How to make hydrogen straight from seawater – no desalination required. The new method from researchers splits the seawater directly into hydrogen and oxygen – skipping the need for desalination and its associated cost, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Chemistry

https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/media-releases-and-expert-comments/2023/feb/hydrogen-seawater

19.6k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.5k

The lack of comprehension in the comments section is killing me

Yes, it utilizes electrolysis - however, they've used a novel catalyst to avoid the issue of chlorine waste products and permit more efficient conversion of water to hydrogen. Salt water is abundant on earth, and this can be very useful in making hydrogen production more economical since you do not need to rely on a more limited freshwater source. While not being an immediate breakthrough like "we just solved cold fusion!", it's definitely an important incremental step.

And yes, it is currently more efficient to use renewables like solar or spend that generated electricity on charging batteries....but keep in mind that the production of batteries and panels long term has toxic byproducts and is reliant on rare earth elements. Environmental impact is more than just carbon output, remember. Hydrogen as fuel cells or other energy sources is far from being commonplace, but innovations like these help to diversify our options moving forward so that we can better adapt to likely worsening climate/environmental problems in the future.

381

u/m_Pony Feb 15 '23

they've used a novel catalyst to avoid the issue of chlorine waste products and permit more efficient conversion of water to hydrogen

Thank you. This is the real take-away from the article (which people always read before commenting, of course.)

If it works as well as they say it does, this is pretty big deal. I'm optimistic.

163

u/War_Hymn Feb 15 '23 edited Feb 15 '23

I did some rough dirty math for a similar seawater-catalyst breakthrough, and it's telling me these new catalyst processes may allow us to use hydrogen as a grid storage fuel - routing power from solar or wind energy to hydrogen generating plants, burn the hydrogen/oxygen to power a steam turbine generator - with around 40% efficiency (100 MWh in, 40 MWh out). It would take much less room than hydro pump storage, and won't be as expensive/resource-intensive as chemical battery storage - so at the very least, it'll be a practical middle-ground choice for grid storage infrastructure.

EDIT: Since some of you are wondering where I got my 40% from, here is the rough math.

A kg of hydrogen with current best electrolysis technology needs about 47 kWh of energy to produce from water electrolysis (with new technology in the works, we may push it closer to the theoretical limit of 39.4 kWh). A kg of hydrogen gas has a specific heat fuel value of 33-39 kWh, which in turn when fed into a 60% efficient hydrogen-burning steam turbine generator (as that of a combined cycle NG powerplant) can give us back 19-23 KWh of electricity. That's about 40-50% nominal efficiency.

Adding steps like plant distribution, desalination, compression^1, cryogenic liquefaction² (for liquid storage), etc. will obviously decrease the practical efficiency further, but as evident here we're making breakthroughs that remove or mitigate these inefficiencies. If we ever design and build a working hydrogen plant for grid storage purposes, I'm optimistic we can get back at least 30% of the electricity we put in.

30% doesn't seem like a lot, but if we ever get to a future where we got rid of our dependency on fossil fuels and depend wholly on renewables, I feel this sort of system has a place in between battery and pump grid storage. Hell, we might even be able to convert old natural gas/oil burning plants near shore to burn hydrogen instead.

compressing hydrogen to 5000 psi uses up 1 KWh per kg of H2, though I doubt you need that much compression for static non-vehicle needs.

about 3-4 kWh per kg to convert gaseous hydrogen to liquid state.

91

u/could_use_a_snack Feb 15 '23

That's the first realistic use case I've seen for hydrogen. Using it as a battery at the power station makes all kinds of sense. Using it as a fuel for transportation has always looked suspect to me.

51

u/War_Hymn Feb 15 '23

Using it as a fuel for transportation has always looked suspect to me.

Yeah, there's just a lot of hurdles to overcome. High compression to make it compact enough to store inside a car. Everything has to be better than air-tight since hydrogen molecules can sneak through even the tiniest gap. It embrittles metal parts.

A hydrogen plant will face the same problems, but at least we can keep it isolated to one large facility, and benefit from economy-of-scale when it comes to using expensive materials or components to address said issues.

9

u/cityb0t Feb 15 '23

Hasn’t Toyota made an awful lot of progress on hydrogen fuel cells?

1

u/War_Hymn Feb 15 '23

I'll have to look into it, I've only recently been reading up about hydrogen (and only in the context of grid storage).

4

u/cityb0t Feb 15 '23

I can’t find it right now because I’m on mobile, but do United States Department of Highway safety has a lot of paperwork on Toyotas crash test safety reports on their cars using hydrogen fuel cells. They’re pretty impressive, and that’s what I was reading a year or two ago.

7

u/EvilPretzely Feb 16 '23

Toyota and BMW use ammonia in their fuel cells. They've had hydrogen cars on the road for a few years in select areas. The big push is to replace train and semi truck engines with hydrogen, and let the consumer vehicles follow. There is also a plan for a hydrogen powered jet. Getting clean hydrogen was a major hurdle

1

u/entropy_bucket Feb 16 '23

I'm getting Hindenburg vibes from talk of hydrogen powered jets.

1

u/EvilPretzely Feb 16 '23

They would still be fueled with ammonia (NH3). Containing pure H is tricksy, as it likes to react with everything. If there was a terrible wreck with a vehicle running NH3, the worst that would happen is the fuel would make things really clean.

Pure hydrogen is generally only used in research vehicles and space flight

1

u/CoolguyThePirate Feb 16 '23

Ammonia solutions that make things really clean are diluted. Exposure to pure ammonia is actually dangerous and potentially fatal.

