ISRAEL TO SOLVE WORLD'S ENERGY PROBLEM?

Successful Testing - a Solution for Production of Hydrogen Fuel Through Solar Technology

Innovative solar technology that may offer a 'green' solution to the production of hydrogen fuel has been successfully tested on a large scale at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. The technology also promises to facilitate the storage and transportation of hydrogen. The chemical process behind the technology was originally developed at Weizmann, and it has been scaled up in collaboration with European scientists. Results of the experiments will be reported in August at the 2005 Solar World Congress of the International Solar Energy Society (ISES) in Orlando, Florida.

The solar project is the result of collaboration between scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, Institut de Science et de Genie des Materiaux et Procedes - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France, and the ScanArc Plasma Technologies AB in Sweden. The project is supported by the European Union's FP5 program.

Hydrogen, the most plentiful element in the universe, is an attractive candidate for becoming a pollution-free fuel of the future. However, nearly all hydrogen used today is produced by means of expensive processes that require combustion of polluting fossil fuels. Moreover, storing and transporting hydrogen is extremely difficult and costly.