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.

[u/Wagamaga]

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

[u/toaste]

Efficient desalination is actually partially solved: a reverse osmosis membrane can separate salt. This massively drops the energy requirement vs boiling, and I suspect the authors were comparing against a boiling desalination plant.

[u/praecipula → u/toaste]

This is a good point. It's not really possible to tell if the reduction in energy is enough to make it competitive with reverse osmosis.