Does ‘unlimited renewable energy’ spell beginning of the end for Islamic extremism?
Scientists have developed a way to transform sunlight into fuel that could lead to an ‘unlimited source of renewable energy’. IF the breakthrough becomes commercially viable, it could destroy the financial base of aggressive radical Islamism.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge have reached this ‘milestone’ by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen.
They did this through using a technique called semi-artificial photosynthesis that is based on the same process plants use to convert sunlight into energy.
Hydrogen, which is produced when the water is split, could potentially be a green and unlimited source of renewable energy.
Oxygen is produced as a by-product of photosynthesis when the water absorbed by plants is ‘split’.
It is one of the most important reactions on the planet because it is the source of nearly all of the world’s oxygen.
Researchers used natural sunlight to convert water into hydrogen and oxygen using a mixture of biological components and manmade technologies.
Academics at the Reisner Laboratory in Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry developed the new technique of solar-driven water-splitting.
Their method also managed to absorb more solar light than natural photosynthesis, according to the paper published in Nature Energy.
‘Natural photosynthesis is not efficient because it has evolved merely to survive so it makes the bare minimum amount of energy needed – around one to two per cent of what it could potentially convert and store’, said Katarzyna Sokół, first author and PhD student at St John’s College.
Artificial photosynthesis has been around for decades but it has not yet been successfully used to create renewable energy.
This is because it relies on the use of catalysts, which are often expensive and toxic.
‘This work overcomes many difficult challenges associated with the integration of biological and organic components into inorganic materials for the assembly of semi-artificial devices and opens up a toolbox for developing future systems for solar energy conversion’, he said.
Ms Sokół hopes the findings will enable new innovative model systems for solar energy conversion to be developed.
‘It’s exciting that we can selectively choose the processes we want, and achieve the reaction we want which is inaccessible in nature.’
‘The approach could be used to couple other reactions together to see what can be done, learn from these reactions and then build synthetic, more robust pieces of solar energy technology.
Violent Islamist extremism around the entire world is based on the vast oil wealth of Saudi Arabia, which spends billions of dollars every year exporting its uniquely intolerant brand of Islamist extremism to Muslim communities everywhere.
While Western politicians are too fond of Saudi money to stop this, the appearance of a technology which ends the Oil Age would do much the same job. Let’s just hope that some Big Oil company or Saudi prince doesn’t just buy the patents and bury the new discovery, or take out a contract on the scientists who have made it….
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