The Future of Energy: Innovation: 7 Cool New Ideas

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Mention sunflowers and you probably think of the famous painting by Van Gogh or perhaps the tasty salad oil. But Valerie Dupont, a scientist at England's University of Leeds, thinks of hydrogen. Last summer Dupont and her team developed a method for extracting hydrogen using nothing but sunflower oil, air, water and two specialized catalysts. That development may help solve one of the chief problems slowing the advance of the much touted automobile fuel cell: how to provide a clean, renewable source of its hydrogen fuel. The process works by vaporizing oil and water, breaking them down and capturing the hydrogen locked inside. Built on a large scale, such a hydrogen generator could provide fill-ups of hydrogen fuel for thousands of cars. The technology would also help solve a potential pollution problem by allowing a by-product of the process, carbon dioxide, to be captured and filtered at a single point. Imagine if all the pollutants could be stripped out of gasoline before you filled up your tank. Known scientifically as "unmixed steam reforming," the process used by Dupont was invented in the U.S. But she is believed to be the first to apply it to sunflower oil. U.S. producers, who have 1.8 million acres under till and produce about 280,000 metric tons of cooking oil annually, are interested. So are producers in places like Argentina and Russia, which grow even more acres. For now, Dupont's prototype must be refined, and the cost of the process remains too high to be widely practical. But time and a few more years of rising oil prices could make sunflower power a reality.

Pigpen Power in China

That cities in the world's largest country are thirsty for oil is no secret. But China's countryside, home to 900 million, has energy woes of its own--low tech, but no less important to the nation's development. Most rural Chinese households depend on coal braziers and open wood-fueled hearths for their cooking. That is why Yunnan province, nestled between Tibet and Burma in the country's southwest, boasts forests that are among the world's most biodiverse--and most imperiled. Consumption of wood for fuel in the area averages about 6 tons per family of four per year, hacking 300,000 acres off the forest each year and leaving some of China's poorest families exposed to a host of troubles: lung disease from smoky houses, soil erosion and floods from the denuded land.

But a "biogas digester," a simple, inexpensive device introduced to Yunnan by the Nature Conservancy (TNC) and catching on in other parts of the country, is cutting down on tree cutting. In place of a woodpile, the system gives homes a pigpen, toilet, greenhouse, underground tank and some rubber tubing. Waste--from the pigpen, the toilet and the odd kitchen scrap--ferments in the underground tank, heating the greenhouse and producing a steady stream of methane to power stoves and lamps. The greenhouse helps keep the tank warm in winter, and the by-product of the tank's digestion makes good fertilizer. The whole setup costs $180. TNC, which installed more than 1,700 digesters in Yunnan last year, often donates the units to village schools, harnessing the energy of children first and using it to fire up their parents.

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