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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latecommer2014:
At August 22, 2014 at 10:21 am you ask me
Doug, it is good to hear from you.
I finished the (sadly unsuccessful) project and moved to a home on shore over a decade ago.
If that is your experience of achieved MPG and cost then I assume it is right. But I fail to see how your experience relates to the above article. Importantly, the article is about electrolysis providing hydrogen for storage and later use but, as you say, your system has no hydrogen storage.
Richard
Sal Minella @8:26 asks:
From Patrick Bedard’s classic column:
http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/the-case-for-nuke-cars-its-called-hydrogen
who needs a battery, seems all you need is 1.5volts
Speaking of fuel cells, here’s a new one that runs on natural gas (hit page-down five times once there) (story is from June 26, 2014):
http://www.dailytech.com/Microsofts+New+Fuel+Cell+Partner+is+Ready+to+Blow+Away+the+Bloom+Box/article36118.htm
Robert Bissett says:
August 22, 2014 at 10:32 am
Fossil fuel? All signs point to abiotic.
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Nonsense. The chirality of petroleum trumps all your signs.
Chirality
Biogenic: The presense of optical activity in petroleum indicates biological origin, because biological compounds are known to exhibit left-handed chirality.
Abiogenic: The idea that optical activity implies biology is a relic dating from the founding work of Louis Pasteur, who first explained the polarization of light in wine in terms of chirality. The study of stereochemistry has revealed that many natural systems, including hydrocarbons in primordial meteorites, possess an imbalance of chirality that results in optical activity. Petroleum may have right- or left-handed optical activity, which contrasts with biological systems’ exclusive left-handed chirality. This distinction has led to chirality being regarded as an abiomarker among proponents of the abiogenic theory.
Note to all you people who think you can make useful hydrogen from PV or wind turbines: hydrogen has to be compressed to be storable and to be useful. So your PV/WT will also have to power a pump to compress it.
Don’t knock cheaper catalysts just because the inventor thinks of the wrong application.
Not all inventors are good businessmen.
Forget hydrogen cars and look at cheaper hydrogen.
I see this as a way to take random or surplus surge electricity production from windmills, tidal and even solar farms, and store that potential energy as hydrogen for when its really needed by burning it to stabilize the local grid during peak demand moments.
This is in the same category as the hydro lake pump solutions that use two lakes to surge water downhill during peak electrical demand generating electricity as needed, and then pumping the same water back up hill at night to resupply the reservoir of potential energy for tomorrow.
Yes there is a net loss in energy efficiency, however the ability to store the H for burning on demand makes these (solar, wind, tidal) sources of incremental random power useful for peak surges in demand.
This article immediately reminded me of the old “cold fusion” news (now rebranded to LENR). Nickel or Palladium electrodes were always key, and the words “not fully understood” always came up in the section attempting to explain observed effects (and why they were so difficult to reproduce). Is this cold fusion 2.0?
mikeishere says:
August 22, 2014 at 9:18 am
Unmentionable says:August 22, 2014 at 8:58 am ” We still fly though because it has incrementally developed into the safest form of travel.”
Well that depends on whether the denominator is utility or time. Time wise, commercial air travel has about 10 times more fatalities per million hours than car travel. It is just that we spend far more than that 10X amount of time in a car than a plane because you cannot fly to most of the places you need to go such as a grocery store.
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How about distance as the denominator, since this is about travel, and speed of travel reduces time.
If they just add some ‘Potassium Hydroxide’ they will make another ‘Outstanding Discovery’.
(Sarc)
Unmentionable says: “How about distance as the denominator…”
How about what? I drew a distinction between judging risk by utility or by time. Utility in this instance is distance and time is what we all have a limited amount of. Both are valid considerations.
M Courtney:
You make one good point but overlook another when you say at August 22, 2014 at 11:31 am
The real difficulty is not “cheaper hydrogen” because a water gas shift will always provide cheaper hydrogen than electrolysis of water.
The real problem is the lack of a method for cheap and effective storage of large quantities of hydrogen.
Hydrogen corrodes and embritles metals. It is costly to compress and difficult to contain because it consists of small molecules: air tight is not hydrogen tight. And hydrogen is explosive.
Hydrogen can be stored in large quantities because we did it at the Coal Research Establishment for use in the hydrogenation plant when working to develop the LSE project for producing syncrude (i.e. synthetic crude oil) from coal. But losses are significant and hazards are real. We enclosed the hydrogenation plant in a containment wall so any explosion would blow up and not out, but what goes up comes down and Tewkesbury would have suffered.
I personally found a solution to the embritlement issue for 310 stainless steel at high temperature. But that was a specialist application for e.g. expansion joints coping with high temperature reducing gas generated in a Topping Cycle power plant. It would not be viable for normal temperature uses.
Find a solution to the storage issue and only then consider uses for large quantities of hydrogen.
