The buzzwords of this era is definitely “green”. It’s hip and popular, everyone wants to save the world (or at least themselves) from the doom of global warming. One of the biggest obstacles is the massive use of fossil fuels, especially on personal transport (cars/motorcycles etc). Here’s the thing though! There is a perfectly clean fuel that we have in abundance (unlike many of the other clean proposals), hydrogen!

You may think it’s like the electric or solar car, a nice idea but ultimately a car that noone really uses (although that’s certainly changing for those two), but the fact of the matter is that these cars are in use around the world. In fact, right here where i live now, Reykjavík (Iceland), there are buses driving around that are run on hydrogen, and i went whale watching the other day on a boat that can also use hydrogen.

While there are many problems associated with hydrogen cars, one of the main problems is that it takes energy to create hydrogen, because we mostly get it by separating the Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms in the water (H20) molecule. And where does this energy come from? You guessed it, fossil fuels that pollute. An exception to the rule might be a country like Iceland where we actually get our energy almost exclusively from hydro-power (huge dams essentially) which is a clean and renewable source of energy, but for the rest of the world this is not the case.

That’s why i was happy to read a story about researchers from Penn state and Purdue claiming to have found a method of extracting hydrogen without leaving a carbon-footprint. Using a few different nanotubes (even more buzzwords!) and energy from the sun, they’ve been able to split water into it’s two basic atoms, and extracting the hydrogen for later use, without releasing any Carbon Dioxide. If you’re interested in the finer details of the process check out the press-release i linked at the start of this paragraph, I’m afraid i’m not much of a chemist or nano-guy, so i won’t recite the details too much.

Although the efficiency of the device is extremely low in this first try (0.3% of the energy from the sun gets translated to electric energy), they are apparently very easy and cheap to make and last for a long time. I must admit though that I’m not sure what the advantage of using this method is, as opposed to just using a traditional solar-panel with MUCH higher electricity and then using that energy to separate the molecule. But like i said before, I’m not much of a chemist.

Whatever the deal is, i personally have high hopes for hydrogen as an energy source. There are many sources around like biofuel, ethanol etc. But these are all resource that are limited, while hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe, so advances in it’s extraction are always good news for me.