Artificial plants can power the future

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley are hacking photosynthesis to produce energy.

The team created an artificial leaf that produces methane, the primary component of natural gas, using a combination of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria.

Peidong Yang, a professor of chemistry at Berkeley and co-director of the school’s Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute, leads a team.

The research, detailed in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August, builds on a similar hybrid system, also recently devised by Yang and his colleagues, that yielded butanol, a component in gasoline, and a variety of biochemical building blocks.

The research is a major advance toward synthetic photosynthesis, a type of solar power based on the ability of plants to transform sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into sugars. Instead of sugars, however, synthetic photosynthesis seeks to produce liquid fuels that can be stored for months or years and distributed through existing energy infrastructure.

“We’re good at generating electrons from light efficiently, but chemical synthesis always limited our systems in the past. One purpose of this experiment was to show we could integrate bacterial catalysts with semiconductor technology. This lets us understand and optimize a truly synthetic photosynthesis system,” he told The Kavli Foundation.

“Burning fossil fuels is putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere much faster than natural photosynthesis can take it out. A system that pulls every carbon that we burn out of the air and converts it into fuel is truly carbon neutral,” added Thomas Moore, who also participated in the roundtable. Moore is a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Arizona State University, where he previously headed the Center for Bioenergy & Photosynthesis.

Ultimately, researchers hope to create an entirely synthetic system that is more robust and efficient than its natural counterpart. To do that, they need model systems to study nature’s best designs, especially the catalysts that convert water and carbon dioxide into sugars at room temperatures.