Richard
“emissions-free device that uses an ordinary AAA battery to produce hydrogen by water electrolysis”
Where exactly do the batteries come from, how are they disposed of, and how do they get charged?
Col Mosby says:
August 22, 2014 at 8:05 am
As I recall, hydrogen in your car’s fuel tank must be continuously bled off. How much from a population of 250 million vehicles does that amount to going into the atmosphere and what would be the effect of all that hydrogen?
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I for one would not want to live over an underground car garage.
Can you say boom?
“chlorine gas” ! WWI here we come. DOHS will love this … probably want to quarantine Stanford U. before bombing it, but will miss and hit Google instead.
Dude: 2NaCl + 2H2O -> Cl2 + H2 + 2NaOH
anode end: 2Cl^- (aq) -> Cl2 (g) + 2e^-
cathode end: 2H^+ (aq) + 2e^- -> H2 (g)
{from my old chemistry text]
Nope, not an engineer. A bullshit artist. You routinely conflate the two, if doing so fits your message. It always fits your methods.
The Hindenburg was designed as a helium airship. Zeppelin’s engineers designed it as a helium airship despite the fact that helium was a less efficient lifiting gas, despite the fact that helium was far more expensive than hydrogen, and despite the fact that the only significant sources of helium were controlled by the US, who treated it as a strategic material and were likely to cut German Zeppelin’s helium supply.
Why would Zeppelin’s engineers choose to burden their design with less efficent, more expensive, less reliable helium? Because Zeppelin’s engineers had the experience of two dozen catastrophic losses of hydrogen ships under their belt. And BTW, those earlier ships used a different envelop technology than that which has been asserted was the cause of the ignition of the Hindenburg, And those ships burned just fine, which is what prompted the engineering decision to design the Hindenburg to use helium. The Zeppelin engineers had the “Hindenburg complex” before the Hindenburg made it on to the drawing board, though they would have referred to it as the “R101, Dixmude, Roma, Akron, R-38, LZ-104, SL-9, LZ-53, LZ-69, SL-6 etc, etc, etc, complex” and thought of that “complex” as good engineering sense in response to the demonstrated propensity of hydrogen ships to burn, explode, explode and burn, or burn and explode.
Later, the engineering design decision to use helium in the Hindenburg was overridden by the pragmatic operational considerations that the engineering design decision to use helium had been made in spite of. Hindenburg was reworked to be filled with hydrogen, and it burned just like the rest of them.
BTW, it was those same Zeppelin engineers who tested hydrogen as a vehicle fuel, and found that it sucked so bad as a vehicle fuel that they decided to blow off a million cubic feet of it every trip, rather than use it for fuel. And they came to that conclusion even though some of the principle drawbacks for hydrogen’s use as a ground transport fuel (low density, storage volume) were actually benefits to their application.
Here’s a pdf that has a bit more info about efficiency of water electrolysis in general.
http://www.electrochemsci.org/papers/vol7/7043314.pdf
mikeishere says:
August 22, 2014 at 8:38 am
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I was thinking more along the lines of the water heater rockets.
Hmmm… where will all the water come from…? Wait up! That’ll solve the rising sea level problem.
I’m having trouble seeing any negatives here.
” Steven Mosher says:August 22, 2014 at 8:25 am ”
In this instance I agree with Mosh. Hindenwhat? Have you ever heard of hydride tanks? Stores hydrogen in gaseous form and can be shot with incendiary bullets without exploding. Been available since the 1980s.
There are still lots of engineering problems to solve but the vast majority of comments here are just embarrassing.
Some people mentioned freezing as a problem for the exhaust of a H2 fuel cell car – well a gasoline car with a catalyst will emit CO2 and H2O and not much else so there you have H2O as well.
A different problem with fuel cell cars and freezing is that they use a membrane that gets destroyed when the water in the fuel cell freezes. I don’t know whether that problem has been overcome; it is a problem for the use of fuel cell cars in climates where temperatures can drop under 0 deg C / 32 F. Generally car components must withstand an enormous temperature range before the industry even considers using them for a mass produced vehicle. Watery fuel cells don’t do that well AFAIK.
richardscourtney, I’d use zeolites.
They won’t degrade.
They will leak but so what… it’s free hydrogen form a windmill and I’m looking at smoothing the output. I would put them in a ventilated place.
It really is just an engineering problem which can probably be solved through Google.
Here, I haven’t read in depth but a quick search came up with:
http://ergobalance.blogspot.co.uk/2006/09/zeolites-to-store-hydrogen_08.html
DirkH:
Thankyou for your post at August 22, 2014 at 11:59 am which says
It is a good paper which I had not seen and will keep for reference. In the context of this thread, I note that its Introduction says
Which, of course, supports what I said in my above post at August 22, 2014 at 8:56 am.
Richard
Mosher: “Read the comments above. Note the snark. Note the dismissive tone of the commenters.”
Annoyed that your style is so easy to copy?