The hard part is now to complete the final step and find a cheap way to combine hydrogen with CO2 to create fuel. This is difficult because CO2 is a remarkably stable molecule. Harvard chemist Daniel Nocera thinks he has found a viable way to accomplish this. He uses a bacterium, Ralstonia eutropha, which can combine hydrogen with CO2 to create fuel and biomass, with an efficiency of 11 percent. Nocera says, “We did a complete artificial photosynthesis that’s 10 to 100 times better than nature….It’s not a chemistry problem, necessarily, anymore. It’s not even a technology problem.” To him, the
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