Hydrogen fuel from the ocean? Scientists say they’ve found a way to do it
- International team introduced an acid layer over catalysts to directly electrolyse seawater to produce the renewable energy
- Existing technologies need high-purity water to create hydrogen, so the researchers looked to ‘an almost infinite resource’
They said that by introducing an acid layer over the catalysts, water from the Earth’s largest reservoir – the ocean – could be used to create hydrogen fuel.
The researchers from Tianjin University and Nankai University in China, the University of Adelaide in Australia and Kent State University in the United States published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Energy on Tuesday.
“Direct seawater electrolysis without the purification process and chemical additives is highly attractive and has been investigated for about 40 years, but the key challenges of this technology remain in both catalyst engineering and device design,” they wrote.
“In this work, we demonstrate direct electrolysis of seawater that has not been alkalised nor acidified and has only been filtered to remove solids and microorganisms.”
Hydrogen is regarded as the ultimate, non-polluting fuel and energy-storage medium of the future. To produce hydrogen, water is split into oxygen and hydrogen using electricity in a process called electrolysis.
According to the International Energy Agency, hydrogen demand stood at 94 million tonnes in 2021, representing about 2.5 per cent of global energy consumption. China was the world’s largest consumer of hydrogen that year, followed by the US and the Middle East.