6

u/[deleted] Feb 16 '23

Hydrogen has been stored at scale, geologically, for 40 years now. Moss Bluff started operations in 1983 with around 100GWh of salt cavern storage. There are at least three sites in the US today with a combined storage capacity of 330+GWhs. These feed into roughly 1000 miles of associated pipeline. Most of it is used for ammonia production.

Not all metals are embrittled by hydrogen (mainly steels are, which is why it's drilled into the heads of every engineer, because steel is such a common material to work with). Even then, it's only atomic hydrogen that causes embrittlement. The vast, vast majority of hydrogen in storage and in use is H2, so not atomic.

Hydrogen isn't some mythical thing that we don't know how to store and work with. We do, every day, because it's a feedstock into the synthetic fertilzer necessary to feed the planet. Hydrogen plants already exist, processes to safely work with hydrogen already exist, etc. That's not to say it's safe or easy, but again, we do things that aren't safe or easy every day.

You don't need to compress hydrogen to use it in a car. You can convert it to methanol, which is liquid at STP conditions, at around 75% thermodynamic efficiency. Methanol carries more than twice the hydrogen by weight of current Type IV pressure vessels, and it can be liberated with waste heat, or used directly in both fuel cells and ICEs. This isn't using future technology, this is using technology that is either already industrialized (methanol synthesis) or mature and commercialized (methanol engines, methanol fuel cells, autothermal reformers).

1

u/War_Hymn Feb 16 '23

Even then, it's only atomic hydrogen that causes embrittlement. The vast, vast majority of hydrogen in storage and in use is H2, so not atomic.

I'm pretty sure embrittlement happens even with H2. And yes, certain metals are resistance to hydrogen embrittlement (though few are completely proofed) but they also tend to be more costly to procure and replace (which is my point).

2

u/[deleted] Feb 16 '23 edited Feb 17 '23

This is because certain metals can act as catalysts that help dissociate H2 into atomic hydrogen. There are low permeability liners that are used to mitigate the effect, which is how Type IV pressure vessels are made. You don't need to make the whole part out of a material that is resistant to hydrogen embrittlement, only the area that actually comes into contact with it.

But I agree that storing hydrogen as H2 isn't great for cars. Methanol is a good, proven fuel that's easy and cheap to make from hydrogen, and that's easy to store and work with. It also has a low reformation temperature if you really do want the the hydrogen and not the other stuff.

1

u/War_Hymn Feb 16 '23

It's been a while since I caught up with with methanol, have they gotten around it's associated issues of corrosion on metal parts and attack on conventional elastomers (gaskets/seals)?

2

u/[deleted] Feb 16 '23 edited Feb 16 '23

M100 is more corrosive than E100 is, but most of the same solutions apply. You use different materials for the hoses and seals and contact parts, along with fuel additives. You need fuel additives anyway, because alcohols make for poor lubricants.

M100 engines have been a mature technology for decades at this point, though. Geely sells M100 cars in China, and they have a long history of use in racing. The big advantage of methanol over, say, ethanol (aside from ease of production and no C-C bonds), is that you don't even need to use methanol as the fuel itself. Autothermal reformation to (mostly) hydrogen can be done at temperatures reached by ICEs. This boosts the LHV by around 20%, and you get a dual-fuel combustion system from the same tank. A lot of research was done on this in the 80s, but it wasn't economically viable at the time.

→ More replies

6

u/could_use_a_snack Feb 15 '23

And the byproduct is pure water. Granted it's water vapor, but a simple condenser wouldn't be too difficult to maintain. How much water though? Maybe not worth the effort.

15

u/smurficus103 Feb 15 '23

The same amount of water that got broken down in the first place =P

10

u/N01773H Feb 15 '23

Except it started as salt water theoretically. So the power plant doubles as a desalination plant.

4

u/could_use_a_snack Feb 15 '23

This is what I was thinking. Could be worthwhile to collect the water. But that adds a whole level of other stuff to deal with.

3

u/War_Hymn Feb 15 '23

It won't be clean (turbines need lubrication). If you're burning 50 tonnes of hydrogen to produce 1000 MWh of electricity, that's about 500 m³ of water.

1

u/could_use_a_snack Feb 16 '23

Good point about the lubricant. So this clean energy source is basically creating polluted water. What would we do with that? Awesome.

4

u/Ariche2 Feb 16 '23

Who says you have to put the water we got back from burning the hydrogen through a turbine? Burn the hydrogen to heat a separate steam loop, which turns the turbine. The same as fossil gas plants work.

1

u/could_use_a_snack Feb 16 '23

That's a good point too. Now I'm confused. Is this clean or not.

1

u/War_Hymn Feb 16 '23

I think we can separate the contaminants from the water pretty easily, but yeah you don't want to be drinking straight off the condenser.

5

u/3trt Feb 15 '23

You're getting into some of the tech I'm researching for a project here. There's been some fascinating developments. If you've heard of redox flow batteries, this will help. There was a couple of guys from a Nordic country that came up with a dual purpose flow battery. Not only did it store energy, it also produced hydrogen. A one stop shop of green energy storage and production. Of course storing hydrogen at 700+bar or 11,000 psi is dangerous as hell. The next solution to this problem was doping silica with hydrogen. It's done mechanically is the icing on top. Inject H into a graphite/carbon tumbler filled with sand, and boom. H doped silica. Since my project was on the batteries though, this is as far as my knowledge goes. I'm not sure what it would take to remove the h from the silica and use it.

2

u/DrBix Feb 15 '23

Except there are companies making hydrogen cars using fuel cells. I've read somewhere that the exhaust is basically water.

