Hydrogen is promising as the fuel of the future but it is also very expensive to produce in bulk. To work around that, a team of Stanford researchers believe they can make it as cheap as fossil fuels by using some water and sunlight.

To make hydrogen out of water and light, scientists often use a solar panel to make electricity.This is then used to power a commercial electrolyzer that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Instead of doing that, the smarty pants at Stanford rolled those two components together, making it far cheaper in the process.

The electrons created by solar panels can power chemical reactions to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. One half can be used to split the atoms and form hydrogen, and the other half to fill the electron shells of oxygen atoms.

To stop materials from corroding, they coated silicon with a thin layer of nickel to protect it. The solar reactions ran for three days without any damage to it. Their coated silicon method was over ten times faster than alternative metal oxides.

The speed and cheapness of the method may lead to an idea of how hydrogen can be generated in such a way to compete with fossil fuels in price in the future. [Science via Technology Review]