In the quest to realize artificial photosynthesis to convert sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into fuel — just as plants do — researchers need to not only identify materials to efficiently perform photoelectrochemical water splitting, but also to understand why a certain material may or may not work. Now scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory…
Together Even When Separated
Bioelectrochemical systems combine the best of both worlds — microbial cells with inorganic materials — to make fuels and other energy-rich chemicals with unrivaled efficiency. Yet technical difficulties have kept them impractical anywhere but in a lab. Now researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a novel nanoscale membrane that could address…
The Search for Fossil Fuel Replacements
The average global energy consumption of transportation fuels is currently several terawatts (1 terawatt = 1012 Joule) per second. A major scientific gap for developing a solar fuels technology that could replace fossil resources with renewable ones is scalability at the unprecedented terawatts level. In fact, the only existing technology for making chemical compounds on…
New Project Transforms Waste Heat to Electricity
Vast amounts of energy are wasted every year in the form of heat. A new project led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) seeks to efficiently capture that heat and convert it to electricity, potentially saving California up to $385 million per year. With a $2-million grant from the California…
Insight into Metastability Paves Way for Next-Generation Materials
They say diamonds are forever, but diamonds in fact are a metastable form of carbon that will slowly but eventually transform into graphite, another form of carbon. Being able to design and synthesize other long-lived, thermodynamically metastable materials could be a potential gold mine for materials designers, but until now, scientists lacked a rational understanding…
Poop Collected to Find Source of Water Contamination
When the local water management agency closes your favorite beach due to unhealthy water quality, how reliable are the tests they base their decisions on? As it turns out, those tests, as well as the standards behind them, have not been updated in decades. Now scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed…