Posted on Feb 1 2023 by Jessica Stanley
Waves in the ocean
https://www.adelaide.edu.au/newsroom/ne ... n-hydrogen
Researchers have successfully split seawater without pre-treatment to produce green hydrogen.
The international team was led by the University of Adelaide’s Professor Shizhang Qiao and Associate Professor Yao Zheng from the School of Chemical Engineering.
“We have split natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen with nearly 100 per cent efficiency, to produce green hydrogen by electrolysis, using a non-precious and cheap catalyst in a commercial electrolyser,” said Professor Qiao.
A typical non-precious catalyst is cobalt oxide with chromium oxide on its surface.
“We used seawater as a feedstock without the need for any pre-treatment processes like reverse osmosis desolation, purification, or alkalisation,” said Associate Professor Zheng.
“The performance of a commercial electrolyser with our catalysts running in seawater is close to the performance of platinum/iridium catalysts running in a feedstock of highly purified deionised water.
Our work provides a solution to directly utilise seawater without pre-treatment systems and alkali addition, which shows similar performance as that of existing metal-based mature pure water electrolyser.
The University of Adelaide's Associate Professor Yao Zheng, researcher in the School of Chemical Engineering.
The team published their research in the journal Nature Energy.
“Current electrolysers are operated with highly purified water electrolyte. Increased demand for hydrogen to partially or totally replace energy generated by fossil fuels will significantly increase scarcity of increasingly limited freshwater resources,” said Associate Professor Zheng.