More reports coming in from the Cleantech Open National Conference:

Revolutionary — that’s how the Department of Energy describes the methods for generating fuels directly from sunlight that the agency hopes will emerge from a new project in California. The DOE announced on Thursday morning that it will award up to $122 million over five years to a team of scientists in a so-called “Energy Innovation Hub” dedicated to simulating the natural process of photosynthesis and using it for “practical energy production.”

The basic idea is to take sunlight, water and carbon dioxide, run it through a highly efficient system that mimics plants’ process for capturing energy from the sun, and reap a clean fuel that’s ready for use in transportation without further processing — a daunting task. As Wired has pointed out, the idea of recycling carbon dioxide through this type of artificial photosynthesis has been kicked around for years, but has “has generally been considered too difficult and expensive to be worth the effort,” and as recently as 2008 researchers estimated it remained a decade or more away from large-scale implementation.

[Click here to read entire article at 3P]