New Catalyst Paves Way for Large-Scale Hydrogen Production from Renewables
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- Written by Anna Strom
Scientist in Bio4Energy and academic partners have created a catalyst for water splitting into hydrogen and oxygen which system, if brought to scale, they say could render cost efficiency to large-scale water electrolysis systems. The intention is for these latter to be powered by electricity made from solar energy or another renewable source.
The concept could be used to produce sufficiently large amounts of hydrogen for this to be a cost-competitive energy carrier in the production of diesel or jet fuel. Springer Nature published the results last month in its Scientific Reports series.
“The system that we have created is robust, scalable and cheap... A further advantage is that we made it work using an alkaline saltwater solution. In principle you could run these systems on sea water”, said corresponding author This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., professor at Bio4Energy lead partner Umeå University.
What the researchers spread over academic institutions in Sweden, Finland and Vietnam set out to do was not necessarily to find the most productive catalyst, but rather one that was cheap, environmentally benign and—above all—performed with great stability and potential for scale up.
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