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Inexpensive Nanosheet Catalyst Splits Hydrogen From Water

Posted by Soulskill on from the i'll-order-a-dozen dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Traditional methods of producing pure hydrogen are either extremely expensive or release lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed an electrocatalyst that addresses one of these problems by generating hydrogen gas from water cleanly and with drastically more affordable materials. Goodbye platinum; hello nickel and ammonia."

39 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Because they're converting it all into flammable lifting gas!

    Whatever will we do?

  2. Will it work? by Auroch · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This article is an excellent example of the types of future-energy that we'll need to rely on.

    Unfortunately, many people don't believe that spending money now is in our best interest - they'd rather wait until gas hits $10/gallon to invest in reducing the average price of energy. There are already many semi-viable alternative fuels, but for some reason, a large majority of people are content to continue "as-is", and let the current energy crisis continue.

    Most of those people though, claim "What energy crisis?"

    --
    Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
    1. Re:Will it work? by Githaron · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I want to know why we have not gone nuclear across the nation. The latest nuclear fission technologies are a lot safer than most people believe. Renewable energy is a nice thought but it is not going to do it in the short term. Perhaps in the future when it is more advanced but not right now.

    2. Re:Will it work? by Delarth799 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Most people could care less about the future. Thinking ahead seems to scare a lot of people so they concentrate on the here and now until that future they ignored comes and smacks them in the face.

    3. Re:Will it work? by ColdWetDog · · Score: 3, Funny

      The problem with this particular approach, if it does turn out to work well commercially, is that GW Bush will then have shown to be prescient in his hyping of the Hydrogen economy.

      I, for one, have some very serious issues with this concept. Very serious indeed.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    4. Re:Will it work? by Stewie241 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The latest nuclear fission technologies are a lot safer than most people believe.

      I think you answered your own question there.

    5. Re:Will it work? by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Blame Wall Street friend. Myself and many others have said that long term research is essential for the very survival of our race and its pretty obvious to anyone with eyes that wars for resources will replace wars for territory in the future. the problem is on wall street if you don't say "Damn everything but the quarterly earnings!" then your stock is gonna take a big old dump and bye bye buddy.

      Personally i believe in a broad approach, i think we should be building at the very least small scale test reactors for thorium and for reprocessing our nuclear waste into usable fuel, we should be investing in battery tech and fuel cells and every other possibility that has any real chance for success because frankly the one that trips over a viable replacement for gasoline is gonna make Gates and Buffet look poor and whatever country they are in will probably have a new golden age but sadly the USA is just too short sighted thanks to the government sucking the dicks on wall street to do anything that the money men don't approve of.

      I bet the next big breakthrough will probably come from China, they are investing heavily in science and like Japan in the 50s they are learning and improving daily thanks to all the work we have given them. Remember when made in japan meant shit? In a decade i wouldn't doubt if the same change happens in China. Looking at history one has to wonder if this is not inevitable, if once an empire gets to a certain size the wealth becomes too concentrated and apathy and trying to hang onto what those at the top have becomes more important than innovation and stagnation simply can't be avoided.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    6. Re:Will it work? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Most people could care less about the future.

      Couldn't care less.

    7. Re:Will it work? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Solyndra did not fail because of any technological fault or even internal corruption.

      They failed because China shattered the price on solar panels, with their own subsidized production, which meant Solyndra couldn't effectively compete.

      People are seeing the wrong lesson from what happened. It's like the flooding in the upper Mississippi. People got all worked up over the dams and reservoirs not working, but they never noticed that the reservoirs were kept full because of their use in fishing. Which made people money. Or like the California power crisis. Everybody swore up and down that the problem was California hadn't built power plants or some such, but they didn't notice that it was Enron's deliberate shut-downs of functional plants in order to create an artificial crisis. So they could make money.

      Perception and reality are often quite different.

    8. Re:Will it work? by BlueParrot · · Score: 5, Informative

      Your way to do it probably had shitty efficiency. 1-2% of the electrical energy probably ended up used to produce hydrogen. With fancy catalysts and carefully controlled temperature, it's possible to improve that efficiency by a factor of 30 or so, with the best methods now getting efficiencies between 30 and 60%. The problem is that those schemes tend to either rely on very expensive catalysts (like platinum ), or they are chemical processes which produce CO2 as a by-product ( steam reforming, in which hydrocarbons are reacted with water to form hydrogen and CO2 ).

