Water + Sunshine = Fuel as Lab in California Chases Dream: Cars
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It sounds like magic, far-out fiction, a California dream. Yet earnest scientists are hard at work on a new alchemy: brewing fuel for cars -- synthetic gasoline -- from little more than water and sunshine.
Mimicking the way plants turn sunlight and carbon dioxide in the air into energy and oxygen, the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis at the California Institute of Technology is in a race to trump nature and slow global warming. Nate Lewis, a Caltech professor and solar energy research star, has a plan to remake fuel as we know it.