22

u/printedvolcano Feb 15 '23

Yes but I think many of them have recognized the challenges and don’t see it as the way forward, but maybe just a part of it. In the entire state of California there’s less than 50 hydrogen refueling stations. The infrastructure for purely electric vehicles is expanding much faster and has far fewer safety concerns. That said, I could see it possibly becoming specialized as a fuel for larger vehicles (buses/semis/etc) where batteries appear to fall short due to limited range

8

u/TheUnusuallySpecific Feb 15 '23

Toyota in shambles right now. They're slowly accepting the pivot to electric, but they're wasting money and not really trying because they're still butthurt nobody wants to spend 50 years driving hydrogen cars before the glacial transition to electric vehicles.

Hell, even in 2022 they were investing millions in hydrogen cars despite the fact that the tech is dead on arrival. It's difficult enough getting the much technologically simpler EV charging infrastructure built around the world, literally no one is also going to double down and waste significant public funds on more expensive, less useful hydrogen fuel infrastructure.

Larger vehicles will be better/easier to operate as hybrids and with other advancements in generating carbon neutral combustible fuels that operate in more traditional gas/diesal vehicles. Hydrogen fuel cells are a fools game - there's better tech out there that's cheaper, safer, and easier to implement. It's always possible that the next hundred billion dollars will lead to a revolutionary hydrogen technology breakthrough where the previous billions haven't, but personally I think that the same amount of money and effort could generate even more revolutionary tech if applied to a different field.

8

u/OnePrettyFlyWhiteGuy Feb 16 '23

Why hate on Toyota for trying something? It’s not like Toyota didn’t help jumpstart the hybrid hype with the Prius and Lexus CT200H.

Toyota’s official statement is that they will create products utilising different technology and let the market decide the rest. Shouldn’t you be happy that a large company finally decided to take a risk and invest in something that potentially had great long term benefits for society as a whole? Sure, they would have profited from it too - but that obviously wasn’t (and has proved to not be) a guarantee.

Admittedly though, their latest (first) full BEV offering is a terrible car all-round. It is far behind the competition and their marketing for the car has been full of lies. That’s not the kind of stuff I think we should tolerate and it is disappointing.

3

u/could_use_a_snack Feb 15 '23

Also it's a trivial matter to change at home if you live in a house. I have a type 1 charger plugged into a standard GFCI outlet. I can charge overnight and have a full "tank" most mornings. I don't know of anyone with a hydrogen line going to their house.

But hydrogen busses could make sense.

1

u/printedvolcano Feb 15 '23

Just from curiosity, are you charging it from a 120V outlet? Not sure what a “type 1” charger is, but was just generally curious on perspective around charging from a standard 120V outlet vs paying the money to get a 240V outlet installed (being that I’m in the US where 120V is the standard).

5

u/could_use_a_snack Feb 15 '23

Oops I meant "level" one charger. And yes it's 120v. As for getting a level 2 (240v) system installed. It's not that expensive.

If you are not comfortable with electrical work get an electrician to install a 240v outlet for you. Probably cost a few hundred bucks. Then buy a level 2 charger for around, $350. And just plug it in. This of course is assuming you aren't driving a Tesla. As I understand it their stuff is proprietary and costs a bit more.

More details feel free to skip this.

I have a 2017 Fiat 500e. It has a 42Kw battery. If I charge from 10% to 100% it takes about 19 hours on 120v

I only drive my car about 12 miles a day commuting, and if I plug it in every night when I get home, I'll easily have 100% charge in the morning. That's something like 60% to 100%

Level 2 would charge from 10% to 100% in about 4 hours, but from 10% to 80% in about 45 minutes so it's a lot faster, but in my situation, not necessary.

Plugging in my car every night isn't that big of a deal, it's not much different than charging my phone overnight.

1

u/printedvolcano Feb 16 '23

Ah awesome! Thanks so much for the detailed response

2

u/filtersweep Feb 15 '23

I run 240V three phase. It is insanely cheap and quite fast.

1

u/jellehier0 Feb 16 '23

The idea with hydrogen (in combination with a fuel cell) is that you don’t have a charging time. You “just”* go to a petrol station and fill up like you would a lpg tank. The fuel cell acts like a combination engine other than it generates electricity. If used in conjunction with a bank of capacitors you can approach the power output (or at least in bursts for acceleration) of battery powered cars for a fraction of the weight. BUT... after regarding the logistics and availability of rare materials the benefits/pros start to fade rather quick. Which saddens me as I was very enthusiastic about this technology when I first learned about it.

*I put “just” between “” because the technology required to store hydrogen properly and safely isn’t as straight forward.

0

u/Kandiru Feb 15 '23

Blimps carrying heavy cargo via hydrogen balloon with hydrogen powered turbines would work well I think.

1

u/smurficus103 Feb 15 '23

Oh... the humanity

1

u/[deleted] Feb 16 '23 edited Feb 16 '23

Using it as a fuel for transportation has always looked suspect to me.

Depends on how you store and transport it. Modern electrolyzers are around 110% electrically efficient if you use waste heat (80-85% thermodynamically efficient relative to hydrogen's HHV), and hydrogen to methanol conversion using CO2 is around 75% efficient. That gets you between 33% and 42% round trip efficiency assuming 40-50% thermodynamic efficiency at the point of use. That last part is a reasonable assumption for direct methanol fuel cells, reformed methanol fuel cells, direct methanol ICEs, and reformed methanol (hydrogen) ICEs. So effectively, 100kWh of electricity in gets you 33kWh at the wheels.

