(Yale) Team Harnessing Power of Photosynthesis To Make ‘Green’ Fuel

Team Harnessing Power of Photosynthesis To Make ‘Green’ Fuel

Published: May 7, 2010

New Haven, Conn. — When people at cocktail parties used to ask Charles Schmuttenmaer what he did, he would say he was a chemistry professor who worked on transient-photo conductivity in gallium arsenide. "At that point they would generally ask me to pass the chips," the Yale chemist says with a laugh.

Now Schmuttenmaer tells them he's working on a way to harness the power of the sun to produce carbon-neutral fuel. "And then the response is, ‘Oh, that's wonderful. Way to go!'" he says.

A few years ago, Schmuttenmaer never imagined he'd be working to solve the world's energy problem. But that's exactly what he now does as one of the four founding members of the Yale Solar Group — a team of chemists trying to use sunlight to split water into its elementary components: hydrogen (a green fuel) and oxygen. In doing so, they hope to pave the way for the development of photoelectrochemical cells that could be used to generate an environmentally benign transportation fuel.

It's a challenge two of the team members — Yale chemists Gary Brudvig and Robert Crabtree — have been working on for the past 25 years, studying the process of photosynthesis and how to replicate it in artificial, "biomimetic" systems.

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