Reinventing the leaf.
نویسنده
چکیده
L IKE A FIRE-AND-BRIMSTONE PREACHER, NATHAN S. Lewis has been giving a lecture on the energy crisis that is both terrifying and exhilarating. To avoid potentially debilitating global warming, the chemist from the California Institute of Technology says civilization must be able to generate more than 10 trillion watts of clean, carbon-free energy by 2050. That level is three times the U.S.’s average energy demand of 3.2 trillion watts. Damming up every lake, stream and river on the planet, Lewis notes, would provide only five trillion watts of hydroelectricity. Nuclear power could manage the feat, but the world would have to build a new reactor every two days for the next 50 years. Before Lewis’s crowds get too depressed, he tells them there is one source of salvation: the sun pours more energy onto the earth every hour than humankind uses in a year. But to be saved, Lewis says, humankind needs a radical breakthrough in solar-fuel technology: artificial leaves that will capture solar rays and churn out chemical fuel on the spot, much as plants do. We can burn the fuel, as we do oil or natural gas, to power cars, create heat or generate electricity, and we can store the fuel for use when the sun is down. Lewis’s lab is one of several that are crafting prototype leaves, not much larger than computer chips, designed to produce hydrogen fuel from water, rather than the glucose fuel that natural leaves create. Unlike fossil fuels, hydrogen burns clean. Other researchers are working on competing ideas for capturing the sun’s energy, such as algae that has been genetically altered to pump out biofuels, or on new biological organisms engineered to excrete oil. All these approaches are intended to turn sunlight into chemical energy that can be stored, shipped and easily consumed. Lewis argues, however, that the manmade leaf option is the most likely to scale up to the industrial levels needed to power civilization.
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ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Scientific American
دوره 303 4 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2010