VALPARAISO | Burning coal to generate electricity creates electric power - and carbon dioxide.

In the first steps to finding a cleaner way to produce energy, a Valparaiso University student engineering team is taking the solar reactor it created to Switzerland later this month for experimentation with harnessing the sun's energy.

The team will experiment with the first half of a cycle that could produce zinc from relatively abundant zinc oxide. The work is intended to show zinc's potential as a fuel for large scale storage and transportation of solar energy.

The work at the Paul Scherrer Institut near Zurich will test if the sun's energy, rather than electricity from fossil fuels, can be used to produce that zinc.

A large solar mirror at the Swiss site will focus sunlight into a parabolic concentrator, then into the VU team's reactor in the attempt to draw zinc and oxygen from the zinc oxide.

Led by engineering professor Robert Palumbo, the team consists of Jackie Kondratko and Robert Schroeder, of Granger, Ind.; Derek Leatzow, of Chicago; and Leanne Matthews, of Fond du Lac, Wis.

The project started in 2006 with a $300,000, four-year grant from the National Science Foundation.

A later stage of the zinc cycle would combine the stored zinc with solar energy to produce electricity, with the by-product being zinc oxide.

Eventually, the process could run on the repeatedly recycled zinc oxide fuel rather than dwindling fossil fuels, Schroeder said. That's the theory, at least. The VU team's work is part of the process to determine if such energy generation is feasible on an industrial scale, he said.

Palumbo said success in achieving such a zinc cycle could take 10 years - or 50.

If the process is found to be workable, widespread use of such a technology would require a new infrastructure of energy storage and transmission, Palumbo said.

"I don't expect the world to run on zinc oxide," he said. But sunlight has to play a far greater role in addressing the country's energy needs, both to confront global warming and as a matter of national security, he said.

Even if zinc oxide is found to be an unfeasible fuel, the project could develop processes that may be applicable to other materials such as magnesium oxide, Palumbo said.