Nocera’s Artificial Leaf Not Viable for Now
May 24th, 2012Via: Nature:
Not all prototypes make it out of the laboratory, but the ‘artificial leaf’ is so elegant that its design seems to beg for commercial production. Described in Science last year1 by a team led by Dan Nocera at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the catalyst-coated wafer is a silicon version of a photosynthesizing leaf: it turns sunlight into storable fuel by splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen.
But Sun Catalytix, the company founded in Cambridge off the back of Nocera’s work, says that it won’t be scaling up the prototype for field tests. The device offers few savings over other ways to make hydrogen from sunlight, the company says.
“We have to be focused on what will be durably better than conventional ways to make renewable hydrogen,” explains chief technology officer Tom Jarvi. Hydrogen from a solar panel and electrolysis unit can currently be made for about US$7 per kilogram, the firm estimates; the artificial leaf would come in at $6.50. (It costs just $1–2 to make a kilogram of hydrogen from fossil fuels).
With the prices of solar cells dropping all the time, the firm is not going to make a heavy investment that’s unlikely to pay off. Instead, it is looking at cheaper designs — but these require yet-to-be-invented semiconductor materials. So for the moment, “the artificial leaf is in the fridge”, Sun Catalytix chemist Joep Pijpers says.