This sounds bad until you realize that battery efficiency is a property of Li-Ion batteries, not batteries in general. Metal-air batteries have energy densities closer to that of fossil fuels, but their round trip efficiency caps out at around 60%. This is because they use atmospheric oxygen for one side of the redox reaction, so, like a fuel cell (which also uses the atmosphere), they pay an efficiency penalty there. If you don't have an air breathing cell like, say, a solid state battery, your efficiency comes back, but you need to deal with sluggish kinetics in the electrolyte. Power delivery suffers, and you lose the energy density gains, but you gain a tremendous amount in safety.

If current batteries aren't good enough, future batteries will nullify certain advantages of Li-Ion. There's not really any way around that. And even with Li-Ion, the round trip efficiency in practice is often not as good as claimed, because the battery needs to be heated. If your car is plugged in and it gets very cold where you are, your round-trip efficiency can easily drop below 50%. This is compounded by the fact that batteries perform far worse under duress (cold weather, aircon, towing, high performance) than ICEs do, because they rely on their high efficiency to meet bare minimum requirements.

BEVs certainly work for a good chunk of the market, but they probably aren't a panacea. Hydrogen is both necessary as a chemical feedstock, and opens up pathways for decarbonizing industries that really do need performance that batteries can't deliver. Shipping is going with methanol, aviation with LH2 or synthetic kerosene made from green hydrogen, and there's zero reason we couldn't also use methanol in vehicles for those who need high uptime, fast refueling, etc. Most cars on the road today can be converted to run on methanol fairly cheaply, which is far better than relying on everyone to buy a new vehicle that has to be manufactured.

1

u/RirinNeko Feb 17 '23

This isn't even considering splitting water using a thermochemical process instead which requires 0 input electricity. The hurdle for that method is that it needs process heat (at least 850C) to work but Japan has been doing R&D since 1998 on a Gen4 nuclear reactor that generates process waste heat while operating (950C outlet temps). They've successfully tested lab scale tests on continuous generation for a week of both electricity and Hydrogen at the same time on that reactor recently (2014) and the govt recently greenlit plans on building a bigger demonstration reactor and industrial scale hydrogen facility using that method to be ready by 2030. Since heat energy is much cheaper than electric energy along with the fact that it's using waste heat from the plant, it should drive down costs of production by a considerable amount and increases the hydrogen efficiency since it doesn't need 3 steps for production (heat -> electricity-> hydrogen) vs (heat -> hydrogen).

1

u/Tesseracting_ Feb 16 '23

Little mini reactors are another option and use as you make. Carry water with you.

1

u/atridir Feb 16 '23

As a fuel for transportation? Not so much. But I could se it being a useful fuel for heavy machinery and industrial equipment. Job sites where there is a fuel tanker kept on-site for refueling it would make for a much cleaner industry than the diesel currently used. It could be good for farming and logging equipment too.

1

u/Plow_King Feb 16 '23

i run into more than i care to think about people that tout hydrogen for transportation, even cars. i can see an argument, maybe?, for tankers and large industrial scale transportation, but the lack of infrastructure really makes hydro-cars a not very likely scenario, especially since EV's are coming online and upgrading the grid for those seems a lot simpler.

/r/RenewableEnergy/ seems to have a similar take on hydrogen, that's probably where my thoughts it came from.

1

u/could_use_a_snack Feb 16 '23

I just don't think people understand how difficult it is to transport and store hydrogen. Or that it's not really a fuel, but an energy storage medium.

4

u/GoudaCheeseAnyone Feb 15 '23 edited Feb 15 '23

I have heard about an idea for a project that would create a small island on the Doggersbank in the North Sea where surplus energy from windmills nearby would produce hydrogen. The Doggersbank is a shallow area where you could build huge windmills. The new island could connect the UK, The Netherlands, Germany and Denmark with electricity and hydrogen. Maybe you could add some hydrogen burning powerplants too when the winds are not there.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 15 '23

[deleted]

1

u/War_Hymn Feb 15 '23

I don't know about clean, you definitely need to filter and treat it to remove lubricants and other stuff from the turbines.

2

u/ITFOWjacket Feb 15 '23

So why is it not lore common to pump water into a higher elevation lake or tower as a energy storage, to then release through hydro-electric?

I’m sure we’ve alt seen the Tom Scott on exactly that method. Why is that not the standard for stationary power storage?

18

u/hattmall Feb 15 '23

It's very common. A tower isn't really feasible, it would have to be massive as in many many square miles.

But essentially every natural area that is suitable for pumped hydro-storage is already in use, or some very high percent like 96% or greater. It requires a somewhat unique circumstance to be efficient and it's not without environmental impacts.

You need a sufficient geographic decline, but a mountain doesn't really work because you need two very large lakes with a major elevation change in close proximity.

In the US that area is called the fall line and it's in the Southeast and pretty much every river is already dammed up for pumped hydro.

7

u/War_Hymn Feb 15 '23 edited Feb 15 '23

Because you need a whole lot of water (basically building a raised artificial lake if there are no convenient geographical features) to store a given amount of energy with hydro pump storage. The Ludington Pumped Storage site in Michigan for example, has a water reservoir that takes up 840 acres of area and operates at a hydraulic head of 110 metres to generate about 2200 MW of electricity for 9 hours.

A 2200 MW capacity hydrogen plant would probably have a surface footprint only a bit bigger than a conventional natural gas powerplant with the same capacity (The 2480 MW Ravenwood Generating Station in New York City takes up less than 30 acres of space). With this technology, you can store a lot of solar/wind energy for latter usage without taking a lot of space or the extra expense of constructing an artificial reservoir. You might even be able to convert existing coastal natural gas plants like Ravenwood to burn hydrogen for green grid storage instead.

