Sunlight to Hydrogen

While generally interesting, the article kept repeating the phrase 'converting light into hydrogen' without giving any details as to what is actually taking place in this process. Obviously one cannot convert light directly into hydrogen; the process must use light as an energy source (as with photosynthesis) to convert some type of hydrocarbon or other hydrogen-containing compound into hydrogen-plus-something, allowing the hydrogen to be used as a source of energy. More details in the article would have been useful.

O'Neill said the primary role of the LHC-II protein is as a solar collector, absorbing sunlight and transferring it to the photosynthetic reaction centers, maximizing their output. "However, this study shows that LHC-II can also carry out electron transfer reactions, a role not known to occur in vivo," he said.

The techniques used for analysis interesting also

http://www.ornl.gov/info/press_releases/get_press_release.cfm?ReleaseNumber=mr20110203-00

has a picture

I couldn't figure out where the original work was published

Here

I don't know if this is based on the same technology, but I saw a show about green energy the other day that made the same claim and started talking about photosynthesis.They talked about using the structure of a leaf having lots of surface area from the vain structure. As far as I could tell that is where the nature influence ended.

The device they showed that created hydrogen did so by electrolysis. It was basically lots of tiny solar cells on a flexible vain structure, but instead of interconnecting the solar cells the voltage was used directly for electrolysis. They showed a device that looked sort of like a black leaf sitting in water, and when they shown a light on it, it started bubbling quite a bit. The guy said the gas it was bubbling was hydrogen, although they didn't say anything about where the oxygen went, I would imagine they were mixed.

"making hydrogen out of sunlight" is a bit general - i think someone should figure out how to enable the production of something like propane or acetylene with the aid of sunlight out of a large variable base of initial ingredients. that would be a useful and profitable venture.

hydrogen would be the Holy Grail

it could be fed to fuel cells the ability to do more in depth analysis will help in adapting & improving processes like Fischer-Tropsch