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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[Duplicate post. Also, please use only one screen identity. Thanks. ~mod.]
Aren’t there other uses for this “new” catalyst other than hydrogen production?
Stephen Rasey says, in part:
August 22, 2014 at 5:11 pm
. . .
“However, to run a fuel cell, you desire 100% oxygen as well as the hydrogen. So you need to store and transfer pure oxygen as well as hydrogen under pressure. In the scheme of things, not a big issue, but it shouldn’t escape notice, either.”
No, that is not so. A fuel cell, for example, employed to provide electrical current to operate an electric motor powering a motor vehicle, would simply use the oxygen from the ambient air to form water vapor. I’ve seen such vehicles operate. Storage of a sufficient volume of hydrogen on board to give the vehicle a practical range is the problem. Hydrogen does not liquify under compression at normal temperatures, as other fuel gasses do. So the short range of the vehicle before needing to refuel is the rub.
The report was funny in that it does the obligatory bow to the evil CO2 but ignores the fact that hydrogen when combusted yields water vapour (the 800 pound gorilla in the room that none of the AGW crowd want to discuss). That and transportation is not where you will find hydrogen practical barring a few more breakthroughs in storage etc.
Thanks for the link to http://cellaenergy.com/ – AJB says:August 22, 2014 at 2:50 pm. Years ago I had heard about using ammonia to store hydrogen but never saw much about it. Interesting angle to the problem.
So in a nutshell this may address 2 out of the 6+ serious issues with hydrogen. Decent enough but a long way to go. Storing a carrier (electricity or hydrogen) is a very difficult task to do in a cost effective, efficient, safe & long term storage scenario.
Just because there are other issues doesn’t mean this isn’t important but I really do wish all these scientists would quit wrapping themselves up in the AGW meme. It is really worn out it’s welcome and I think a lot here wrote off the whole idea when they read those parts. Understandable.
It’s those darn morphic fields!
[The mods cite this as proof you have complete mental control over many other writers worldwide, modifying their thoughts and influencing their decisions before they type them. That’s fine. But now, about your numerous spelling errors and typo’s ….. 8<) .mod]
Well how about some science? The Electrochemical potential of H2O is 1.51V – so if everything goes right and your fresh alkaline is about 1.65 volts or so – very good. If there are no other losses that is about 91.5% efficient.
richardscourtney says:
August 22, 2014 at 10:54 am
Unmentionable:
Your rant at August 22, 2014 at 10:02 am is too long for me to quote all of it so I provide this link to it so people can see what I am answering. And my quotations from it in this post are the totality of your post I am answering.
—
I doubt a more contorted blow-hard level of unadulterated misdirection I’ve read in a while. I must admit you have the advantage on me of formal coaching and accusatory debate malpractice under your belt, to be so blather-adept.
Before you butted-in with diatribe of accusatory actual misdirection of the topic, I was responding ingenuously to a commenter who was criticising the operating economics of buses that were then in operation. I made the entirely valid counterpoint that a bus that gets $50/mile must still be compared to the mileage of a conventional bus with fifty fare paying passengers on it and its mileage, to determine its economic viability. This is what I responded to in its entirety:
__
klem says:
August 22, 2014 at 8:59 am
I think they used to run hydrogen powered buses in British Columbia. Everything was going along fine until the public realized that they cost about $50 a mile to run. Even the notorious BC greenies thought that saving the planet wasn’t worth $50 a mile. !
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/22/a-new-twist-on-an-old-grade-school-science-project/#comment-1715052
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Now just because you tend to auto-discombobulate around internal knee jerking and gainsaying and lampooning other people’s comments, this does not make something uneconomical to operate, or not a viable transportation option. It makes no economic difference at all whether the conversion factor is at a technical threshold of efficiency which rows your boat. The inefficiency of conversion is accepted because the fuel itself is sufficiently efficient to make it up for it as a viable economic operating vehicle.
That’s not complicated to grasp for a mildly disinterested mind, and it is an entirely economically valid.
In the end the economics of the fares paid and what the market will bare is the measure which matters. I can tell you from prosaic experience that $1/mile is not unusual in a taxi. People pay that 24/7/365 where I am and the affordability of more than $1/mile is successfully borne by the market. In fact demand is high, which is another measure of economic viability. $1 / mile / passenger equates to “$50 a mile”, which are the same economics as the buses that were being criticised on affordability grounds.
So on economic grounds this is not necessarily something to dismiss with spasmodic knee-jerks given that price point is already present, plus the busses were only being operated at a very small scale. The expansion of new technologies does introduce economies of scale which lower cost over time of a given vehicle and I gave a valid modern example of it in my original comment.
But your tangential tirade which if harnessed could power a trans-Atlantic balloon flight and scare the high altitude record to boot, ends with an simply laughable appeal to the toxicity of nickel. haha! For real! I guess you never heard of nickel-wound guitar strings. Why don’t you appeal with heartfelt conviction to a relevant national regulator about this naughty nickel contamination and see if they take your phoney-baloney ‘concerns’ seriously. I predict they laugh your butt back out onto the street. 😀
Talk about grasping at straws!
Next time you decide to gallivant in and blazing away with accusatory tirades make sure you didn’t load the blanks into your peashooter again. 😀
Steven Mosher says:
August 22, 2014 at 8:25 am
the research claims two things
1. the use of non-precious metals
2. splitting at a low voltage
12 volts and a couple of pencils worked for me in Junior High School 40+ years ago.
