On the horizon: Liquid fuels made by sunlight

Electricity is turn energy from the Sun solar panels like this in England. But researchers are looking to make the energy of the Sun, liquid fuels for cars and trucks, to capture by the combination of carbon dioxide, water and chemical elements cerium.

Sunlight pours a lot of energy on the surface of the Earth. But is a huge challenge to figure out how to capture, that energy and turn it into fuel makes our cars and trucks.

Fossil fuels is not eternal, so that scientists and engineers are looking for new and efficient ways to capture solar energy for fuel. A promising technique is based on a common material, most people never heard yet: the element cerium.

The ultimate goal is to say, "How can we take solar photons and convert into a liquid fuel for greater efficiency as we know, we do with plants?"

-Eric toone, chemist, Duke University

Cerium "is chemically similar to the rare earth metals, but it turns out, don't we call rare to be", says Sossina Haile, Professor of materials science and chemical engineering at Caltech. It is about as abundant as copper and is quite useful.

Haile has experimented with CER because the right temperature can transform it carbon dioxide and water into high-energy fuels.

But there's a hang-up: "The catch is certainly that the temperatures must be high," she says. Really high - almost 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. Obviously, this process would completely useless if you had to make an energy fuels to use guzzling oven.

A dent on U.S. energy production?

So earlier in this year Haile got together with some colleagues in the Switzerland and figured out how to put that can generate this enormous temperature by concentrating solar power cerium within a device.

And did it – were able to make synthetic fuels from only water and carbon dioxide. As in the journal Science reports, it was not very efficient - got converted to less than 1 percent of solar energy into fuel. But there is hope.

"If we had a perfect reactor" Haile says, "we should easily 10 percent get more efficiently."

And because that don't get used up CER in the response it can be used over and over again.

"We went through the big numbers and said: 'This would all dent on U.S. energy production make?'" And the answer is Yes, "she says."

However, the trick with any technology is to find out whether you can develop it in a convenient and relatively inexpensive way. A few years the Department of energy, the promise, the dangers of technologies that solar energy to use instead to liquid fuels electricity realized how solar panels to do. It established an organization called ARPA-E - the advanced research projects Agency for energy.

Better than plants?

Eric toone, a chemist at Duke University, conducts an ARPA-E program, research ideas to reach the biology, to do Haile with straight chemistry and technology attempts to integrate.

"Is the ultimate goal the same right?" The ultimate goal is to say, "How can we take solar photons and convert into a liquid fuel for greater efficiency as we know, we do with plants?" "Toone says."

Plants are now grown to produce biofuels such as ethanol from corn. Fuel cast but green plants usually far less than 1 percent of the sunlight.

"The name of the game is to say, 'well, better than we do?'" ", he says."

To find out, ARPA-E has pumped research dollars in over a dozen universities and small companies across the country. Most projects have just started and toone says it is clearly too early to start picking winners and losers. But it is full of optimism.

"This is absolutely a solvable problem." Realistic time frame? I suspect we are 10 to 15 years of the actual fuel, you buy at a pump and put in your vehicle can, "he says." "But I think very, very, very strongly that this will happen."

Caltech Professor Haile says not, is that your approach is the best, but it is an example of what might pan out.

"I personally see the challenges that remain are very surmountable", she says.

The point here is how all technologies, someone needs to invest time and money, to find out what is really going to work. Interesting ideas, like you are only the starting point for innovation.

"This is something that interests a company, it would be to take forward," she says.

Energy

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