From Stanford University something familiar to most anyone who has taken science – electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Stanford scientists develop a water splitter that runs on an ordinary AAA battery
In 2015, American consumers will finally be able to purchase fuel cell cars from Toyota and other manufacturers. Although touted as zero-emissions vehicles, most of the cars will run on hydrogen made from natural gas, a fossil fuel that contributes to global warming.
Now scientists at Stanford University have developed a low-cost, emissions-free device that uses an ordinary AAA battery to produce hydrogen by water electrolysis. The battery sends an electric current through two electrodes that split liquid water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. Unlike other water splitters that use precious-metal catalysts, the electrodes in the Stanford device are made of inexpensive and abundant nickel and iron.
“Using nickel and iron, which are cheap materials, we were able to make the electrocatalysts active enough to split water at room temperature with a single 1.5-volt battery,” said Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford. “This is the first time anyone has used non-precious metal catalysts to split water at a voltage that low. It’s quite remarkable, because normally you need expensive metals, like platinum or iridium, to achieve that voltage.”
In addition to producing hydrogen, the novel water splitter could be used to make chlorine gas and sodium hydroxide, another important industrial chemical, according to Dai. He and his colleagues describe the new device in a study published in the Aug. 22 issue of the journal Nature Communications.
The promise of hydrogen
Automakers have long considered the hydrogen fuel cell a promising alternative to the gasoline engine. Fuel cell technology is essentially water splitting in reverse. A fuel cell combines stored hydrogen gas with oxygen from the air to produce electricity, which powers the car. The only byproduct is water – unlike gasoline combustion, which emits carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
Earlier this year, Hyundai began leasing fuel cell vehicles in Southern California. Toyota and Honda will begin selling fuel cell cars in 2015. Most of these vehicles will run on fuel manufactured at large industrial plants that produce hydrogen by combining very hot steam and natural gas, an energy-intensive process that releases carbon dioxide as a byproduct.
Splitting water to make hydrogen requires no fossil fuels and emits no greenhouse gases. But scientists have yet to develop an affordable, active water splitter with catalysts capable of working at industrial scales.
“It’s been a constant pursuit for decades to make low-cost electrocatalysts with high activity and long durability,” Dai said. “When we found out that a nickel-based catalyst is as effective as platinum, it came as a complete surprise.”
Saving energy and money
The discovery was made by Stanford graduate student Ming Gong, co-lead author of the study. “Ming discovered a nickel-metal/nickel-oxide structure that turns out to be more active than pure nickel metal or pure nickel oxide alone,” Dai said. “This novel structure favors hydrogen electrocatalysis, but we still don’t fully understand the science behind it.”
The nickel/nickel-oxide catalyst significantly lowers the voltage required to split water, which could eventually save hydrogen producers billions of dollars in electricity costs, according to Gong. His next goal is to improve the durability of the device.
“The electrodes are fairly stable, but they do slowly decay over time,” he said. “The current device would probably run for days, but weeks or months would be preferable. That goal is achievable based on my most recent results.”
The researchers also plan to develop a water splitter than runs on electricity produced by solar energy.
“Hydrogen is an ideal fuel for powering vehicles, buildings and storing renewable energy on the grid,” said Dai. “We’re very glad that we were able to make a catalyst that’s very active and low cost. This shows that through nanoscale engineering of materials we can really make a difference in how we make fuels and consume energy.”
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Unmentionable:
Your post at August 22, 2014 at 9:09 am says
Your post is a masterpiece of misdirection. The above article is about a supposedly novel method for electrolysis of water to provide hydrogen for use as a viable and economical fuel. Your post does not alter the fact that the proposed electrolysis does not provide hydrogen for use as a viable and economical fuel.
Buses rarely crash so explosions were unlikely.
Economies of scale cannot drive the costs down below their possible minimum.
The minimum cost of hydrogen from electrolysis is higher than the cost of hydrogen from water gas shift because the electrolysis uses more fuel for the same amount of hydrogen.
