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Ditching Platinum For the Ocean Could Make Hydrogen Cheap – Slashdot
speriamo non si trovino – come troppo spesso accade – degli ostacoli a livello tecnologico che ne rendono difficile l’adozione…
Shotgun shares a report from Popular Mechanics: [S]cientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have found a pairing of minerals that surpasses other precious metal materials when it comes to producing hydrogen. Testing a molybdenum-phosphide (MoP) catalyst with wastewater in a small reactor called a microbial electrolysis cell (MEC), scientists found that the MoP worked better than platinum. The most frequently used method of producing hydrogen is known as electrolysis. Bringing together chemicals called electrolytes with electricity, a catalyst triggers a reaction that creates hydrogen. Platinum is currently the best of these catalysts, although its high price is a big drawback. If platinum could be discarded, that could bring hydrogen production costs down rapidly. And that’s not all. The MoP catalyst excelled at working with another abundant source: seawater.
Using an MEC, the team was able to combine the electrolysis technique with hydrogen fermentation, a low-yield process that consumes less energy. Unable to afford expensive platinum catalysts, the team needed something that could reduce production costs to approximately $2 per kilogram of hydrogen. With a strong microscope, the team discovered that the catalyst assembled into a mixture of two distinct crystal phases: MoP and MoP2. With slightly different atomic structures, they produced different reactions. MoP2 released hydrogen atoms from water molecules, while MoP was able to convert hydrogen atoms into hydrogen gas molecules. It was a welcome surprise. Would a hydrogen generator be a partial solution to the energy storage story for solar and wind?