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Feb 13,
2023
By Brian
Westenhaus
Scientists Successfully Split Seawater To Produce Green Hydrogen
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A team of scientists have successfully split natural seawater
without pre-treatment to produce green hydrogen.
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The team will work on scaling up the system by using a larger
electrolyzer so that it can be used in commercial processes such as
hydrogen generation for fuel cells and ammonia synthesis.
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Seawater is an almost infinite resource and is considered a natural
feedstock electrolyte.
University of Adelaide’s Professor Shizhang Qiao and Associate
Professor Yao Zheng from the School of Chemical Engineering led an
international team that successfully
split seawater without pre-treatment to produce green hydrogen.
Professor Qiao said, “We have split
natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen with
nearly 100 per cent efficiency, to produce green hydrogen by
electrolysis, using a non-precious and cheap catalyst in a commercial
electrolyser.”
The team published their research in the journal Nature
Energy.
A typical non-precious catalyst is cobalt oxide with chromium oxide on
its surface.
Associate Professor Zheng explained, “We used seawater as a feedstock
without the need for any pre-treatment processes like reverse osmosis
desolation, purification, or alkalization. The performance of a
commercial electrolyser with our catalysts running in seawater is
close to the performance of platinum/iridium catalysts running in a
feedstock of highly purified deionized water.
Professor Zheng added, “Current electrolysers are operated with highly
purified water electrolyte. Increased demand for hydrogen to partially
or totally replace energy generated by fossil fuels will significantly
increase scarcity of increasingly limited freshwater resources.”
Seawater is an almost infinite resource and is considered a natural
feedstock electrolyte. This is more practical for regions with long
coastlines and abundant sunlight. However, it isn’t practical for
regions where seawater is scarce.
Seawater electrolysis is still in early development compared with pure
water electrolysis because of electrode side reactions, and corrosion
arising from the complexities of using seawater.
“It is always necessary to treat impure water to a level of water
purity for conventional electrolysers including desalination and
deionization, which increases the operation and maintenance cost of
the processes,” noted Zheng. “Our work provides a solution to directly
utilize seawater without pre-treatment systems and alkali addition,
which shows similar performance as that of existing metal-based mature
pure water electrolyser.”
The team will work on scaling up the system by using a larger
electrolyzer so that it can be used in commercial processes such as
hydrogen generation for fuel cells and ammonia synthesis.
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Should this work get replication with similar success it will be a
breakthrough. No expensive precious metals involved. But cobalt while
not so rare isn’t abundant by any means and is often sourced from ore
gathering by small children. That makes the future of cobalt very much
up in the air for assessment. Should this research prove up, the
cobalt demands would sky rocket and get way more expensive. There is
cobalt to be had, its just buried under ‘not in my backyard’ and the
environmental green groups’ lawyer barriers, which plug up the
politics quite severely.
The second matter is that the power source isn’t discussed. While the
energy input is definitely electric and the claim is near 100%
efficiency, the input vs product calculation isn’t shown or discussed.
Yet the prospect of a greatly reduced water source cost, plus not
using precious metals is cause for a lot of anticipation.
Congratulations to the team is in order. Lets hope the next steps are
solvable by low costs and not requiring decades of political
maneuvering to get the jobs done.
By Brian Westenhaus via New
Energy and Fuel
Green Play Ammonia™, Yielder® NFuel Energy.
Spokane, Washington. 99212
www.exactrix.com
509 995 1879 cell, Pacific.
Nathan1@greenplayammonia.com
exactrix@exactrix.com
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