Richard
So, the answer to peoples problems is simple to solve. A molten salt thorium nuclear power plant that uses its power to do nothing but produce hydrogen and another one that uses its power to do nothing but extract CO2 from the atmosphere.
Then you take the hydrogen and the CO2 and make dimethyl ether. There you have a fuel that’s stable and wont cause massive explosions like the circa the Hindenburg. Dimethyl ether is easy to store in liquid form and can replace diesel fuel and aviation fuel.
You can also use that same hydrogen and CO2 to make methanol. Another stable fuel that wont cause an explosion like the Hindenburg. Methanol is easy to store in liquid form and can directly replace gasoline.
If you build several power plants that do nothing but dedicate the power they produce to make the components for these fuels, you could make enough fuel to replace all existing fuels with fuels that are 100% carbon neutral. No, you dont have to use natural gas to make the hydrogen with this system! You can just make it from water because you have more than enough power to get the job done.
Whats the down side to this setup? Well you have to build several molten salt thorium nuclear power plants. Its ok though, molten salt thorium nuclear power is 100% safe and cant ever have a nuclear accident like we saw at Chernobyl and Fukushima. Oh, then there is the nuclear waste problem, again its ok, because the molten salt thorium reactor produces less than 1% of the amount of nuclear waste that a uranium reactor does. So there is much less waste. Sadly the waste is much more radioactive than the waste from a uranium power plant. The good news is that there is much less of it and its only radioactive for 250 years versus the 250,000 years for the waste from a uranium power plant.
So tell me guys, where are the problems with this setup and please dont say its with the thorium. The US ran a molten salt thorium reactor for over 10 years before the funding was pulled and it was shut down. So we know it works!
Sorry for the confusing sentence, its hard to edit on this tablet
It is not. It has very low energy density, and storage requires large volumes, high pressures, ridiculously low temperatures, or adsorption onto heavy, metal-hydride complexes. Hydrogen sucks as a vehicle fuel.
Even the Hindenburg, which had to carry 7 million cubic feet of the stuff around everywhere it went, did not use hydrogen as fuel. It ran on diesel, even though doing so meant that and it had to vent about 1 million cubic feet of hydrogen during a typical voyage to compensate for the weight lost to diesel consumption. They were literally blowing off the “ideal fuel for powering vehicles” because it sucked so bad as a vehicle fuel.
They are still loosing energy in the conversion process. The initial energy has to come from somewhere.
““Hydrogen is an ideal fuel for powering vehicles, buildings and storing renewable energy on the grid,” said Dai. ”
Uh, doesn’t this sort of impeach anything else he might say in the article?
The main problem for using hydrogen as a fuel source for internal combustion engines (ICE) is how it is stored in the vehicle, not how it is produced. Electrolysis of water by batteries in a vehicle could not produce enough hydrogen to support the running of an ICE using water as the hydrogen storage medium because the ICE will burn the hydrogen faster than it can be produced. Some other storage medium for hydrogen is therefore a necessity in order to meet the demand of the ICE.
There is absolutely nothing new or revolutionary in this study. The amount of energy required to produce hydrogen by splitting water molecules is the same no matter the source of energy. If you want to produce ‘Green’ hydrogen without burning natural gas and producing CO2, use the energy from a nuclear power plant instead. I should also point out that the combustion of hydrogen produces water vapour, not just water, which is a more potent GHG than CO2. Also, using air, instead of pure oxygen, for combustion, occurs at a high enough temperature that it produces nitrous oxides and other ‘pollutants’, even disregarding the lubricants in the engine which are also burned.
The comparison to fuel cells is a red herring. Fuel cells produce electricity by oxidizing a fuel using oxygen or some other oxidizing agent through a chemical reaction, not the production of hydrogen for use in an ICE – vehicles operating using fuel cells use an electric motor to provide propulsion.
It really pains me to see such lazy research being conducted and promoted by universities in order to pursue the ‘warmist’ agenda. They are retracing ground which has already been extensively covered in the past 30-50 years by companies which have recognized the commercial value of the technology, some of which has already been patented.