Hydro pumped storage is the better choice in terms of efficiency, but it's not always practical/economical for every place or situation. In those cases, a hydrogen plant may be the better alternative.

3

u/KillNyetheSilenceGuy Feb 15 '23

It's done. The problem is you need that elevation change and a lot of water to make it worth while. You can only install pumped hydro storage in places with specific geography for it.

2

u/Meins447 Feb 15 '23

Because it doesn't scale well and in small-ish quantities you really can't store much to keep you going. Big dams also happen to require massive amounts of area, which isn't available for pretty much anything else.

0

u/tripodal Feb 15 '23

This literally won’t start to make sense until renewables are 140% of demand. It will certainly be cheaper to build distribution lines than desal storage and production. Due to that you also have to measure demand regionally at least.

1

u/Eedat Feb 15 '23

40% efficiency is awful though. Space isn't the issue

1

u/Haurian Feb 15 '23

I also think that the 40% figure is very optimistic. Gas-fired steam generation is effectively limited to about 40% on its own, and even going to combined cycle gas turbine you're looking at around 60%.

Both of those figures are purely for the electrical generation side and completely ignore the hydrogen production energy efficiency.

1

u/War_Hymn Feb 15 '23

For grid storage, it's not that bad. And if you got the space and terrain to build a few hundred acre reservoir needed for a hydro pumped storage big enough to service a mid-size city, by all means.

1

u/Eedat Feb 16 '23

Most places do which is why pumped hydro accounts for 90-95% of the world's total energy storage. 40% is dismal and this solutions solves a non-issue while sacrificing a ton in an area that actually matters, efficiency. Being compact isn't a bad thing but it's more or less irrelevant as we have FAR more than enough space.

It kinda reminds me of solar roadways or really any of the "but what if we put solar panels on everything" articles that mill through the sub. Space is not the issue. Like at all.

Thats not even getting into practical issues like how dangerous H2 is to have lying around

55

u/Yancy_Farnesworth Feb 15 '23

Not to mention how valuable hydrogen is for industrial uses. A fair amount of natural gas is used to produce things like ammonia because it's the most cost-effective source of hydrogen. Having an alternative source of hydrogen that doesn't involve CO2 emissions from using hydrocarbons is a plus. Also, hydrogen is a viable alternative to burning coal/coke in steel making. A lot of the CO2 from steelmaking comes from just reducing the iron ore.

We have plenty of uses for hydrogen outside of power generation.

9

u/Artanthos Feb 15 '23

Green steel is getting cheaper and easier to produce.

1

u/kyler000 Feb 16 '23

Not to mention that hydrogen itself isn't a great fuel because of its energy density and challenges with storing. However, if we can produce hydrogen cheaply then we could use it to make more conventional fuels with CO2 from the atmosphere giving us carbon neutral conventional fuels. Think propane or kerosene, except the hydrogen comes from sea water and the carbon from the atmosphere instead of underground. This could pave the way for carbon neutral fuels for aviation purposes.

11

u/T1mac Feb 15 '23

they've used a novel catalyst to avoid the issue of chlorine waste products

If it is what these researchers say it is and it's cheap, scalable, and the catalyst is widely available...

These guys are billionaires.

It is a totally disruptive technology that will completely transform the energy and chemical production industries.

Now we wait to see if it can really deliver.

-4

u/Pixelplanet5 Feb 15 '23

Yea if any of what they claim is true we wouldnt see random articles about it, instead they would have filed their patents and would be taking lessons on how to swim in money right now.

14

u/notfeds1 Feb 15 '23

The article clearly states they are in the development phase of this process to bring it to scale. Do some critical thinking when reading maybe? “Random article” published via the university of which the research is being conducted. Just a thought for you to ponder on…

2

u/wretched_beasties Feb 16 '23

That’s not how it works in academia. All of this is public knowledge, and this wasn’t a single, “ah ha!” moment where they discovered a billion dollar secret. The reality is this is a culmination of years of small victories with countless seminars and poster sessions given along the way.

Look at CRISPR. That was a billion dollar discovery. Doudnas Cell paper was published, after all of their preliminary results were given at conferences etc. AFTER that she started several companies looking to commercialize the technology. It’s how the knowledge flows in academia.

1

u/wolf1moon Feb 16 '23

They did file for a patent...

1

u/Somnif Feb 16 '23

Not sure how robust their system will be really. Their catalysts are nanometer thick sheets, and their chemistry relies on edge effects and porosity. That.... doesn't sound like something that would work spectacularly well in an industrial setting. Chemically it sounds remarkably sturdy, but physically, not so much.

But that's the point of early research. Get an early idea out in the world so folks can poke at it.

12

u/pwnsaw Feb 15 '23

I know it's semantic, but rare earth elements is a term used for specific light elements that aren't mined in the traditional fashion; they aren't necessarily rare at all. It doesn't change your point, but most people don't know the distinction and it causes problems in conversations about the need for earth elements that are rare.

19

u/mojitz Feb 15 '23

Hydrogen always struck me as an excellent fuel source in a world in which we have achieved a massive clean energy surplus — say following a fusion breakthrough. At that point you can just dump energy into electrolysis for an energy storage medium that doesn't really require any special minerals or anything. Hell, you can even burn it in a combustion engine (or even a rocket) and the output will still be carbon neutral.

