A chemist and energy researcher at MIT, Daniel Nocera, has gotten a lot of attention in recent years for what he calls the artificial leaf. It does appear rather clever and perhaps a door toward a historical shift in how mankind powers civilization. Envisioned is a system of simple solar collectors that, placed in water, harness the energy in sunlight to split, right there, H2O into bubbling streams of hydrogen and oxygen. One can store the hydrogen as fuel that, at night, could run turbines or other engines and make electricity.
This week a special “Innovation” edition of the New Yorker arrived in the mail. It has at least two articles of particular interest to the demographic that KSJTracker serves. One, by Michael Specter, looks hard at geo-engineering, or what former Science magazine writer Eli Kintisch has called hacking the planet. It’s a good and cautionary read. But my interest for the moment is in the one by David Owen on Nocera and his artificial leaf. If you’re not a subscriber you may have a hard time reading the whole thing online without ponying up a fee.
What the article does best is, along with its personal and historic detail, tell readers that Nocera’s aim is not, as some of us (me) have been led to believe during casual encounter with news on this at other outlets, to provide a major new power source for heavily industrialized nations’ manufacturing centers or to other people who like their kilowatts in bulk. Those uses benefit people already heavily powered up. Nocera is aiming lower, also means higher. He imagines this technology as transformational mainly for people who struggle to have any power at all. That includes those in shanty towns or out in the bush far from the grid, and for whom having a simple, sturdy way to make enough power to run a light bulb all night or to keep cell phones and other comm devices charged would be life-changing.
What it should have done is put much higher that Nocera is developing a reputation for excess enthusiasm and lapses into exaggeration. “Showmanship” comes up. One finds this nice bit of phrasing: his prototupe (see pic above) is “a prop, not a product.” This is nowhere near saying he has a scam running. That’s clearly not the case. But Owen tells us that despite the fervor of the team building these little electronic water-splitting marvels, they are still short of the efficiency and compactness that one needs even to run a decent light bulb all night on the energy harvested during the day. It’s better up front to tell people to take what they are about to read with a grain of salt.
The article also adds to the tremendous amount of media attention, by specialty outlets for the most part, that Nocera and his group have enjoyed. The best New Yorker stories tend to tell us things we didn’t know a thing about. We’ve posted on this possibly epochal development in photosynthesis here at ksjtracker (in March last year). The news flow has continued.
Other Stories on the Artificial Leaf:
- PC World – David Saetang (Mar 29, 2011) Researchers Develop Artificial Leaf; Your Marigolds Cower in Fear ;
- NYTimes (Business, Mar 21, 2011) Anne Eisenberg: The Answer Is (Artifically) Blowing in the Wind ; Where we learn the name of the (famous) Caltech chemist to whom Owen refers in passing.
- Economic Times (April 1 2012, India) Hari Pulakkat: Artificial photosynthesis: Make your own fuel and change the world ;
Grist for the Mill: American Chemical Society Press Release ;
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