A New Method For Easy (And Clean) Conversion Of Water Into Hydrogen Energy

Hydrogen is often hailed as one of the most promising elements to replace polluting fossil fuels in the future. The long-term optimism is based both on its potentially boundless supply, and its wide range of industrial and energy applications — from car battery cells to manufacturing ammonia.

But turning potential energy into viable energy still requires scientific breakthroughs. Hydrogen is mostly found in water, but the chemical process to transform it into fuel is still inefficient. So it is commonly made through natural gasses like methane — a more polluting and unsustainable process that entails releasing carbon dioxide, defeating the initial purpose.

A new study run by researchers from several universities — including Oregon State and the University of Zurich — has used advanced technological tools to increase the efficiency of converting water into hydrogen, bringing us one step closer to the goal of abundant “green” hydrogen. Here’s a rundown of their research:

• Making hydrogen from water (or “water-splitting”) is inefficient because of the low-performance electrocatalysts used to facilitate the process. Part of the reaction has high “overpotential,” which means that driving a chemical reaction by applying electricity requires a higher voltage than theoretically expected. Electrocatalysts are critical to lower this overpotential.
• Producing efficient electrocatalysts has always been a strenuous task for scientists because there is little information about how they evolve during the reactions. In the study, the scientists used advanced tools to study one of them — strontium iridate (SrIrO3) — and understand why its efficiency rate is 1,000 times higher than the common commercial catalyst, iridium oxide (IrO₂).
• The study led to a deeper understanding of what makes strontium iridate such a great catalyst. Their study points to the critical role of chemical processes like lattice oxygen activation and coupled ionic diffusion in the evolution of its microstructure. The study opens new possibilities to design better catalysts for water-splitting, improving the efficiency of the whole reaction and making mass-producing green hydrogen a real possibility for the future.

ENGIE EXPERT EYE

It seems like a small step but Pierre Olivier, research engineer at the Hydrogen Lab at ENGIE Lab CRIGEN, tells us why it is crucial:

"This study is about the evolution of the microstructure of a type of catalyst used for the production of hydrogen by electrolysis of water. Understanding how this microstructure evolves (at the atomic scale) is fundamental to optimizing the catalysts in question, and thus significantly increase the efficiency of converting (renewable) electricity into hydrogen. As such, this work is very interesting. Still, there is still a long way to go for this understanding to be "usable" for the design of catalysts that can be integrated into industrial electrolysis systems."