A group of Stanford researchers says they’ve devised a viable way to create hydrogen fuel out of one of Earth’s most abundant resources: seawater.
In a new paper, researchers demonstrated a machine that was able to separate hydrogen and oxygen gas from sea water by applying electricity.
While similar methods already exist to accomplish the split, they require a burdensome and costly water purification process — a task that researchers say their method sheds entirely.
To power cities and cars, you need so much hydrogen it is not conceivable to use purified water,’ said Hongjie Dai, J.G. Jackson, and C.J. Wood professor in chemistry in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences and co-senior author on the paper.
‘We barely have enough water for our current needs in California.’
One other enormous benefit to the method, said researchers, is that the use of hydrogen fuel does not create carbon dioxide when burned — hydrogen, when burned, emits only water vapor.
Because of that key difference, the usage of hydrogen to power cars, cities, and homes would act as a major step towards combating carbon-fueled climate change.
What sets the researchers design apart from other forms of separating hydrogen and oxygen using electricity — a long-understood idea called electrolysis — is both its durability and simplicity.
While other systems work similarly by electrifying water and then harvesting the resulting gases — hydrogen is released through the negative end, called the cathode, and oxygen is released through the positive side, called the anode — previous setups all shared one common problem.
After a brief period of usage, resulting negatively charged chloride corrodes the positive electrode until it eventually crumbles.
By coating the positive end in negative charges like nickel-iron hydroxide and nickel-sulfide, however, the researchers were able to offset the effects of of the corrosion and vastly improve the structures durability.
According to the group, while a normal electrolysis machine would only last about 12 hours, their setup could live on for more than 1,000 hours.
Not only that, but according to the team, electrodes are able to operate at higher currents, allowing them to create more hydrogen and faster.
Since the system also creates breathable oxygen, its applications could go beyond producing hydrogen and also act as method of producing oxygen for submarines or breathing apparatuses.
Adding to the method’s upside, researchers said, is its unrivaled simplicity.
‘If we had a crystal ball three years ago, it would have been done in a month,’ Dai said in a statement.