Solar-energy project works towards 'clean' fuel production

The SolarCAP project is a multi-disciplinary effort that involves physicists who manipulate the behaviour of photons and harvest them; chemists to utilise these photons for fuel generation; and, eventually, engineers to scale up the process.

‘I think the public tends to think of hydrogen-powered cars as being very green and I don’t think there’s a widespread understanding that all that hydrogen is currently coming from fossil-fuel sources,’ Prof Wendy Flavell of Manchester University told The Engineer.

One of the SolarCAP research groups recently demonstrated the splitting of water to form hydrogen using an indium phosphide (InP) nanocrystal array with an external light source.

However, Flavell believes there may be too much emphasis on achieving a hydrogen economy given the difficulty in storing and transporting the gas in fuel form. She said the ‘holy grail’ would be solar activation of alkanes such as methane into methanol, for which there is a very ‘mature technology’ in terms of utilisation in devices such as fuel cells. This process would also release carbon monoxide as a byproduct, which is a widely used feedstock for the chemical industry.