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Rust, the new energy source

Everywhere you look there are people claiming they can burn water or that water can be used as a fuel and I've debunked these scams on several occasions in the past.

However, it appears that a new method of splitting water into its constituent elements might offer some increased hope for the generation of renewable energy.

Researchers in Switzerland have had encouraging results using good old iron oxide as a catalyst to allow regular sunlight to break the bonds between the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen in water. In fact, they're claiming efficiencies of up to 15%, a figure that rivals that of photovoltaic cells.

Could this new research open the door to a whole new generation of renewable energy generation?

Think about it -- instead of huge fields of PVAs (photovoltaic arrays), cells filled with water and iron oxide nano-particles could harness sunlight to create copious amounts of H2 and O2.

Whereas most PVA-based energy sources require huge batteries or other far less efficient methods of storing energy if their power is to be available at night, the storage of H2 gas is relatively straightforward. I suspect that there are even a few towns out there that still have the good old fashioned gas tanks that were once used to hold and pressurize coal-gas some 60 years ago.

So how practical would this be?

Well the big problem would be separating the H2 from the O2, since storing the two gases together in a mixture would be incredibly dangerous and be a massive explosion just waiting to happen.

The need to remove the O2 from the output of these cells could be the very thing that ankle-taps the viability of this technology. I imagine some form of oxidation process would be required -- perhaps (to create new iron oxide to act as a catalyst) but the rate of that reaction would need to be kept low enough that it didn't create so much heat it ignited the H2 in the process.

The concept is certainly exciting though. Who'd have thought that a few buckets of rusty water could power your house?

Strangely enough, I seem to recall that as a young lad, I placed a nail in a testube of water once, as an experiment to watch rust form. One thing I did notice was that when the testube was left on my bedroom window-ledge, bubbles of gas did form on the surface of the nail.

I put this down to the oxidation process causing the oxygen in the water to bind with the iron and thus release the hydrogen it was previously bound to. Not quite the reaction that's being claimed here but a very similar result.

Of course this bodes very well for the creation of manned colonies on Mars -- since the catalyst for their fuel-cells (rust) seems to be one of the main components of the planet's surface.

Let's hope the old saying is true and rust never sleeps. If it doesn't, we may find the next generation of solar energy systems are cheaper and produce a more easily stored form of energy.

Related story: Rust promises hydrogen power boost

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