Seawater's complex composition includes hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, and other elements, as per the USGS. That makes it essential to life on Earth, but extracting hydrogen gas from it for clean energy has been challenging.
However, as Nanowerk reported, a team from SLAC-Stanford has successfully extracted hydrogen directly from ocean water, which could aid efforts to produce low-carbon fuel for electric grids, vehicles, boats, and other infrastructure.
New Water-To-Hydrogen System Allows Control of Ions
The team created a double-membrane system and electricity to extract hydrogen fuel directly from seawater. The process successfully generated hydrogen gas without producing large amounts of harmful byproducts, as seen in traditional methods using fresh or desalinated water.
The study "Hydrogen Production With Seawater-resilient Bipolar Membrane Electrolyzers," published in Joule, focused on implementing a bipolar, or two-layer, membrane system and testing it using electrolysis. This method uses electricity to drive ions to produce a desired reaction.
The researchers found that using seawater to generate hydrogen gas through their innovative design could provide low-carbon fuel for electric grids, cars, boats, and other infrastructure. Hydrogen gas is currently a low-carbon fuel in many ways, such as fueling fuel-cell electric vehicles and as a long-duration energy storage option.
The researchers could generate hydrogen gas with seawater by controlling the most harmful element to the seawater system, chloride, through their two-layer membrane system.
This could help advance efforts to produce low-carbon fuels currently used in many ways, such as running fuel-cell electric vehicles and as a long-duration energy storage option for electric grids.
Why Convert Seawater to Hydrogen Fuel
The researchers said in the press release that working with seawater would be a more economical option, as purifying water is expensive, energy-intensive, and adds complexity to devices. Furthermore, natural freshwater contains impurities that are problematic for modern technology, in addition to being a limited resource on the planet.
In addition to developing a seawater-to-hydrogen membrane system, the team noted that the study had provided a better overall understanding of how seawater ions move through membranes. This knowledge could be applied to other fields, such as producing oxygen gas.
Moreover, they said that the understanding of ion flow and conversion in the bipolar membrane system is essential for the effort to produce oxygen through electrolysis, and the team showed that the bipolar membrane could generate oxygen gas along with producing hydrogen in their experiment.
The team aims to improve the electrodes and membranes using more readily available and easily extracted materials. This enhancement in design could make scaling the electrolysis system to a size necessary for generating hydrogen for energy-intensive activities such as transportation much simpler.
The researchers intend to take their electrolysis cells to SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) to study the catalysts and membranes' atomic structure using the facility's intense X-rays.
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