For years, scientists have tried to emulate the process of photosynthesis. Finally, those efforts are blooming. The magazine Scientific American, together with experts from the World Economic Forum, has named the artificial leaf one of the breakthrough technologies of 2017.

Laboratory-based efforts are attempting to go one better on nature by generating not plant food but fuels that can be stored for later use. Such projects offer the promise of making new forms of energy while mopping up carbon dioxide, an unwanted greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere. That makes artificial photosynthesis one of the potentially cleanest technologies on the energy horizon.

Daniel Nocera and Pamela Silver, from Harvard University, have taken early steps along this road. Their system — the “leaf” is actually a container — uses a catalyst, activated by sunlight, to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The container is home to hydrogen-eating bacteria, which feast on the newly liberated molecules plus carbon dioxide to churn out liquid fuel.

While even the fastest-growing plants manage to convert about 1 per cent of sunlight into food, the Harvard scientists managed an efficiency of 10 per cent when using pure carbon dioxide. The efficiency drops to about 4 per cent when pulling carbon dioxide from the air.

The sun is shining for solar fuels more widely. The US Department of Energy runs a specialist hub, the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, that brings together a host of academic institutions such as Caltech and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Its mission is to develop a scalable technology that converts carbon dioxide, water and sunlight into renewable transportation fuels (even in a green future, trucks, planes and ships can’t be plugged into the grid while on the go). There are also a number of start-ups dedicated to transforming light energy into a storable, chemical alter ego; MIT Technology Review lists Opus12, Liquid Light, Joule Unlimited and LanzaTech. One challenge, among many, is to find cheap and plentiful catalysts; some techniques use platinum.

The excitement over artificial photosynthesis stems from its potential to create “dispatchable” renewable fuels, which can be stored and used when needed. In contrast, wind turbines and solar panels generate energy intermittently. That hurdle has hampered the bid to put renewables more firmly into the energy mix: one estimate, from the Cambridge University Science and Policy Exchange, contends that replacing the power supply of one coal-fired power station requires solar or wind substitutes to produce four times the output.

There is another bonus to solar fuels: they need no infrastructure. They can be whisked to even the remotest rural locations, with obvious implications for the developing world. Those advocating more public support of the technology point out it can be deployed quickly in places such as refugee camps and isolated villages undergoing disease outbreaks. For those reasons, Bill Gates declared himself an aficionado of the concept earlier this year. In March, he blogged: “I’ve written before about the need for an energy miracle to halt climate change and provide access to electricity to millions of the poorest families who live without it. Making solar fuel would be one of those miracles.” Mr Gates, among others, founded breakthrough energy ventures to invest $1bn in clean energy.

Tesla has already anticipated the trend: the company’s Powerwall battery is designed to store solar power generated during the day so that it can be used at night, and is targeted at the same market. Indeed, a whole movement has sprung up around eco-living, with multiple books and websites offering blueprints for off-grid utopias, often powered by wood-chopping.

This has inspired talk of a “death spiral” in the utilities industry: as renewables become cheaper, and with a huge infrastructure being serviced by a decreasing pool of customers, more will go off-grid. Enthusiasm for artificial photosynthesis, as with other renewables, is fuelled by green concerns too — and how fabulously post-modern that the cleanest way of going back to nature might be to fake it.