That’s handy. I have just developed a AAA battery tree which produces completely organic batteries.
Well, there sure is a lot of hydrogen in outer space. All you have to do is such it down (/sarc)
From Stephen Mosher’s post:
“Read the comments above. Note the snark. Note the dismissive tone of the commenters.
Note that few address the real science in this piece.”
Generating hydrogen by electrolysis is a means of converting electricity into a potential fuel (hydrogen). If that hydrogen can be safely & efficiently transported, stored and converted into an useable form of energy, it could be a critical component of an energy storage technique. The method described in the article, if it can be scaled, does indeed represent a more econonomical electrolysis alternative to hydrogen generation. That is a factual summary of the article.
However, the implication of the article, as with many others of its ilk, is that practical “green energy” technology is just around the corner, as evidenced by the article’s quote from Standford chemistry professor Dai: “Hydrogen is an ideal fuel for powering vehicles, buildings and storing renewable energy on the grid.”.
So here we have a quote from a Stanford scientist, especially as used in the context of the article, to make it sound like the widespread use of hydrogen as fuel is imminent. Professor Dai’s statement is arguable. As used in the article, it is an important element of what is really a propaganda piece.
I too hope for “an ideal fuel for powering vehicles, buildings and storing renewable energy on the grid”, but propaganda won’t get us there.
suck it down
“Hydrogen is spontaneously explosive when released to air, it is difficult to store, and it corrodes or embrittles metals. It is extremely dangerous as a transport fuel: vehicles would be traveling bombs and almost every crash would provide an explosion.”
Claim: almost every crash would provide an explosion.
Almost every crash? really? well, no.
Still work to do. don’t underestimate engineers.. and DAFS before you make wild claims.
crashes can cause leaks, sometimes ignition, sometimes fires. explosions?
http://www.sae.org/events/gim/presentations/2012/hennesseynhtsa.pdf
“Hydrogen is an ideal fuel for powering vehicles…”
Hydrogen exists as a gas at room temperature/pressure, Gasses are far from ideal for powering automobiles. Liquids are way more practical.
Some interesting reading from a while back.
interesting perspective on the hindenburg.
RIF
http://www.aps.org/policy/reports/occasional/upload/fuelcell.pdf
“The “Hindenburg complex” is a non-problem however. A study years ago showed that the Hindenburg fire was caused by the coating on the fabric skin of the craft. Hydrogen is so light that it will dissipate rapidly in air, so that there is only a small area around a leak where the hydrogen concentration is within the flammability limit.”
Yup. thanks for being an engineer.
For once, I agree with Steven Mosher. Doing it with cheap material and at low voltage is a breakthrough. Whether it ever comes to anything is another matter, I accept that, but that does not mean that it should not be acknowledged that the guys who did this just might have achieved something significant.
Steven Mosher – My snark is backed up with real-world facts. See posts above.
“I’ll snark if I want to.
Pls note: platinum has been available for decades. Higher voltage has been available for decades. Yet none of the FG engineers could do anything with it. In other words, as far as practical applications is concerned, nothing has changed.”
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the comment about snark is an inside joke. you see I once got a mail complaining about a snarky comment. I found that odd since snark was so prevalent here.
I’d suggest an open mind ( that is what skepticism is ) WRT practical applications.
Matt says:
August 22, 2014 at 7:54 am
“Splitting water to make hydrogen requires no fossil fuels and emits no greenhouse gases.” – Soooooo, they get the energy from unicorn farts?
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This would be a good use for wind / solar power. There is also nuclear power. So no, no unicorn farts here.
Gamecock’s Law: “As an online discussion of energy grows longer, the probability of thorium fanboys showing up approaches 1.”
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Baronstone says:
August 22, 2014 at 9:24 am
So, the answer to peoples problems is simple to solve. A molten salt thorium nuclear power plant that uses its power to do nothing but produce hydrogen and another one that uses its power to do nothing but extract CO2 from the atmosphere.