Next up will be someone claiming that a new fangled thing called ‘the wheel’ will revolutionize transportation.
At best this ‘breakthru’ is a small incremental improvement on previous work. Of course those looking for ‘startup seed/grant money’ will tout this as something else.
Kind of like a certain Phd spouting off about how a certain university needed grant money to help the chinese to frack for natural gas when the Chinese already own considerable portions of US natural gas interests.
jimmaine says:
August 22, 2014 at 8:00 am
Huh. One of the first articles in a long time that doesn’t contain the term “model” anywhere.
Wonder what I need to do to run my 383 1969 Camaro on Hydrogen…and will it impact the torque? 🙂
——————————————————————————————————————
New intake & throttle body $300-500, spider and injectors $800, turbo or supercharger of your choice. You might be able to get 600HP out of it, but I doubt on the low end. I don’t think hydrogen goes “boom” as well as gasoline with an octane booster and an ethanol eater, and needs the RPMs to produce. But, give’em time.
Oh, and new fuel tank and all lines.
If this wasn’t so ridiculous it would be funny. I’m 70 years old, and when I was about 9 my buddies and I would make small explosions using H and O2 that we manufactured using a flashlight battery, two lengths of bell wire, two test tubes and water to which we added table salt. Just google “Browns Gas” for crying out loud.
I find it a bit icky that so many people focused on the article’s unnecessary spin attachment of C02 gas, then water product, as the main point of objection. Yes, both those things are quite unfortunate, and unnecessary. And yes, you’re strictly completely right, water is indeed an evil blight and we simply can not encourage the promotion of a fuel-efficiency development and eco trade-off that creates even more of that diabolical molecule.
Take the high-road or be seen as an unthinking mass who’s accomplishment of having rightly mastered the art of seeing through the green baloney is tripping up and merely embracing complex cynical cheap-shot habitual rejection-ism.
3/10 Can do better.
Unmentionable:
I note your post at August 22, 2014 at 9:12 pm which attempts – and fails – to excuse your earlier untrue rant at me together with an attempt to excuse your untrue rant at klem. And I also note your failed attempt to excuse your untrue rants at mikeishere, too.
So, I have given you the courtesy of acknowledging your latest untrue rant at me. I write to say that I will not give you that courtesy if you aim another of your untrue rants at me: I will ignore it.
Richard
That would be best Richard, sorry you can’t tell the difference between your facts and your fictions, but I appreciate your note and more civil but overdue approach.
And unused in the 30 years since, because they weigh a ton and have to be heated to 500F to operate. Not good qualities for a vehicle fuel tank. Hydrogen sucks as vehicle fuel. The only efficient way to use hydrogen for portable energy storage involves its deuterium isotope and a fission primary.
“Splitting water to make hydrogen requires no fossil fuels and emits no greenhouse gases.” This statement is highly misleading. Splitting water requires enerergy. It can be done without using fossil fuels and without emitting greenhouse gases only so long as you have access to sufficient non fossil fuel energy sources.
Friends:
I draw attention to untrue accusations of incivility from those posts have been uncivil, for example the post of Unmentionable at August 22, 2014 at 11:37 pm.
It seems that some people (e.g. Mosher, Phil., Unmentionable) think pointing out their errors is impolite.
Richard
Alternatively it’s you (and you know it) Mr. quintessence of passive-aggressive, who appeals to a crowd of friends the innocence of the not so credibly innocent. I don’t have that luxury, but if I had it, I sure wouldn’t use it.
Do unto others … produces incredibly productive interaction. 😉
“Splitting water to make hydrogen requires no fossil fuels and emits no greenhouse gases.”
I agree with Mike Trembley on this. Since when is water vapour not a greenhouse gas? If anything burns in a hydrogen engine it is the stupid. The main problem with using hydrogen as a fuel in an internal combustion engine is the fact that it has a low octane rating. It pops, not burns. At a modest concentration it pops the cylinder heads off. There will be no hydrogen retrofit for the 383 Camero. Hydrogen is fine for a fuel cell.
It is fine for the single cylinder engine developed by Garth Foxcroft which recycles the water internally, thus producing no NOx and no H2O. No one has picked that up yet.
Unmentionable:
I love the smell of a burning troll in the morning.
I suggest returning to the subject of the thread.
Richard
Another accusation, didn’t see that coming. Dismissing alternate views with that safe little cop-out is deflection at its crudest. I never strayed from topic but to deal with you. What you smell is your irresistible burning desire for one more snide remark, because we were done two comment cycles back. I already moved on. Now it’s your turn to do the same.
I’m more impressed with the students of Ohio State U than these Stanford scientists. The students made the fastest electric car (top speed 322 mph) powered by ordinary C battery. That’s a creative way of using flashlight battery.
Reblogged this on Maley's Energy Blog and commented:
This why we don’t have to worry about Peak Oil: at some point, price and necessity drive innovation*. It has been that way since the days of Thomas Malthus.
*Government cannot and will not mandate innovation. They may be helpful in funding basic science, but as currently executed government subsides and maintains the status quo. That works counter to the creative destruction necessary for transformational change.
Steven Mosher says:
August 22, 2014 at 8:25 am
don’t under estimate engineers. many above do.
Don’t underestimate idiots. Many engineers do.
Dihydrogenmonoxide THE greenhouse gas.
g3ellis says:
August 23, 2014 at 6:05 am
“If you make something idiot proof, someone will just make a better idiot.”