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UVA wins $3.7 million grant to study hydrogen production

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm says UVA is one of 54 universities and labs to get money for clean energy research.
RadioIQ
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm says UVA is one of 54 universities and labs to get money for clean energy research.

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.

Sandy Hausman is Radio IQ's Charlottesville Bureau Chief