. . . .
So tell me guys, where are the problems with this setup and please dont say its with the thorium. The US ran a molten salt thorium reactor for over 10 years before the funding was pulled and it was shut down. So we know it works!
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“The US ran a molten salt thorium reactor for over 10 years . . . .”
This is false. If you are going to be a fanboy, at least learn the facts.
The link to Stanford University doesn’t lead anywhere immediately useful.
The Stanford report is here:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/august/splitter-clean-fuel-082014.html
The nature abstract here:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140822/ncomms5695/full/ncomms5695.html
I can’t actually see any figures quoting the yield (efficiency). Need to know.
Precious metals (platinum, palladium) are already used in catalytic converters, so I don’t see why cost and availabilty should matter any more or less in fuel cells. Nickel is cheaper but also has some toxicity issues for those that enjoy being frightened by chemicals.
What they are claiming is that the hydrogen overvoltage (voltage required for “splitting” hydrogen from the water molecule at the cathode) of Ni metal / Ni oxide is closer to that of platinum which is considerably lower than commercially viable metals for large scale industrial processes like lead.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/84265
It’s a potential efficiency improvement but as others have pointed out there’s no magic energy gain, you’ll always use more energy producing the hydrogen than you can get from burning (oxidizing) it.
As far as the sodium hypochlorite production goes these kind of units have been around for a long time, perhaps a small efficiency increase could be gleaned from their research, eventually.
http://www.miox.com/products/on-site-generation
Oh Dear, not again …
http://www.waterboost.co.uk/waterfuel/site/about.asp
How great is this one? Every conversion of energy has a net loss. I.E., Converting A to B results in B having less energy (potential) that what A had. Thus, convert energy to a AAA battery and then convert the AAA battery energy to H2 and O2 then convert H2 to O2 to energy that is converted to mechanical energy. It’s like Zeno’s paradox one supposes since you’ll never run out of energy.
richardscourtney says:
August 22, 2014 at 9:24 am
Unmentionable:
Your post at August 22, 2014 at 9:09 am says
“public realized that they cost about $50 a mile”
Depends how many fare-paying passengers you have and whether the economy of scale is developed to drive the costs down. The battery change for a Gen 2 Prius is now about half the cost they originally were. What’s the mileage of a conventional bus with the weight of 50 people on it? Not to good I suspect. Economics of scale would probably close any such gap rather quickly. How many blew up? None I bet.
Your post is a masterpiece of misdirection. The above article is about a supposedly novel method for electrolysis of water to provide hydrogen for use as a viable and economical fuel. Your post does not alter the fact that the proposed electrolysis does not provide hydrogen for use as a viable and economical fuel.
—
Misdirection? Ridiculous twaddle. It was a response directed at the specific criticism of the ECONOMICS of the application of a nascent fuel technology to mass transportation. You didn’t like the answer, I get that, but nothing you said alters the validity of the points made.
I’m glad you acknowledged your a lack of data to support the assertion that every accident will lead to an explosion, which renders it baseless twaddle to. Apparently you suppose this vehicle model was registered to operate on the road with no national standards testing to ascertain its fitness for the road and public health and safety? The fact that it was used for fair-paying passengers should be a bit of a hint that extensive testing, and then some, was performed on such a vehicle, and that it passed its certification standards testing.
If you want to sustain some claim it was unsafe then the onus is on you to demonstrate the national and local authorities acted improperly and endangered public safety. A cheap shot at the technology doesn’t cut it, when it was the economics being discussed.
Feel as ‘masterfully misdirected’ as you like, your protests of that sounds ostentatious and silly to me. I responded separately to the article elsewhere, above, and I’m very glad to see the novel chemistry and unknown science which it represents. The point of a discussion is to hear the discussion in its width and depth, not to try and pretend valid points don’t count.
You’re also supposed to impart knowledge, or constructive insight, which you didn’t.