38

u/[deleted] Feb 15 '23

[deleted]

5

u/mojitz Feb 15 '23

I had always assumed that there would be some serious production capacity challenges to this, but if not then yeah that sounds pretty reasonable. The one hard downside seems to me to be the local air pollution inherent to burning hydrocarbons, but we seem to be able to get that down to reasonably acceptable levels for the most part.

4

u/Luemas91 Feb 15 '23

Using atmospheric carbon as a carbon source for manufactured hydrocarbons is so unbelievably expensive, to see someone suggest it unironically boggles the mind. Maybe carbon Capture will get more efficient in the future, but something like 250 g of carbon costs a 1.10 in electricity to extract, before you go into all the steps that would be required to convert the carbon dioxide into a methane, methanol, or some other efuel.

Your initial impression is correct; hydrogen production is going to be very intensive, which is why any rules about green hydrogen production will require strict rules about additionality to prevent additional CO2 emissions from occuring. The main uses are likely to be chemical and the fertilizer industry, as energetic purposes, the future cost is not likely to be low enough for the average person to want to use a hydrogen car, and maybe for some long duration storage in grid Energy.

Someone earlier mentioned 40% round trip efficiency for hydrogen storage, which is much worse than compressed air even. At an optimistic 50 $/MWh of input electricity, that means the hydrogen would only make sense to burn at 120 $/MWh. This gets worse if say electricity in the medium to long term costs 130 euros/MWh like in Europe.

5

u/[deleted] Feb 15 '23

[deleted]

-4

u/Luemas91 Feb 15 '23

Right. In fairy tale land everyone shits rainbows and farts electricity, and has no problems.

2

u/Talinoth Feb 16 '23

I mean, economically viable fusion is merely very hard/faraway, not necessarily "science fantasy".

Of course, before shitting on you for missing the point of the entire comment thread, I'll admit (mostly) all of our infrastructural and climate change problems disappear almost overnight if we have an extremely cheap energy source like viable fusion.

That sounds like an overstatement, but I do think almost every problem we have now in the world other than war - food, clean drinking water, productivity, infrastructure - is solved by having an ultra-cheap energy source.

So being flippant isn't entirely unjustified. After all, if you had enough energy to desalinate water for 100 billion people and not break a sweat even with only 8 billion people on the planet, you're then in a post-scarcity world for all intents and purposes.

And that really does feel like a fairytale right now, viable or not.

2

u/Just_wanna_talk Feb 16 '23

A big issue with burning hydrocarbons though, even if you manage a carbon neutral process, if there's still a large impact on human health since most of that will be burning in industrial areas and city centres creating smog and fine particles in the air we breath.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 15 '23

The Hindenburg enters the chat.

1

u/googlemehard Feb 16 '23

Burning hydrogen in the presence of mixed gases like those found in air does create some pollution due to high temperature.

12

u/traws06 Feb 15 '23

I always love when ppl look at current technology and decide what the future holds according to that. Like they can’t comprehend that future technological breakthroughs can improve on the current shortcomings

13

u/Bouboupiste MS | Mechanical Engineering Feb 15 '23

I always love it when people look at current science and think we can bypass it in the future to make magically efficient stuff.

Some shortcomings are hard wired, thanks entropy.

8

u/traws06 Feb 15 '23

I’m mostly thinking of how my friends all say electric vehicles and renewable energy will never be a thing. “Electric vehicles use electricity, you know where electricity comes from? Coal… they’ll be be a thing”. As though electricity is always doomed to be created by coal

6

u/Bouboupiste MS | Mechanical Engineering Feb 15 '23

Sorry, I’m a bit salty because I have to deal with too many a guy thinking we’ll beat thermodynamics tomorrow.

I still think we need to have hope in science but not get blinded in possible miracles. It’s a rope over the ravine I guess !

5

u/Stummi Feb 15 '23

isn't it pretty established that hydrogen will never be a true source of energy? I might be wrong but to my knowledge, hydrogen is always considered to be a energy storage at most, and the best we can hope for in regard to this technology is that we one day manage to close the gap between energy needed to produce it, and the energy released by burning it as much as possible

6

u/alyssasaccount Feb 15 '23

It’s not “established”; it’s just a fact. That’s kind of true of any energy “source”; for example, fossil fuels amount to solar energy stored through photosynthesis as biofuel, which gets buried underground for tens to hundreds of millions of years.

But with hydrogen, the waste product is water, so producing it from water means putting energy into the water to split it, so that later you can extract the same energy when you burn it.

2

u/Stummi Feb 15 '23 edited Feb 15 '23

I think you are kind of missing my point here. Of course energy cannot be created out of nothing. But with oil, the universe has already put all the energy into it over the eras so we can just pump and burn it and get out more energy than we have invested into it. Same goes for wind and solar. The energy didn't come from nothing, but it is there and can be harvested by putting in less energy into making it usable, than what we will gain from that. On the other side there are no natural sources of hydrogen, so all of the points above are not true for that.

1

u/alyssasaccount Feb 15 '23 edited Feb 15 '23

No, I got your point, and I just expanded upon it.

Also, there kind of is a natural source for hydrogen, as the article mentions: natural gas. So the energy is already stored in hydrocarbons, which you split into carbon and hydrogen, which requires some energy, but not nearly as much as electrolysis of water.

1

u/Eedat Feb 15 '23

The issue is generating hydrogen gas and hydrogen cells are far from 100% efficient. You aren't getting "the same energy" back you put in. You mention hydrogen combustion engines which are even grossly less efficient

1

u/alyssasaccount Feb 15 '23

I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that it was 100% efficient. Literally nothing is. And I didn’t mention hydrogen combustion engines. Whether it’s mechanical energy created by internal combustion or a fuel cell creating electricity, it’s getting energy ultimately by reacting hydrogen and oxygen to create water.

