ScienceDaily reports an interesting discovery:
“Electrochemical water splitting driven by electricity sourced from renewable energy technology has been identified as one of the most sustainable methods of producing high-purity hydrogen.”
Professor O’Mullane said the new composite material he and PhD student Ummul Sultana had developed enabled electrochemical water splitting into hydrogen and oxygen using cheap and readily available elements as catalysts.
“Traditionally, catalysts for splitting water involve expensive precious metals such as iridium oxide, ruthenium oxide and platinum,” he said.
“An additional problem has been stability, especially for the oxygen evolution part of the process.
“What we have found is that we can use two earth-abundant cheaper alternatives — cobalt and nickel oxide with only a fraction of gold nanoparticles — to create a stable bi-functional catalyst to split water and produce hydrogen without emissions.
“From an industry point of view, it makes a lot of sense to use one catalyst material instead of two different catalysts to produce hydrogen from water.”
Professor O’Mullane said the stored hydrogen could then be used in fuel cells.
Although wind and solar have a role in a diverse energy infrastructure, it seems to me that technologies like this are much more likely to enable us to reduce the use of fossil fuels. The most significant barriers to the adoption of fuel cells are distribution infrastructure, safety, and the cost of producing hydrogen. Technologies like this address the third of those barriers.
No matter how it’s promoted fossil fuels are being used to split water molecules apart. Wind and solar power due to their intermittent generation problems have to be backed up by continuously operating fossil fuel plants, even if at low power much of the time. The authors of the article seem to be acting as though they have finally figured out how to reverse entropy. Investors beware!