Electrolysis

tahanson43206 · 2023-02-13 13:33:42

For SpaceNut ... we did not have a topic that included the word "electrolysis" in the title.

The article in post #1 is about improvements in the well known process.

The topic is available for anyone who might find further developments in this basic technology.

(th)

tahanson43206 · 2023-02-13 13:34:25

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/scie … 00419.html

Oilprice.com
Scientists Successfully Split Seawater To Produce Green Hydrogen
Editor OilPrice.com
Sun, February 12, 2023 at 11:00 AM EST
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.”
Stay ahead of the market
The team published their research in the journal Nature Energy.
A typical non-precious catalyst is cobalt oxide with chromium oxide on its surface.
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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.
***
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
More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:

(th)

SpaceNut · 2023-02-13 19:44:10

Sea water electrolysis was reported in another topic that was termed a green energy.
While salt lowers the energy to process the water into hydrogen it's still going to be a problem for the plate assembly.
Even stainless-steel plates do not last all that long. It is one of the reasons that fuel cell technology is being used instead as its not a plate driven system but makes use of membranes to allow the process to function.

SpaceNut · 2023-02-13 19:46:46

SpaceNut wrote:

tahanson43206 wrote:
This post about improved desalination technique could fit well in several topics ...
I'll start it here:
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/clea … 42411.html
Engadget
Researchers can now pull hydrogen directly from seawater, no filtering required
It could eventually produce cheap, renewable energy for coastal areas.
lingqi xie via Getty Images
Will Shanklin
Will Shanklin·Contributing Reporter
Fri, February 3, 2023 at 4:40 PM EST
Researchers at the University of Adelaide announced this week that they made clean hydrogen fuel from seawater without pre-treatment. Demand for hydrogen fuel, a clean energy source that only produces water when burned, is expected to increase in the coming years as the world (hopefully) continues to pivot away from fossil fuels. The findings could eventually provide cheaper green energy production to coastal areas.
“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,” said Professor Shizhang Qiao, the team’s co-lead. Seawater typically needs to be purified before electrolysis splits it into hydrogen and oxygen. The team says its results, using cobalt oxide with chromium oxide on its surface as the catalyst, had similar performance to a standard process of applying platinum and iridium catalysts to highly purified and deionized water.
Compared to freshwater, seawater is an abundant resource, and the ability to extract hydrogen fuel from seawater without pre-treatment could save money. However, even if successfully scaled, it would likely only be practical for coastal communities with plenty of seawater — not so much for Iowa or Kansas.
The team’s next step is to scale the system with a larger electrolyzer. Then, although it’s still early in development, the researchers hope to eventually apply the findings to commercial hydrogen production for fuel cells and ammonia synthesis. Co-lead Yao Zheng summarized, “Our work provides a solution to directly utilise seawater without pre-treatment systems and alkali addition, which shows similar performance as that of existing metal-based mature pure water electrolyser.”
(th)
Of course, if the power source is clean then this is only going to work when that power is local to the ocean water.

SpaceNut · 2023-02-13 20:40:22

Just saw this one The Future Is Bright For Pink Hydrogen

pink hydrogen, produced using nuclear power, has been largely overlooked. Governments worldwide are once again discussing nuclear power, with plans to construct several new power plants around the globe.

Steve Stewart · 2023-02-17 19:55:41

This is an interesting article from BBC Top Gear about electrolysis.

Hydrogen fuels might have just got a huge leg-up
With current tech, electrolysis generally produces hydrogen at about 75 per cent efficiency. So to create a kilo of pure hydrogen fuel, which holds about 39.4kWh of energy, it takes 52.5kWh. By improving electrolysis efficiency to 95 per cent, that means it’ll only take 41.5kWh to generate a kilo of fuel. That’s a huge improvement over the old method of electrolysis, but also over the fossil-fuel-based hydrogen production methods, which are about 75 per cent efficient at best. And use fossil fuels, which we’re kind of trying to get away from these days.
If this tech works like its creators say it does, that means green hydrogen will be the cheapest and most efficient to produce. And because wind and solar power are now cheaper than fossil fuels (and only extending their lead), that means green hydrogen could soon be better economically as well as environmentally. Not to over-egg things, but this is huge news for billions of people. And yes, we’ll back that statement up before the article’s over.
...
So, petrol is ruinously expensive and not long for this world. Fossil-fuel hydrogen is as awful for the environment as you’d imagine from something that starts off as gas, oil or coal – and it’s getting costlier by the minute. Green hydrogen is environmentally friendly, will only get cheaper as green power costs continue to decrease and doesn’t require any extra expense for carbon capture or similar band-aids for bullet wounds. Hydrogen could finally be having its moment.

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#1 2023-02-13 13:33:42

Electrolysis

#2 2023-02-13 13:34:25

Re: Electrolysis

#3 2023-02-13 19:44:10

Re: Electrolysis

#4 2023-02-13 19:46:46

Re: Electrolysis

#5 2023-02-13 20:40:22

Re: Electrolysis

#6 2023-02-17 19:55:41

Re: Electrolysis

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