Making a Better Leaf

As the world casts about for greener, cleaner technologies to allow future sustainable development, scientists are increasingly turning to the very thing we’re trying to save—nature—for ideas. Biomimicry, as this nature-inspired technologies are called, seeks to capitalize on the products of untold generations of evolution by emulating systems that have already gone through quality control testing more robust than anything a laboratory could cook up. The FT reports:

Laboratory-based efforts are attempting to go one better on nature by generating not plant food but fuels that can be stored for later use. Such projects offer the promise of making new forms of energy while mopping up carbon dioxide, an unwanted greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere. That makes artificial photosynthesis one of the potentially cleanest technologies on the energy horizon.

Daniel Nocera and Pamela Silver, from Harvard University, have taken early steps along this road. Their system — the “leaf” is actually a container — uses a catalyst, activated by sunlight, to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The container is home to hydrogen-eating bacteria, which feast on the newly liberated molecules plus carbon dioxide to churn out liquid fuel.

Artificial leaves are especially attractive because, by aping photosynthesis, they aim for a double-whammy: produce energy while storing carbon dioxide. The former is and always will be a primary concern for civilization, and the latter is shaping up to be one of the defining challenges of this century. It’s no wonder, then, that a potential solution that seeks to marry energy security with better environmental stewardship is attracting the attention of so many researchers.

Policymakers rarely get it right when it comes to green ideas, but it’s hard to go wrong when it comes to funding energy research and development. Technologies like the artificial leaf hold incredible potential to remake our entire energy landscape with a single breakthrough (or series of breakthroughs, as we’ve seen with still young shale boom). President Trump wants to defund America’s energy moonshot technology program, ARPA-E, and that’s a major mistake. Many of these technologies won’t ever see the light of day, but the possibilities of transformative realizations make this one green policy arena in which governments can play an important role.

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