What if we could make “clean” hydrogen from plain water, with none of the problems associated with coal, oil or gas extraction and the waste byproducts produced in extracting brown or blue H2? Several approaches such as artificial leaves have been developed, but a totally different new approach seems incredibly promising. A promising approach may lead to greener-than-green hydrogen. The Race to Invent the Artificial Leaf Varun Sivaram, in his book Taming the Sun discusses how Nate Lewis at Caltech and Daniel Nocera at Harvard “determined to find a way to wring fuel out of thin air.” Each has created an “artificial leaf” that emulates the photosynthesis performed naturally by real leaves. A real leaf is far more complex than one would imagine, and the chemical interactions inside even more so. For all that, photosynthesis is only one percent efficient. “A commercially viable artificial leaf would solve several of the trickiest challenges in clean energy. It would create a way …
