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Renowned scientist and Bharat Ratna awardee Professor CNR Rao said the country should unlock hydrogen as fuel to address the growing energy needs and also tackle greenhouse gas emissions.
The process of synthesising hydrogen fuel through artificial photosynthesis process, on which Rao is currently working at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) in Bengaluru, will help India generate enough fuel from the atmospheric water vapour and sunlight to meet its transportation fuel requirements and industrial energy needs.
While plants utilise photosynthesis-generated hydrogen to prepare food for their growth, in the artificial process, scientists are using semiconductors to harness hydrogen fuel from water vapour present in the air in the presence of sunlight. The other element released during the process is oxygen gas.
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Underscoring the importance of artificial photosynthesis, he said,"the US government two months ago had declared producing hydrogen through artificial photosynthesis as a national mission and the US President had granted a $120-million research funding to the two scientists working on it." However, in India, research in hydrogen fuel is very limited, he added.
According to him, the key to taking forward the use of hydrogen fuel lies in its storage.
“The entire world is working on it. The real issue here is we need a solid material that can store hydrogen and also allow us to use it by just scratching it or by slight heating,” he said.
To an extent, Rao was able to find a solid that can store 4.5 per cent hydrogen by weight, but the requirement is for a solid that can hold 6 per cent hydrogen fuel by weight, to be used in the cars as fuel. Currently, cars makers have been employing compressed cylinders technology to store hydrogen fuel in the vehicles.
Rao, who is JNCASR national research professor and Linus Pauling Research professor, today delivered the keynote address at the national conference on Advanced Materials for Defence and Aerospace Applications held at Birla Institute of Technological Sciences- Hyderabad.
In his address, he said India should aim at a higher solar energy installed capacity of 30,000-Mw. “The flood of cheap silicon photo voltaic cells from China has made solar generation much easier. In such a scenario, it would be realistic for us to target at least 30,000-Mw capacity,” he said.
The head of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India said universities in the country should take up extensive research in organic photo voltaic cells so that these can be used for generating solar energy in a big way.
