UVA’s President, Jim Ryan, is no chemist, but he took the occasion to explain why a lab in the department of chemistry will be getting $3.7 million from the federal government. Scientists there are trying to harvest hydrogen – to split it off from Oxygen in plentiful molecules of water.
“You want to use a clean process and a sustainable process in order to actually produce that hydrogen which, itself, is a clean fuel," he said. "Figuring how to do it in a sustainable way would be a game-changer.”
It wouldn’t be a silver bullet, but Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm says it could be silver buckshot.
“With wildfires, with all these extreme climate events, with the fact that last year we as a nation spent $150 billion in cleaning up after these extreme weather events – those extreme weather events are obviously caused by carbon pollution, and the way to reduce that is to find ways to have zero carbon-emitting energy sources,” she explained.
So her department has set a goal of producing one kilogram of hydrogen for one dollar in the next decade. Other clean energy grants will go to scientists at 53 other universities and national labs.