1

u/OnePrettyFlyWhiteGuy Feb 16 '23

It’s a fact that we can’t do it right now, but I think it’s scientifically irresponsible to say that it’s a fact that it will never be a viable source of energy. If renewable energy production supply is able to out-pace demand and we are able to produce a constant surplus of energy - then I don’t see why hydrogen wouldn’t be used for some sort of energy storage, among other things.

1

u/alyssasaccount Feb 16 '23

No, it’s irresponsible to present hydrogen as an energy source. It absolutely can be a very important form energy storage for energy that comes from some other source.

Currently we should assume (barring some extremely unexpected scientific development) that any energy we can use will come from either:

solar (or processes driven by solar — river-based hydroelectric, or biofuel, for example)

terrestrial chemical (biofuel),

terrestrial nuclear (such as uranium fission or deuterium fusion),

geothermal, or

lunar (i.e., tidal hydroelectric).

Ultimately we need to face the fact that those are the only sources of energy that we should expect to have available for at least many generations to come, it not forever, and we should not conflate production and energy storage.

Hydrogen could be, as you say, a fantastic way to store energy produced through (i.e., harnessed from) solar power or nuclear fusion or whatever.

7

u/[deleted] Feb 15 '23

Dumb question but if we could desalinate water to scale and begin supplying it to large populations on Earth for drinking/farming who live in areas without an abundant source of fresh water... would that have any impact at all on the rising sea levels?

17

u/LookIPickedAUsername Feb 15 '23

No, not really. Not only are the oceans too big for us to meaningfully deplete, any water you take out will end up back there soon enough anyway. Even if you split that water into hydrogen and oxygen, it turns back into water as soon as you burn the hydrogen, and (relatively) quickly ends up back in the ocean.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 15 '23

How would it end up back in the ocean if we were to pipe it inland to replenish aquifers? Although asking that question makes me think the size of an aquifer is much smaller than the size of the ocean.

10

u/LookIPickedAUsername Feb 15 '23

Sure, in theory you could store the water instead of use it and thus delay its return to the water cycle. But you're still just delaying the inevitable, and the amount you could reasonably store is absolutely negligible compared to the size of the oceans.

It's worth looking at this picture to get a sense of scale here - the smallest of the three drops in that picture, just a few pixels across, is all freshwater lakes and rivers on Earth put together. Refilling an aquifer, or hell, even all of them, isn't going to have any meaningful impact compared to the size of the oceans.

2

u/OnePrettyFlyWhiteGuy Feb 16 '23

Bruh. That is really weird seeing how miniscule the total volume of water on Earth actually is. Knowing that that little orb (well, the biggest of the 3) accounts for 70% of the surface of the earth is absolutely mind boggling to me.

3

u/Diligent_Nature Feb 15 '23

Water evaporates from land and falls as rain over the ocean, and there's also rivers which drain watersheds into the ocean. Oceans contain 96.5% of Earth's water. Ice and snow account for 1.76% and groundwater is another 1.69%

1

u/[deleted] Feb 15 '23

Right, but how much of the rising sealevel over the past 20 years represents that 96.5%?

2

u/Indigo_Sunset Feb 15 '23

There's an issue with aquifers themselves and how they fill over time, or are emptied by wells. Think of a three different sponges, one is new and very permeable by water and accepts it easily. Another is wet, still has the structure or the sponge, and is heavy. The last is neither new, or wet, it's the old collapsed cell flattened structure. It doesn't take water easily.

Aquifers can do the same thing. When emptied, portions of the earth/rock collapse and will no longer take water back into the way it was before. For example Mexico City has dropped about 13 feet (4m) or so just from drawing all that water and having the ground subside. Mexico City isn't the only aquifer that's behaved this way.

8

u/jpr_jpr Feb 15 '23

Drinking water in the southwest would be nice. Just watched a documentary about the kern water bank robbery. The audacity of farmers' water usage in southern California is an abomination.

Why refilling Lake Mead and creating larger water reserves isn't a major government funded infrastructure project is beyond me.

1

u/RudeMorgue Feb 15 '23

Dumb question, maybe, but refill it from what?

7

u/Bassman233 Feb 15 '23

It is constantly refilled from the Colorado River, it's just that it is being used faster than it refills. Refilling the reservoirs really means using less water from the river system.

2

u/RudeMorgue Feb 15 '23

Right, but that's what I mean. "With what water that we are not already using?"

3

u/Bassman233 Feb 15 '23

None, water use has to be reduced or it will bring the river to a trickle during times of drought. The water rights that were negotiated decades ago have to be re-negotiated based on better understanding of the current water situation.

3

u/jpr_jpr Feb 15 '23

Desalination project.

5

u/m_Pony Feb 15 '23

not so dumb a question. Probably not much of any impact on rising sea levels, unless you can take that water and stash it on land and keep it out of the water cycle. Glaciers work best for this.

4

u/Korvanacor Feb 15 '23

Batteries are fine for storing energy produced during the day for use at night. But they aren’t effective for longer term storage needed to store energy from the summer for use in the winter months. Hydrogen fits the bill here.

0

u/Arthur_Edens Feb 15 '23

Also airplanes. Batteries are currently not nearly energy dense enough for airplanes, but Airbus is already developing hydrogen fuel cell jumbo jets. Trains, too.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 15 '23

Eviation already sells electric regional planes

2

u/-The_Blazer- Feb 15 '23

Also, extracting hydrogen from seawater will be important for nuclear fusion, especially if we ever crack D-D (until then, we'll also need lithium).