      What the article seems to speak of is that they've found a catalyst that drastically improves the efficiency of electrolysis, without resorting to expensive materials.

    9. Re:Will it work? by nbsr · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Nuclear is bad. Nuclear is not safe and never will be. It is also going to be necessary for the next 50-100 years.

      All strong sources of energy are inherently dangerous and expensive (in absolute terms). They differ enough from each other to make you choose your poison, that's it. For the amount of energy nuclear plants produce, they are relatively cheap and safe.

      Coal has many operational issues, but failure is limited to the plant and extremely immediate surrounding area.

      Coal plants are failing continuously (as a part of their design), and by doing so they affect much larger area than nuclear plants will ever do.

    10. Re:Will it work? by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Consider this.

      Apple's cash reserves are $110 billion. Microsoft has $60 billion. Google has $40 billion.

      U.S. is spending $8 billion per year for TSA (and growing).

      Direct spending on Iraq War is over $800 billion. In Afghanistan, over $400 billion.

      According to MIT fusion researchers we've had here on Slashdot the other day, we could have had fusion today if we were willing to spend $80 billion on it in the last 20 years. If true, it means that Apple alone could fund it if they wanted!

      Let's assume that they are overly optimistic, and increase that figure by an order of magnitude - even then it's what was spent with zero benefit on Iraq alone.

      When we fuck up our civilization by over-reliance on a single oh-so-convenient power source, we'll have no-one but ourselves to blame.

    11. Re:Will it work? by nbsr · · Score: 2

      That's where speculators come in handy. Hypothetical situation: people don't care about energy, use plenty of fuel for as long as they can (come on, production of gas isn't all that more expensive, is it?), and, suddenly, they wake up with gas prices od $100/gallon. It's hypothetical because there are people who try to predict the future. If they are right - they get plenty of money, if not - they loose (pretty damn good incentive for being right). If many of them expect a hike in prices of oil - the prices will slowly ramp up and at the same time some amount of oil will be stock piled for later use. Voters don't like that ("let's just burn all the oil now") and politicians are pushing for moving the reserves back into retail. But, voters don't care, and politicians only care about the next election. Who do you believe then?

    12. Re:Will it work? by NemoinSpace · · Score: 3, Interesting

      My friend, please compare the energy density (in Mj/L) of gasoline, coal, and hydrogen. - I'll even allow you to use liquid hydrogen.
      There is a reason engineers choose the materials they do.
      Another hint: the price of oil is not based on the amount of it in the ground. We'll burn gas till the last drop. If you think gas is expensive, wait till your plan comes true and see how much you pay then.
      If it makes you feel better, the entire planet receives lots more energy from the sun than we use. Sunlight is free, yet we don't use it. Why? - energy density. Converting this almost limitless source of energy into useful energy is not only inconvenient, but also because it's expensive.
      Most people like you will still claim "the sky is falling." Relax. We are engineers. We will do it for you. When the time comes.

    13. Re:Will it work? by nbsr · · Score: 2

      This may change overnight (I've seen that in some coutries where, at least at some point in time, majority of cars on the road were using LPG).
      Performance of EVs is no longer a problem - there are batteries, which can take you 300 miles on a single charge. They are just not yet economically viable for lower segments of the market.
      The good news is that there is absolutely no reason for the batteries or other EV components to be more expensive than, say, a gas engine. They are a lot easier to manufacture and take less resources (amount of lithium in an Li-ion battery is pretty miniscule). It's just a matter of ramping up the production.
      Also, markets don't respond linearly, especially in emerging applications (Apple didn't just put a hardisk in an iPod - they put a disk big enough to store all you music in it). There's almost always a threshold "good/cheap enough", which makes all the difference. But, if you want to cross the threshold you have to reach it first (which isn't nearly as flashy). OTOH, once you're above it, it doesn't matter if your camera has 10Mpixels or 100Mpixels - you're probably better off fighting challanges that matter.

    14. Re:Will it work? by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But you missed my point friend, in that if say Apple WERE to announce they were gonna fund such a thing to that amount of money wall street would take a massive dump on their stock and then they simply wouldn't have the funds.

