Here's the quick and dirty of it all: labs have found ways to create hydrogen gas, a very good 100% clear combustible gas using the organic pollutants in the air and water vapor, or solid organic materials (or organic) waste.
And this, at room temperature and no energy expenditure.
I go into details of the impact of these technologies in the video below if you prefer the video format.
Let me take you through this step by step.
First off, at the University of Leuven, Belgium, scientists have been able to create a device, using catalysts and membranes, that filter air, in a way that what comes out the other end is cleaner air and hydrogen gas, which can then be collected and stored. The chemical reaction inside happens at room temperature using catalysts that react in those conditions to convert say methane and water, into oxygen, hydrogen and say carbon dioxide (ok the carbon dioxide is not desired, but below I'll show you another method that can convert that carbon dioxide into harmless organic compounds under the same conditions, so we could chain those and end up winners all around).
Imagine having commercial or home versions of these devices set discreetly all over the place connected to hydrogen storage systems and the hydrogen being used for energy generation, for example.
Secondly, since as mentioned, the first mentioned technology could produce some greenhouse gases, in particular carbon dioxide, we need something to deal with that compound. We already have too much in the atmosphere in the first place and in the air of our cities. Enter very cool research from the University of Central Florida that shows we can use metal-organic-frameworks (MOF) to capture and convert carbon dioxide, at room temperature, using sunlight alone (and the MOF of course). The MOF acts like a catalyst so you don't need to regenerate it all the time. This mechanical aparatus would essentially be our very first artificial photosynthesis machine: plants convert carbon dioxide into glucose (energy for them) using light and chlorophyll (plant catalyst), while we convert carbon dioxide into hydrogen (energy for us) using light and harmless catalysts.
The organic compounds could then be processed by the filter I mentioned above to convert some of it into hydrogen, in essence using both device in a cycle to purify air optimally and optimize hydrogen generation at the tail end. Hence this whole system potentially would run on air and light alone and on the other end we'd get purified air and hydrogen gas.
Now here is another one, since air is not the only thing we'd like to clean up: researchers at the University of Cambridge have developed a technique and material that will convert solid or liquid organic matter like wood, paper and leaves.. anything that contains cellulose, into guess what? Hydrogen gas. It won't work on plastics unfortunately....
This technique also works quite well at room temperature with the only energy input being light. The only downside of it is that the catalyst used is a quantum dot cloud of cadmium, a polluting metal. But since the quantum dots are catalysts, they don't get consumed by the reaction so can be reused repetitively....
This could be huge though since homes do produce lots of organic materials containing plant fibers from our sit-down time in bathrooms to kitchen waste. So if devices using this are used in homes, we could filter and dump all of that waste in there instead of sewage, recycling or septic tanks. The environmental ramifications would be huge and again, more hydrogen for the hydrogen tanks at home (or businesses). All it needs is light.
Now one thing that needs to be mentioned is why hydrogen gas isn't so widely used already, especially since it burns to make water when combined with air... (I mean, how cleaner can you be when you use your energy supply and drink from the other end?). The problem is hydrogen gas is SUPER flammable in its gaseous form and to keep it in liquid form, you need to get the temperature down to -252.87 degrees Celsius (absolute zero is -273 degrees C). That's not very energy efficient if you want to carry hydrogen safely from one place to another (remember that hydrogen gas takes up huge amounts of space vs hydrogen liquid...).
We're in luck, scientists from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) figured stuff out.
First off, a trick we've learned a while ago is that we can safely carry ammonia (a liquid at room temperature) from one place to another using current pipelines and we're very good and efficient already at making ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen. We're in luck, we are discussing technologies that create hydrogen using air and 79% of our breathable air is nitrogen. So we have everything we need to make ammonia at home automatically. Ammonia is easy to store and not dangerous one tiny bit. Then we can also convert the ammonia back to hydrogen gas and nitrogen as we need hydrogen gas for energy consumption purposes. The issue resolved by the CSIRO group here is that using their technique we can recuperate almost all of the nitrogen as a purified gas where before there was lots of hydrogen loss and impurities in the result.
Though currently making ammonia takes high pressure and heat, which requires energy, it also creates heat, which is needed to make the conditions for the ammonia in the first place. And since we're burning hydrogen here as part of a system, part of it can also be used to store hydrogen in ammonia when not needed. The release of hydrogen from ammonia can be done with a little heat and a catalyst so no big deal when you can recuperate most of it.
So all in all, very nice techniques and technologies coming that could allow us all to have our own energy supply systems using only light and ambient air, safely.
Now finally a note on perhaps a new way of making unlimited energy in a centralized way: Fusion reaction.
Personally, I'm not a fan because this is old technology refined and would require, at first, a centralized type of energy distribution, just like we have now, which to me is contrary to the direction we wish to go. However, it is worth mentioning this because to work it requires... small amounts of hydrogen gas.
Headed primarily by the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, the "Star in a jar" project named Wendelstein 7-X is basically about creating a tiny sun within a super strong magnetic field. We're basically converting hydrogen plasma into helium atoms, thus producing tremendous amounts of energy from the fusion, just like the sun does, and converting it into electricity. The project seems to be well underway and with significant funding, could end all energy needs on the planet since this fusion is completely clean environmentally and there is no lack of hydrogen (which we can get for free seemingly now). I would really prefer seeing cold fusion out in market and in our homes, but research on that is still not refined enough and there are still doubts on it too.
All in all though, energy-wise, we have only good news to report and lots of hope to eliminate all of our energy generation aches in the near future, as well as cleaning the mess we've made of things over the last 80 odd years....
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