Energy

The future of solar fuels

The biggest problem with solar energy is storing it. We can only use solar energy when the sun is shining, only use wind turbines when there’s wind. Electric energy can be stored with batteries that are expensive and not environmentally friendly—and it’s difficult, so most of us use it straight away.

To produce solar fuels, you’d usually find a technology that drives solar light directly into a chemical and then store it. Professor Gunther Andersson and his team are trying something new. You can think of it like reversing the combustion process in a car. They’re taking the waste from combustion (like carbon dioxide) and adding it to a reactor, using light to stimulate a chemical reaction that creates fuel. In the future this could be a closed circuit process: you burn down the energy in your car engine, then capture the waste and produce the same type of fuel again, and funnel it back to the first tank.

Gunther and his team are doing it by arranging atoms into clusters. The particles they use actually go below the nanometre scale—a field of research that doesn’t yet have a name. The field has existed for 20-30 years, but Gunther’s team is leading the way. Atoms are difficult to cluster as they tend to move around and grow. We need to keep them small. It took the team six or seven years to figure out how to keep clusters on a surface and maintain their properties. On the way, they’ve been at the forefront of this type of science. There are ten methods of measuring atoms and clusters on a surface and they’ve combined four of them in one instrument. This equipment doesn’t exist anywhere else in Australia and is unique worldwide.