      The entire system IMHO has been taken over by leeches, you have corps that literally are doing NANOsecond trades, now how is that in ANY way helpful to innovation? The original intent of trading stock was like what kickstarter is now, you have an idea and need funding, others believe your idea will work and provide funding for a piece of the proceeds. I would argue that the lack of tech actually helped because one had to focus on the long term.

      But now the entire system is completely short sighted because any other view is crucified by wall street, it is the reason why you have companies sitting on piles of money instead of investing it into more plants or better infrastructure, simply because anything that affects the bottom line in any way that isn't immediately positive is shat upon. in my own area neither DSL nor cable has moved a single foot in over a decade, even though the town has grown by over a third, why? Because they are both publicly traded companies and their stock goes down when they spend money on lines but goes up when they buy out some other company, so that is what they do instead.

      Like I said looking at history i have to wonder if this is simply inevitable because in every empire you see the same progression, first growth and innovation followed by wealth concentration then finally stagnation and downfall. Just as once the sun never set on the British empire so too it appears our own day in the sun is setting, most likely to be replaced by China and India. lets just hope they find the answer before we are all out of time.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    15. Re:Will it work? by jo_ham · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You use the electricity generated by nuclear power stations to drive the (energy intensive) process of generating hydrogen, that you then use for fuelling vehicles.

      It's the same process as simply charging up an electric car, it's just a different energy storage method.

      Like the purely electric car, however, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have the problem of range brought about because hydrogen has an extremely low energy density and is difficult to store effectively as a gas or a liquid (compared to a liquid hydrocarbon fuel, for example).

      The market is all interlinked, and that market is energy.

    16. Re:Will it work? by bogjobber · · Score: 2

      want to know why we have not gone nuclear across the nation.

      I know it was a rhetorical question, but it's really simple: fear and ignorance. When a nuclear plant fails it's on the front page of every newspaper in the world for months, and a significant percentage of our population doesn't even climate change is happening.

    17. Re:Will it work? by Frenchman113 · · Score: 2

      I am a chemical engineer by education, if not by practice. There are several reasons why catalysts are degraded despite not being consumed in reaction.

      The issue is that catalysts are typically formed into fine, spherical pellets to maximize the surface area of catalytic material exposed. This is because catalytic reactions are characterized by an intermediate reaction between the reactants and active sites on the catalyst. As a result of their being made into pellets, a variety of things can occur that reduce the active surface area. As a result of temperature and pressure, the pellets may adhere to form larger particles, which will hence have lower surface area. Additionally, chemical entities present in the reactor may physically adhere to the pellets creating a diffusive barrier to the catalyst. The catalyst can probably be recycled after its effective lifetime, but the cost is certainly not zero (probably similar to production costs in ore refining).

      Additionally, although catalysts are not consumed <b>in the reaction they catalyze</b>, they may take part in reactions other than the one of interest. In this way, catalytic material may degrade over time, although platinum is fairly inert.

    18. Re:Will it work? by cupantae · · Score: 2

      Another portion of society don't even all the words in their sentences.

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      --
    19. Re:Will it work? by pixelpusher220 · · Score: 2

      Yes, it is $10/gallon because it is heavily taxed and used to subsidize the 'socialist' agenda (not a bad thing). You don't NEED a car because they have actual public transportation systems that work and run on time. Even far out suburbs have well running bus systems to get you where you need to go. London's subway system gets you within 3 blocks of your destination anywhere in the city practically. NYC is our best attempt at decent public transit.

      Europe for example, you can tell - to the minute - when that train will arrive and on which track in the station. We know how to do this, because we helped them build the damn system after WWII. Yet here the auto and air industries has taken over and so only roads and air get government subsidies, whereas rail has to basically cover it's own costs.

      --
      People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people :-D
    20. Re:Will it work? by Intrepid+imaginaut · · Score: 2

      JAXA is working on a 1GW orbital power plant that sends energy down to a 1km wide rectenna, birds could fly through it without harm. Of course they say it won't be economical until launch costs drop to 1% of their former amount. And hey, look, here's a Star Tram to do just that! :D

  3. Affordable by Dan+East · · Score: 2, Funny

    Cat pee and pocket change. I can handle that.

