(Saarbrücken) – As the number of projects in the hydrogen industry explodes, there are increasing concerns that the production of hydrogen comes at the expense of the increasingly scarce commodity of drinking water - and thus the decarbonization of industrial processes and drives is being played off against (surplus) food. Water is needed to produce the gas, which is often praised as a cure for global warming, via electrolysis.
“Basically, the transition to the hydrogen economy is a piece of cake,” say scientists at the Leibniz Institute for New Materials gGmbH (INM): Of the approximately 1,4 billion cubic kilometers of water on earth (1.400 trillion liters), the water is overwhelming Majority as salt water in the oceans “easily accessible and present in sufficient quantities to supply humanity with energy for a long time”. The problem: The current technology does not allow seawater for fuel cells; instead, it has to be desalinated using a lot of energy in order to obtain hydrogen from this treated water.
Fresh water, electricity and heat
Volker Presser, Professor of Energy Materials at Saarland University and head of the Energy Materials program area at the INM, together with doctoral student Yuan Zhang, have now succeeded in desalinating seawater and then the resulting fresh water on an experimental scale using a fuel cell in turn used in the fuel cell for hydrogen production. To achieve this, they built a system from a fuel cell, “which ultimately produces fresh water from the raw material salt water and also produces electricity and heat, which in turn can be invested in the production of hydrogen.”
The salt present in salt water (especially NaCl, table salt) is “forced to dissolve its connection with the water by the addition of hydrogen and oxygen”. In addition to drinking water, which can be used to produce hydrogen, an acid (especially Hcl, hydrochloric acid) and a base (especially NaOH, sodium hydroxide) are created as an intermediate product, says Volker Presser: “We also generate electricity that we can use further .” If you bring acid and base together again, usable heat is created.
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Research: Seawater becomes hydrogen / © Volker Presser, INM
The question is which companies/stock corporations use these scientific findings or deal with them intensively?
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