Bona Fide Water Power?

Generally, when we talk about generating power from water, we’re talking about hydroelectricity, a source of energy that uses the force of water’s movement to turn massive turbines. But what if we could actually derive energy from the water itself?

It’s already the way that plants and some microorganisms feed themselves, through photosynthesis. Sunlight is used as a catalyst to split water into its constituent molecules, with oxygen being released as waste and the remaining CO2 being converted into usable organic compounds. As a result, the fossil fuels that we use every day still ultimately depend on photosynthesis, given that the decaying organisms originally storing that sunlight have since been converted into hydrocarbons.

And all that brings us back to water.

A recent innovation by a team of MIT researchers allowed them to split a water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The result: a ready source of hydrogen that could be used in the production of fuel cells and even liquid fuel.

It’s not the first time that MIT researchers have been able to split water molecules, but it is the first time that they’ve been able to initiate the process without electricity. In this new process, a virus is used to construct a biological “scaffold” that can assemble the nanocomponents necessary to split the water molecule.

Like so many new and exotic energy technologies, MIT’s water-splitting virus is a long way from being able to do its work at an industrial level. Even though the photosynthesizing  organisms we’re used to using in our gas tanks are millions of years old, it would be many more years before this particular technology could replace them. We don’t have the technology to create water-powered cars yet, unfortunately.

Still, with more than 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface covered in water, it’s hard not to be tantalized by the promise that, one day, we might also be able to use it to power our homes and vehicles.