Study: Sunflowers Could Supply Hydrogen Fuel

Sept. 9, 2004 -- One of these days you might find yourself tooling down the highway in a car that runs on flower power.

Or maybe not.

But at least that's the goal of British researchers who say they have come up with a way to extract hydrogen from sunflower oil — the same stuff you might put on your salad — which in turn could be used as the fuel of the future, powering everything from our cars to our cell phones.

Hydrogen holds great promise as a clean-burning fuel that could free us forever from fossil fuels. But it has been hyped so much recently that it is often seen as the answer to all our energy problems so we don't need to worry about potentially catastrophic global oil shortages.

Don't bet on it.

There are nightmares associated with the acquisition and distribution of hydrogen that could kill this dream in its infancy. Despite the fact that hydrogen is found just about everywhere, it doesn't travel alone. And separating it from other elements, such as oxygen, requires processes that also use energy.

And where does that energy normally come from? It is produced by burning fossil fuels — the stuff we're trying to get away from — in processes that use more energy than the extracted hydrogen is likely to produce. That's called a net energy loser, and until someone solves that problem hydrogen power isn't going to go anywhere.

What If …

Yet, there is a glimmer of hope. Researchers around the globe are fine tuning a "breakthrough," if we dare use that overworked word, that came out of Japan a quarter of a century ago. It just may be possible to get all the hydrogen we need by using ordinary sunlight to drive something called "artificial photosynthesis."

Kenichi Honda and Akira Fujishima were researching photochemical processes at the University of Tokyo in the late 1960s when they made a remarkable discovery. They hooked an electrode coated with titanium dioxide to another electrode coated with platinum and exposed it to sunlight.