    --
    Better known as 318230.
  4. Re:So where is my car? by user+flynn · · Score: 2, Funny

    Silly mortal, only Jebus runs on water.

    --
    In the distance you hear an ominous moo.
  5. Re:More seriously though... by muon-catalyzed · · Score: 2

    Free energy? "Electrocatalyst", you also need to plug some electric juice to split the water, and the process is "under unity" efficient, that's for sure.

  6. That's not where most of the cost comes from by Solandri · · Score: 5, Informative

    I wouldn't have made this post a few weeks ago, but reading other people's comments about hydrogen fuel made it painfully obvious that many people have a fundamental misunderstanding about how the hydrogen economy works: There is no free energy. You cannot convert water into hydrogen with little energy, then burn the hydrogen with oxygen to get lots of energy.

    The amount of energy you put in to break water into hydrogen and oxygen has to be more than the energy you get out when you burn (or combine via a fuel cell) the hydrogen with oxygen. There is no getting around this; it is simple thermodynamics. This is why many people refer to hydrogen as a battery, not as a fuel. Free hydrogen is exceptionally rare to find, so when you manufacture atomic hydrogen gas you're storing energy in it like in a battery. When you burn the hydrogen, you're extracting that energy like from a battery.

    With electrolysis, typically you're looking at about 50%-70% of the energy you put in ending up in the hydrogen gas. The rest is converted into waste heat. With a non-research grade fuel cell, you're looking at about 50%-70% efficiency there as well (the rest going to waste heat). So for the cycle overall, you're at 25%-50% efficiency. That is, only 25%-50% of the energy you put in to create the hydrogen ends up actually doing useful work, which is absolutely abysmal for a battery.

    The cost of materials like platinum is also a bit misleading. The platinum is not consumed during the electrolysis process. While the high cost of platinum does affect the cost of the device used to generate hydrogen, it has no effect on the cost of the hydrogen gas itself. Almost the entirety of the cost of hydrogen gas is the energy used to create it by cracking water.

    1. Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from by Grayhand · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yes but the cost of Platinum has been holding back the wide adoption of fuel cell technology. At one point only NASA could aford to use them. Most of the cost of a fuel cell is in the platinum. Say you want or need to live off the grid, this process can make afordable equipment possible for producing hydrogen at home. You can use it to store energy for lean days or refuel the car. Not caustic and expensive batteries and the fuel cells can be recycled. Hydrogen was never a solution. Bush only pushed it after it was pointed out to him that most hydrogen in use now is produced from fossil fuel. How about this for crazy, install one on an offshore wind farm and run a pipe back to shore and have a wind farm producing not electricity but hydrogen gas! No line loss and you can have a car hydrogen fueling station on shore. Hydrogen does escape mostly at fitting and valves since it's so small it's nearly impossible to completely contain hydrogen but in a closed line there would be less loss than the bleed that happens in power lines which could offset some of the energy lost in producing the hydrogen.

    2. Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from by bolt_the_dhampir · · Score: 2

      Unlike the batteries however, it can be stored indefinitely without degrading, and be "charged" (tank filled) in a matter of seconds. Also it doesn't wear down (to anywhere near the same degree, anyway) when recharged.

    3. Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from by loshwomp · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Almost the entirety of the cost of hydrogen gas is the energy used to create it by cracking water.

      Don't forget that you have to compress the H2 before you can use it, too, and that takes a huge amount of (usually electrical) energy. Enough energy that you could put it into a battery electric car instead and drive a significant fraction of the distance the fuel cell would take you without the stupid fuel cell.

    4. Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from by loshwomp · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Say you want or need to live off the grid

      If you need to live off the grid you're already such an edge case that we don't need to be optimizing for you. Living off the grid is expensive. And if you just want to live off the grid, then you're obviously not optimizing for 1) low cost or 2) efficient use of resources, so why should I care about your problem?

      How about this for crazy, install one on an offshore wind farm and run a pipe back to shore and have a wind farm producing not electricity but hydrogen gas!

      Yes, it's crazy alright, but what good is that? The electricity->H2->electricity round trip efficiency is something like 25%, and that's not counting the massive amounts of energy required to compress the H2. 25% sucks bad enough that you can't change things with handwaving as you scale that efficiency to the transportation sector.

