Article: Chemist Tries to Solve World's Energy Woes

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Chemist Tries to Solve World's Energy Woes

 

August 06, 2005 6:28 PM EDT

 

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - A U.S. chemist is trying to determine how the world

will produce enough energy to supply 9 billion people by mid-century -

and whether that can be done without pumping off-the-charts amounts of

carbon dioxide into the air.

 

Daniel Nocera, 48, is working to achieve an old, elusive dream: using

the bountiful energy in sunlight to split water into its basic

components, hydrogen and oxygen. The elements could then be used to

supply clean-running fuel cells or new kinds of machinery. Or the energy

created from the reaction itself, as atomic bonds are severed and

re-formed, might be harnessed and stored.

 

There is a beautiful model for this: photosynthesis. Sunlight kickstarts

a reaction in which leaves break down water and carbon dioxide and turn

them into oxygen and sugar, which plants use for fuel.

 

But plants developed this process over billions of years, and even so,

it's technically not that efficient. Nocera and other scientists are

trying to replicate that - and perhaps improve on it - in decades.

 

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it's

generally locked up in compounds with other elements. Currently, it is

chiefly harvested from fossil fuels, whose use is the main cause of

carbon dioxide emissions blamed for global warming.

 

And so while hydrogen fuel cells - in which hydrogen and oxygen combine

to produce electricity and water - have a green reputation, their

long-term promise could be limited unless the hydrogen they consume

comes from clean sources.

 

That's where Nocera's method comes in. If it works, it would be free of

carbon and the epitome of renewable, since it would be powered by the

sun. Enough energy from sunlight hits the earth every hour to supply the

world for months. The challenge is harnessing it and storing it

efficiently, which existing solar technologies do not do.

 

" This is nirvana in energy. This will make the problem go away, " Nocera

said one morning in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology, where the Grateful Dead devotee has a " Mean People Suck "

sticker on his window. " If it doesn't, we will cease to exist as

humanity. "

 

Lots of people have explored this challenge, but Nocera had a big

breakthrough when he used light to coax multiple hydrogen atoms out of

liquid. The key was figuring out the right chemical catalyst.

 

Nocera's 2001 paper on the process in the journal Science, written with

graduate student Alan Heyduk, turned heads. Venture capitalists rang his

phone off the hook offering to fund him in an alternative-energy

company.

 

The achievement, and its revolutionary prospects, won Nocera this year's

Italgas Prize, a $100,000 award given annually by an Italian utility to

a top energy researcher.

 

" Dan is even-money (odds) to solve this problem, " says Harry Gray, a

renowned California Institute of Technology chemist who was Nocera's

graduate adviser.

 

But there's a catch. In fact, there's a few, and they illustrate how

hard it can be to move alternative energy beyond the proof-of-concept

phase.

 

Nocera has performed the reaction with acidic solutions, but not water

yet.

 

The catalyst he used was a compound that included the expensive metal

rhodium. To be a practical energy solution, it will have to be made from

inexpensive elements like iron, nickel or cobalt.

 

Nocera's reaction got the photons in light to free up hydrogen atoms,

but that's only half the equation. The harder part will be to also

capture the oxygen that emerges when water molecules are split. That

way, both elements can be fed into a fuel cell, making the process as

efficient as possible.

 

Nocera and scientists not affiliated with his work say those steps are

achievable. But first, major advances in basic chemistry will be

necessary for the reactions to be well understood.

 

As a result, Nocera believes it might be 20 years before engineers might

design systems based on his work. And he frets that too few scientists

are exploring the problem, with many top minds instead focused on

biomedical research.

 

" This is a massive construction project, " he says. " You can go back to

building New York City in the '20s and '30s. You can't do it with just a

few construction workers. So I need more construction workers, more hard

hats, with me as a hard hat. "

 

There's another big hurdle. While Nocera plugs away at trying to save

the world, some people don't believe it needs saving.

 

Most scientists concur that continuing to burn fossil fuels will send

the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - it's now 35 percent

higher than in preindustrial times - to dangerous levels, causing global

temperatures to rise with potentially devastating effects.

 

" We are literally poisoning ourselves, " Nocera says. " People don't get

it because they can't see it. "

 

But this is a famously politicized topic in the United States, where

some powerful political leaders question the science behind global

warming. And that, many scientists say, diverts attention and funds from

trying to solve the problem.

 

And even among people who believe global warming's risks are too great

to ignore, there is no consensus on what kind of green energy should

come to the rescue.

 

Nocera cites a calculation by Caltech chemist Nathan Lewis that power

demands in 2050 will be so great that just to keep carbon dioxide

emissions at twice preindustrial levels, a nuclear plant would have to

be built every two days. There's not enough room on the planet's surface

for other widely touted solutions such as wind and biomass to have much

impact.

 

Only the sun is the answer, Lewis argues.

 

Critics of that vision say many energy technologies being explored -

including improved ways of storing electricity and different kinds of

fuel cells - will come online in the next few decades and throw off

today's extrapolations about the future.

 

Arno Penzias, who won the Nobel Prize for confirming the Big Bang and

now invests in alternative energy startups for New Enterprise

Associates, contends there are dozens of ideas more promising than ones

involving hydrogen.

 

When told about Nocera's project, Penzias gets heated, saying it is

unlikely to be practical.

 

" It is so far from being revolutionary that it's not even worth

mentioning, " Penzias says. " It will be a big yawn. "

 

Nocera seems to thrive on such opposition, because he expects to prove

naysayers wrong.

 

It's part of his blunt enthusiasm, which manifests itself when he

discusses the joys of teaching chemistry to freshmen ( " They love me " ) or

when he meets with his grad students to discuss the status of their

research.

 

Those sessions often devolve into arguments over the meaning of some

data or the direction that projects ought to take. Provoked by Nocera's

intensity - he'll exclaim, " I'm dying here! " in a tone resembling

neurotic comic Larry David - tempers often rise.

 

One student recently threw an eraser at Nocera, leaving a pink welt on

his back that Nocera later showed off with a laugh.

 

" There were times I absolutely hated working for him, because he knew

how to press all of my buttons and drive me absolutely insane, " says

Heyduk, now assistant professor of chemistry at the University of

California, Irvine. " He knew I was the kind of person that needed to be

challenged all the time. "

 

Nocera believes this constant prodding at what's possible is the essence

of science. As evidence, he reels off several ancillary developments

from his research, including microscopic sensors that detect biological

hazards, which attracted funding from the Defense Advanced Research

Projects Agency.

 

Pointing to a whiteboard sketch of his vision for using sunlight to

split water, Nocera acknowledges that it ultimately might not be an

energy panacea.

 

" Is it right? Maybe not. But it will be something. And it might be

something I can't see right now, " he says. " That's OK. But you don't

stop doing something because you can't see it. It's antiscientific. It's

anti-intellectual. "

 

Copyright 2005 Associated Press.

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