Several major automakers are betting on hydrogen fuel cell cars as the non-polluting future of personal transportation. Indeed both Toyota and Honda will begin selling fuel cell cars in the US some time next year.
Fuel cell cars are electric cars that get their power from hydrogen fuel cells, which are devices that combine hydrogen gas with oxygen to produce water and create electricity in the process. If fuel cell cars are to become widely used, there will have to be plentiful and economic sources of hydrogen.
There is already a large hydrogen industry, but at present, a process known as steam reforming, which generates hydrogen from natural gas, produces most of it. The problem with this is that carbon dioxide is a byproduct of the process, which would make hydrogen-powered cars much less green.
The carbon-free way to produce hydrogen is by electrolysis – breaking water into its constituent parts of hydrogen and oxygen. Currently, electrolysis is energy intensive and requires costly precious metal catalysts like platinum, so it isn’t used much for mass-producing hydrogen.
Recently, some scientists at Stanford have demonstrated a new way of doing electrolysis that uses low-cost electrocatalysts based on iron and nickel. The required energy is low enough that they were able to split water in the laboratory using a single AAA battery.
If this low-cost, low-energy catalyst can be used on an industrial scale and is shown to be sufficiently stable and long lasting, it could be the answer to establishing a viable, completely green hydrogen-based transportation technology.
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Stanford scientists develop water splitter that runs on ordinary AAA battery
Photo, posted September 10, 2014, courtesy of Mike Mozart via Flickr.
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Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
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