tricks have, as ever, proved difficult to copy.

Zetian Mi, a specialist in computer and electrical engineering, began working on this problem while at McGill University in Montréal. Now at the University of Michigan, Mi has published a paper describing a device capable of this artificial photosynthesis and water decomposition in Nature Communications.