“This is the direction for the future.”
Few climate solutions come without downsides. “Green” hydrogen, made by using renewable energy to split water molecules, could power heavy vehicles and decarbonize industries such as steelmaking without spewing a whiff of carbon dioxide. But because the water-splitting machines, or electrolyzers, are designed to work with pure water, scaling up green hydrogen could exacerbate global freshwater shortages.
Today, nearly all hydrogen is made by breaking apart methane, burning fossil fuels to generate the needed heat and pressure. Both steps release carbon dioxide. Green hydrogen could replace this dirty hydrogen, but at the moment it costs more than twice as much, roughly $5 per kilogram. That’s partly due to the high cost of electrolyzers, which rely on catalysts made from precious metals. The U.S.
Seawater is nearly limitless, but splitting it comes with its own problems. Electrolyzers are built much like batteries, with a pair of electrodes surrounded by a watery electrolyte. In one design, catalysts at the cathode split water molecules into hydrogen and hydroxyl ions. Excess electrons at the cathode stitch pairs of hydrogen ions into hydrogen gas , which bubbles out of the water.
Shizhang Qiao, a nanotechnologist at the University of Adelaide, and his colleagues made changes to a second type of electrolyzer that uses a membrane permeable only to H+ ions. This setup split water molecules at the anode instead of the cathode, snatching away electrons to free H+ ions. The ions migrate through the membrane to the cathode where they combine with electrons to make H.
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