Plants Do It | Green Energy News

February 1, 2004 – Vol.8 No.45

PLANTS DO IT.

In the process of photosynthesis plants and algae take water (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2) and the energy in sunlight to create nutrition for themselves while expelling excess water and oxygen. That is, plants are able to split enough hydrogen atoms away from their oxygen cohorts to allow hydrogen to link up with a gathering of carbon and oxygen atoms to make organic compounds. Those compounds eventually become things like leaves, stalks, and tree trunks. Hydrogen and oxygen combinations that aren’t needed for plant building are let go. We humans appreciate the excess oxygen .

So, if trees, algae and the bushes in front of your house can easily split water into oxygen and hydrogen, why can’t we find an easy way to do it? We certainly could make use of the hydrogen.

Well, as you can imagine, scientists have been studying photosynthesis for years, but now may have figured out how it works.

Scientists at Imperial College in London have for the first time been able to describe the mechanism of the photosynthesis, water splitting reaction. If they are correct - and they think they are - now that the photosynthesis can be described it should be able to be duplicated in an industrial process. That process, they say, would result in a much cheaper, much easier way to split hydrogen from water than using electrolysis.

The article appeared in the journal Science and is available to subscribers at http://www.scienceexpress.org/ .