hydrogen economy

Fuel From Wind And Water | Earth Wise

February 21, 2023 By EarthWise 1 Comment

Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and it can be used as a fuel to run cars, trains, and even airplanes. Using it produces no harmful emissions. However, to date, the way it is economically produced is not clean and green. It is made from natural gas and leaves behind lots of carbon dioxide.

Around the world there are many projects working on so-called green hydrogen. Producing hydrogen by splitting water into its component elements is called electrolysis and produces only oxygen as a waste product. The problem with electrolysis is that it takes prodigious amounts of energy and therefore is very expensive.

A new project taking place in north Texas hopes to create the country’s first large-scale producer of green hydrogen. The project is building a 900-megawatt wind farm along with a 500-megawatt solar farm. The 1.4 gigawatts of total production capacity is more energy than the city of Austin consumes. That energy will be used to produce 200,000 kilograms of hydrogen a day.

This project is among the largest proposed green hydrogen projects in the U.S. There are green hydrogen proposals in Europe, Australia, Africa, and the Middle East that range from 10 GW to 67 GW.

The Texas project, being developed in partnership by Air Products and AES, has been enabled by government support from the Inflation Reduction Act.

There are a few thousand hydrogen-powered cars, boats, and trains but without substantial, cost-effective hydrogen infrastructure, the market is very limited. Subsidizing the development of the necessary infrastructure is essential if there is any real chance to create the long-imagined hydrogen economy.

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Texas Project Will Use Wind to Make Fuel Out of Water

Photo, posted June 5, 2005, courtesy of City Transport Info via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

New York And Green Hydrogen | Earth Wise

August 23, 2021 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

In July, outgoing New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced plans for the state to explore the potential role of green hydrogen as part of New York’s decarbonization strategy.

Green hydrogen is hydrogen produced using renewable energy, such as wind, solar, and hydro power. While hydrogen itself is a carbon-free fuel, most of the hydrogen produced today is made with a process called natural gas reforming which has byproducts of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. As a result, the environmental benefits of using hydrogen are largely lost. Hydrogen is the most plentiful element in the universe but extracting it for use as a fuel is not easy.

Green hydrogen is obtained by splitting water molecules into their constituent hydrogen and oxygen parts. In principle, oxygen is the only byproduct of the process. The main drawback of electrolysis, as this process is called, is that it is energy intensive as well as being expensive. But if that energy comes from renewable sources, then it is a clean process.

New York’s announcement is that the state will collaborate with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and join two hydrogen-focused organizations to inform state decision-making, as well as make $12.5 million in funding available for long duration energy storage techniques and demonstration projects that may include green hydrogen.

Green hydrogen has the potential to decarbonize many of the more challenging sectors of the economy. Hydrogen is a storable, transportable fuel that can replace fossil fuels in many applications. Many experts believe that the so-called hydrogen economy could be the future of the world’s energy systems. For that to happen, green hydrogen will need to be plentiful, sustainable, and inexpensive.

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New York announces initiatives to explore green hydrogen for decarbonization

Photo, posted October 26, 2019, courtesy of Pierre Blache via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Getting Value From Plastic Waste | Earth Wise

November 30, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

To date, the world has produced more than five billion tons of plastic and is making more all the time. Based on the way things are currently done, most of that will end up in landfills or in the natural environment. By 2050, the amount of plastic is expected to exceed 13 billion tons. This is one of the world’s biggest environmental problems.

Recently, an international collaboration by universities and institutions in the UK, China, and Saudi Arabia has developed a method of converting plastic waste into hydrogen gas and high-value solid carbon.

The technique was achieved with a new type of catalysis that uses microwaves to activate catalyst particles that effectively strip hydrogen from plastic polymers. The work was recently published in the journal Nature Catalysis and details how the researchers mixed mechanically pulverized plastic particles with a microwave-susceptor catalyst of iron oxide and aluminum oxide. That mixture was then subjected to microwave treatment and yielded a large volume of hydrogen gas and a residue of carbonaceous material, most of which was identified as carbon nanotubes.

The process is more rapid than most methods for dealing with plastic waste and can extract over 97% of the hydrogen in plastic without producing any carbon dioxide emissions.

The new method represents an attractive potential solution to the problem of plastic waste. Instead of polluting the planet, plastics could become a valuable feedstock for producing clean hydrogen fuel as well as valuable carbon materials. Proponents of the so-called hydrogen economy have continued to seek a green and economical way to produce hydrogen. This new work might be just what they are looking for.

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Turning plastic waste into hydrogen and high-value carbons

Photo, posted April 21, 2007, courtesy of Redwin Law via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Generating Hydrogen From Poor-Quality Water | Earth Wise

September 8, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Hydrogen could be the basis of a complete energy system. It could be stored and transported and could be used to power vehicles and to generate electricity in power plants. Proponents of the so-called hydrogen economy contend that hydrogen is the best solution to the global energy challenge. But among the challenges faced by a hydrogen economy is the development of an efficient and green method to produce hydrogen.

The primary carbon-free method of producing hydrogen is to break down water into its constituent elements – hydrogen and oxygen. This can be done in a number of ways, notably by using electricity in a process called electrolysis. A method that seems particularly attractive is to use sunlight as the energy source that breaks down the water molecule.

While there is an abundance of water on our planet, only some of it is suitable for people to drink and consume in other ways. Much of the accessible water on earth is salty or polluted. So, a technique to obtain hydrogen from water ideally should work with water that is otherwise of little use to people.

Researchers in Russia and the Czech Republic have recently developed a new material that efficiently generates hydrogen molecules by exposing water – even saltwater or polluted water – to sunlight.

The new material is a three-layer structure composed of a thin film of gold, an ultra-thin layer of platinum, and a metal-organic framework or MOF of chromium compounds and organic molecules. The MOF layer acts as a filter that gets rid of impurities.

Experiments have demonstrated that 100 square centimeters of the material can generate half a liter of hydrogen in an hour. The researchers continue to improve the material and increase its efficiency over a broad range of the solar spectrum.

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New Material Can Generate Hydrogen from Salt and Polluted Water

Photo courtesy of Tomsk Polytechnic University.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Hydrogen From Water And Sun

March 7, 2019 By EarthWise 1 Comment

There are research efforts around the world seeking ways to produce hydrogen starting from water and using clean energy. Finding an economical and scalable way to do this is a key to the so-called hydrogen economy.

A recent study at Argonne National Laboratory makes use of a chemical reaction pathway central to plant biology to create a process that converts water into hydrogen using energy from the sun.

The process combines two membrane-bound protein complexes to perform the conversion of water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

The first protein complex, which the researchers call Photosystem I, is a membrane protein that uses energy from light to feed electrons to an inorganic catalyst that makes hydrogen. But this represents only half of the overall process.

A second protein complex that they call Photosystem II uses energy from light to split water and take electrons from it. The electrons are then fed to Photosystem I.

The two protein complexes are embedded in thylakoid membranes, which are like those found inside the oxygen-creating chloroplasts in plants. This membrane is an essential part of pairing the two photosystems. It supports both of the photosystems and provides a pathway for transferring electrons between the proteins.

The researchers also make use of a synthetic catalyst made from nickel or cobalt that replaces expensive platinum catalysts used in conventional water-splitting schemes. Combining the light-triggered transport of electrons with the synthetic catalyst results in what the researchers call the “Z-scheme”, an adaptation of photosynthesis to produce hydrogen.

The next step is to incorporate the scheme into a living system which the researchers hope will lead to a practical system for hydrogen production.

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