      Put the energy directly into the battery (we already have better batteries than H2 fuel cells) and drive several times as far. There's a reason electric cars are here today, but fuel cell cars are not.

    5. Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from by jmerlin · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Gasses can be condensed using temperature as well, imagine this process happening in space, where an absence of heat is abundant. Gaseous hydrogen will gladly float beyond our atmosphere, at which point it can be easily compressed and then gravity will bring it back down to earth. I don't think this problem has to require an enormous amount of energy to solve. And that process of moving hydrogen to space can also generate electricity...

    6. Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from by ljw1004 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The platinum is not consumed during the electrolysis process. While the high cost of platinum does affect the cost of the device used to generate hydrogen, it has no effect on the cost of the hydrogen gas itself. Almost the entirety of the cost of hydrogen gas is the energy used to create it by cracking water.

      You think so? I reckon you're missing the "thermodynamics of capital". If you have to borrow $10k to start your electrolysis company, then the prices you charge will have to cover the $1k/year repayment on that loan. But if you only borrow $1k to start your electrolysis company, then the prices you charge will only have to cover $0.1k/year repayments.

    7. Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from by QQBoss · · Score: 2

      Ummm, yeah, sure. Tell you what, you go get a container made out of the material of your choice (not including unobtanium, that would just be cheating) able to hold a meaningful level of PSI (or the metric of your choice) of hydrogen. Hermetically seal the container (I won't even expect you to have a hole in the container via which you can connect it to whatever you plan to generate work with).
      Come back in a day, a week, a month, a year....

      Then realize your concept of "stored indefinitely without degrading" probably needs some significant rethinking. Even if the hydrogen is still hydrogen (not physically degraded), it can't do you any useful work if it is sneaking out of any container you can make and off wafting through the atmosphere looking for other atoms to get jiggy with.

      This is only one of the reasons why the ability to generate hydrogen on demand as close to the source that will use it is fairly essential for a hydrogen engine to be viable.

    8. Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from by nbsr · · Score: 2

      One thing he is right about, though, is that battery cells developed for portable applications aren't particularly well suited to EVs.

      Don't get me wrong - it is fantastic we have them, and have them manufactured at a mass scale. This way we can piggy-back on decades of intensive R&D that went into them. Without that there wouldn't be mass manufactured electric cars on the road now. Portable batteries have even proven pretty good in that application, but it doesn't mean we can't improve on that.

      In a long term we probably want batteries where reactants are not stored in a solid form, separated only by a thin layer of electrolyte. We can afford having a pump here and there, or add a couple of (refillable?) tanks for keeping reactants and their byproducts. There were already some attempts of doing just that, but at the moment such batteries simply can't compete with the whole industry backing up the development of portable batteries. This will have to wait until EV's gain more market share.

      Although I consider hydrogen a dead-end (maybe except for special applications, like airplanes), the research that goes into fuel cell may produce something useful (who says the reactants must be "H_2" and "O_2" after all?).

    9. Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Funny

      According to Graham's law, it would appear that the solution is to make the molecules bigger. However hydrogen doesn't seem keen to associate into groups larger than pairs.

      Some have suggested that attaching the hydrogen atoms to chains of carbon atoms (say, six to ten of them) might do the trick, but I reckon that's crazy talk.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    10. Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from by Locke2005 · · Score: 2

      But, look at all the waste products produced by use of hydrogen fuel -- where are you going to dispose of all the H20???

      --
      I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
  7. Its probably 5 to 10 years out by asm2750 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Seriously I am tired of all these researchers saying they found a way to break bonds in water to make hydrogen a feasible long term energy source or a new photovoltaic technology that has 40% efficiency and then say down the road "oh the commercial version is 5 to 10 years out". Its always 5 to 10 years out, heres a suggestion how about announce your results or accomplishments when you ACTUALLY have a working commercial product that is in production. Maybe then I'll give a fuck.

    1. Re:Its probably 5 to 10 years out by Locke2005 · · Score: 2

      Once again, hydrogen is NOT an energy SOURCE, it is an energy storage medium!

      --
      I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
  8. Re:Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink by dwye · · Score: 2

    Just repeat after me:

    Whoosh!