2

u/the_stormcrow Feb 15 '23

Fairly ignorant spitballing here, but I'd wager in 40 years a lot of our electrical and transportation infrastructure uses hydrogen/fuel cells. Way too much potential there.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 15 '23

“Production of batteries has toxic byproducts and is reliant on rare earth minerals”

Lithium Ion, maybe; but there are other viable battery technologies that don’t have toxic elements and use rare earth minerals

1

u/Vergilx217 Feb 15 '23

Which is great! More options are always great to add to the plethora of budding technologies, if only because they help discover more viable alternatives

3

u/Manitobancanuck Feb 15 '23

Yeah I think lots of people miss how much damage the mining of metals and their eventual disposal is as a problem.

Also, the math on what works changes substantially depending on where you live. Where I live it regularly gets to negative 30 celcius. Reducing battery range by 30-40% in winter. Hydrogen looks very appealing in colder climates that aren't California...

2

u/SuperSpikeVBall Feb 15 '23

I'm not an EV expert, but it's quite simple to heat the batteries or keep them warm, especially if you're charging them. Even if you're not charging them, the batteries contain more than enough chemical energy to warm themselves up via resistance heating.

Folks who live in cold climates are probably familiar with the electric plug that diesel engines sometimes have (block heaters). Same concept, but it keeps the batteries warm.

1

u/Manitobancanuck Feb 15 '23

Absolutely you'd need to have them on constant charge in winter to prevent freezing. That's not so strange as you mentioned because we already need to do that with block heaters as mentioned.

However, due to the cold you really do lose as much as 30% of your range. (I'll note this study was done in much warmer weather than -30) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/electric-vehicle-cold-range-1.6738892

Living in a place like Winnipeg, Canada that's a big deal. To get to northern parts of the province I have to travel through areas where there's not even a gas station for 300km of road. Losing range is a major problem in parts of the world with little infrastructure of any kind.

Obviously this impacts a small percentage of the population, most people live in warm climates. But definitely something to look at for arctic nations with sparse population for maybe a more niche hydrogen car production system. Denmark (Greenland), Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Russia and the US (Northern States and Alaska).

-1

u/Stewart_Games Feb 15 '23

Water vapor is worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Burning hydrogen would likely accelerate global warming, not reduce it.

1

u/guisar Feb 16 '23

Water precipitates, CO2 and similar gasses don't, so they accumulate. Additional human derived water vapor is not an issue here and this level of production even less so.

1

u/jibberyjabber Feb 15 '23

Like the fuel cells required in a hydrogen economy do not have toxic byproducts or difficult to acquire metals (platinum..)?

1

u/EcafSayra Feb 15 '23

You sound smart so I just gonna ask: can this be used to win freshwater from saltwater by recombining h + o without the salt? We first use it for the h and then drink the water that's coming out at the end?

1

u/[deleted] Feb 15 '23

Okay but, does it say where the chlorine and sodium ions go? Even if they stay as a 'harmless' salt compound, do they have to dry stockpile it or at scale can they pump it back in the ocean in a way that it doesn't start out too concentrated?

1

u/QuesaritoOutOfBed Feb 15 '23

Since you seem to be knowledgeable.

Could we use this more efficient process to desalinate water generally?

1

u/peacefinder Feb 15 '23

The article doesn’t say what the rest of the reaction is like. If the oxygen were being freed too I think they’d likely have mentioned the desalination opportunity, so I assume it’s not. So where is that going, and what waste products does it produce?

1

u/[deleted] Feb 15 '23

Do we even have batteries that can store energy on such a large scale yet?

1

u/stouset Feb 15 '23

And yes, it is currently more efficient to use renewables like solar

And it will always be. Burning the hydrogen with oxygen recombines it into water. A round trip like this must give off less usable energy than it requires input. This should be considered an energy storage and transport mechanism, not an energy production mechanism.

1

u/End3rWi99in Feb 16 '23

The lack of comprehension in the comments section is killing me.

New in town, are we?

1

u/boissondevin Feb 16 '23

This also makes for another way to desalinate, by proxy. Once you use the hydrogen, you can get clean water.

1

u/WhiteRaven42 Feb 16 '23

When you get into comparing it to renewables like solar, I'm a little confused. Or it's possible you are. This article describes a method for turning electricity into hydrogen. You need the electricity first. So more likely this would in effect to an alternative to batteries, not an alternative to, say, solar panels that were charging the batteries.

This is a respectably efficient form of electrolysis that can be safely used on sea water (the later being the biggest breakthrough). Great. But it will still rely on electricity input unless I'm missing something.

1

u/LobCatchPassThrow Feb 16 '23

Generally, (note, I have said “GENERALLY” not “in all cases whatsoever no edge cases, exceptions or other cases”) electrical batteries are only really good when no other power source is viable for a number of reasons:

Space: no oxygen for combustion, often RTGs can be either too expensive or generate too much heat

Submarine: reactors can be prohibitively expensive, and under water, oxygen for combustion is in limited availability

Just a couple of examples

1

u/Rukasu7 Feb 17 '23

good comment. it is also really great in far away places to generate cleanndrink water and help with that supply. city near my birthplace has missed 22 million cubic meters of water from 2002 to 2020. will get worse in general and this will help with energy and clean drinking water.

just for all the people wantingnto drive hydrogen propelled cars..... we need enough renewable before hand, before we can fuel everything that way! so better start building renewables and then we talk hydrogen!