Researchers Can Now Make Clean Hydrogen Fuel By Pulling it Directly From Seawater—No Filtering Required

Without been too expensive, it is possible to produce hydrogen gas from electric power.  It is almost one hundred percent efficient. for commercial hydrogen production, this really good news.

There are still plenty of expensive probems for hydrogen though.  Not least is storing  and moving it which has made real usage a problem.  And it still takes electric power to produce it.

Methane remains the easist way to use  hydrogen.

Researchers Can Now Make Clean Hydrogen Fuel By Pulling it Directly From Seawater—No Filtering Required

By Good News Network

-Feb 5, 2023

By Daniel Sallai, CC license

Researchers in Australia, an island nation, have successfully split seawater to produce green hydrogen without pre-treatment.

An international chemical engineering team, led by the University of Adelaide’s Professor Shizhang Qiao and Associate Professor Yao Zheng, were motivated by the fact that the only thing emitted by hydrogen fuel is water.

“We have split natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen with nearly 100 percent efficiency, to produce green hydrogen by electrolysis, using a non-precious and cheap catalyst in a commercial electrolyzer,” said Professor Qiao.

“We used seawater as a feedstock without the need for any pre-treatment processes like reverse osmosis desolation, purification, or alkalization,” said Associate Professor Zheng.

The team reports that the performance of their seawater with catalysts of cobalt oxide and chromium oxide is close to the performance of expensive platinum/iridium catalysts running in a feedstock of highly purified deionized water.

“Increased demand for hydrogen to partially or totally replace energy generated by fossil fuels will significantly increase scarcity of increasingly-limited freshwater resources,” explained Zheng.

Seawater is an almost infinite resource and is considered a natural feedstock electrolyte, which would be very practical for regions with long coastlines and abundant sunlight.

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 electrolyzers including desalination and deionization, which increases the operation and maintenance cost of the processes,” said Associate Professor Zheng, co-author of the study published in the journal Nature Energy.

“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 electrolyzer.”