$122 million to turn sunlight into fuel
Pat Brennan, The Orange County Register
A group of California universities that includes UC Irvine landed a $122 million grant Thursday to attempt a scientific breakthrough: converting sunlight directly into fuel.
The five-year project, to be funded by the Department of Energy and led by Caltech, will seek to create an artificial way to perform a task that leaves perform naturally — combining sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to create an energy source.
The ultimate goal: fuel that could be poured directly into auto gasoline tanks and other existing infrastructure, dramatically reducing the need for fossil fuels.
“Many people consider this to be, if we can pull it off, a potential game changer,” said Nathan S. Lewis, George L. Argyros professor at Caltech, who will direct the research “hub” created with the grant money.
“We think we’re smarter than a plant,” he said. “We should be able to do it, too.”
UC Irvine’s dean of physical sciences, John Hemminger, will take part in the project, along with the university’s Center for Solar Energy. Hemminger will work out of a building at Caltech, wired to a second building in northern California using telepresence and other advanced technology, Lewis said.
While leaves can already accomplish what the project aims to do artificially, plant photosynthesis is quite inefficient, he said; less than one percent of the energy that hits them is converted into plant tissues.
The artificial system might look like sheets of bubblewrap into which water is fed; fuel would flow out of the cells. Unlike solar cells, the sunlight-driven energy could be stored for later use.
“That way, you can store sunlight’s energy for cloudy days, or night, and you can put it in your cars, and not just make electricity that can’t be stored,” Lewis said. “We know it’s possible to do this at least ten times better than a plant does.”
The other institutions taking part are the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara and UC San Diego.
