Scientists at the United States Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have found that by linking platinum nanoparticles with algae proteins they can commandeer photosynthesis to produce hydrogen, and at a rate five times greater than the previous record-setting method. Lisa Utschig, a chemist at Argonne, said, “If you are considering the question ‘How do we get energy from the sun,’ you always come back to photosynthesis. Photosynthesis does it best. It’s been engineered over millions of years.” Most people think of solar panels when they think of solar energy, but an alternative is solar fuels, which pulls energy from the sun to create fuel that can be stored for later. Hydrogen is one such fuel, but we have yet to figure out a low-cost way to manufacture large amounts of it. David Tiede, also an Argonne chemist, said, “Basically, we’ve been reverse-engineering photosynthesis. If we understand how Nature does it, we can tweak the process to produce hydrogen.” The Argonne method uses the platinum nanoparticles as catalysts to make hydrogen. Platinum is too expensive to be cost-effective, so the team hopes, in further studies, to experiment with non-platinum catalysts, while also improving the method’s efficiency, reliability and economics. According to Utschig, “Hopefully we can find a catalyst that can be made with a cheaper metal, which would make the process much more attractive on a large scale.”