Published on 07/31/2008
Hydrogen, is the most abundant material in the universe that we could use to power a bunch of stuff… if only we could produce it cheaply. That’s the problem that an MIT researcher is hoping to solve. Daniel Nocera has a way to break water molecules at room temperature using a catalyst based on Cobalt and Phosphor. Other methods include heating water to 900 degrees which is not always practical… or cheap. On the cost, Nocera says:
I'm using cheap, Earth-abundant materials that you can mass-manufacture. As long as you can charge the surface, you can create the catalyst and it doesn’t get any cheaper than that.