A bit over a year ago, we reported on a variety of developments in the production and use of hydrogen. One of those was a cheap and easy way to produce a catalyst that would liberate hydrogen from water when provided with an electric current. The results-focused description provided in the Science paper turned out to obscure the fact that this catalyst was part of a much larger vision for changing the global energy economy. MIT's Daniel Nocera, whose lab produced the research, used a talk at today's EmTech conference to fill the audience in on the vision.

Nocera pointed out that most of the work in providing carbon-neutral energy has focused on increasing efficiencies of existing technology and creating economies of scale, both of which will ultimately reduce the cost of electricity produced in the developed world. The problem has been that this has kept the price of the hardware expensive. As a result, the solutions we're arriving at won't make sense for the developing world. "We need to tackle the non-legacy world, and they don't have any money," Nocera said.

To drive the point home, Nocera showed a curve that plotted the weight of something and the number produced, and showed that heavy, rare stuff costs a lot (like 747s), while lighter, more common items are cheap—the Hamburger was on the other end of the spectrum. "I want to be the Hamburgler of energy," Nocera said.

His point was that to get there, you need to ignore efficiency. Instead, you have to focus on bringing the cost down for solutions that can operate on the individual level, without the big, expensive infrastructure like an electric grid. And that's where the catalyst comes in. Given the right salt solution, one containing cheap ingredients like cobalt and phosphate, a current could be run through it, and the catalyst would form spontaneously. Keep the current running, and it will start splitting the water and producing hydrogen, which can be stored and converted to energy long after the sun goes down.

Because it forms spontaneously, it's essentially impervious to damage and indifferent to just about any form of contamination. Nocera's group has kept a test catalyst setup running for over a month, feeding it water straight out of the Charles River. The catalyst is also simple, as it can operate in a container that's little more than a standard stretch of PVC piping and a few sheets of plastic. It may not be anywhere near as efficient as some of the best hardware on the market—Nocera said it's off by about a factor of 10, in fact—but it's something that could be deployed even in countries without much in the way of a GDP.

This ability to work with nearly any source of water, including salt water and human waste streams, is the key to the technology's appeal. "If we bring pure water to Africa, what will happen?" Nocera asked. "They'll drink it." Instead, when coupled with a fuel cell, this technology can produce clean drinking water. Coupled with a solar cell, the system can be deployed anywhere there's water, including places that are off the grid and don't have a population large enough to support a major facility.

Hydrogen production isn't generally considered a solution, because each step of the process involves energy losses and inefficiencies. But again, Nocera doesn't care: if it's cheap, the inefficiencies don't matter, because higher-priced solutions are simply never going to be deployed.

Of course, this system would also require cheap solar panels (an area where progress is being made) and cheap fuel cells. The latter issue could be a bit tricky, but Nocera is optimistic that, given that the whole process is based on the acceptance of lower efficiencies, they'll find an older generation of fuel cell tech that can be made cheaply. (He mentions that Toyota executives are talking to him about technology they rejected for applications in vehicles that might work for stationary applications.) So, the company that's set up to commercialize the catalyst is currently working with partners to develop single closed systems that are ready for deployment. Nocera figures one kilowatt systems using the catalyst will be ready for production within two years.

Nocera took pains to point out that none of this should be taken as disdain for the sort of big projects that will be needed to put the infrastructure-rich developed world on a sustainable path. A lot of his research group is devoted to projects that will ultimately make sense on a large scale. Even so, Nocera showed a photo of a house that sports solar cells that aren't sufficient to power it. But they were sufficient, he suggested, to produce enough hydrogen to run a fuel-cell-powered vehicle (which was also in the picture) for most daily uses. If this sort of arrangement is cheap enough for mass deployment in developing economies, it may even make financial sense in the suburbs near MIT.