A study recently published in Nature Communications highlights the exciting future of hydrogen energy. Scientists from University and Swinburne University of Technology (UNSW), Griffith University and Swinburne University of Technology, have shown that it’s possible to use only water, iron, and nickel, to create hydrogen fuel. This is less expensive and more ecologically friendly than traditional methods of creating hydrogen fuel.
The team was able to capture hydrogen from oxygen in water, using the iron and nickel. This speeds up the chemical reaction process and requires less energy to do so. It replaces the much more expensive ‘water-splitting’ processes used today, which require precious metals such as platinum, iridium, and ruthenium.
UNSW School of Chemistry’s Professor Chuan Zhao, explains that in water-splitting, two electrodes apply an electrical charge to water that enables hydrogen to be split from oxygen and used as energy in fuel cells.
Zhao goes on to say:
What we do is coat the electrodes with our catalyst to reduce energy consumption, On this catalyst, there is a tiny nano-scale interface where the iron and nickel meet at the atomic level, which becomes an active site for splitting water. This is where hydrogen can be split from oxygen and captured as fuel, and the oxygen can be released as an environmentally-friendly waste.
Professor Zhao has been working towards this since 2015 when he and his team invented a nickel-iron electrode for oxygen generation and achieved a record high efficiency. He said that iron and nickel on their own are not good catalysts for hydrogen generation, but joining on a nanoscale is “where the magic happens”.
Zhao explains:
The nanoscale interface fundamentally changes the property of these materials. Our results show the nickel-iron catalyst can be as active as the platinum one for hydrogen generation. An additional benefit is that our nickel-iron electrode can catalyze both the hydrogen and oxygen generation, so not only could we slash the production costs by using Earth-abundant elements, but also the costs of manufacturing one catalyst instead of two.
This low-cost eco-friendly method could be further developed to be used for hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. Professor Zhao said it would be much like going to a regular gas station, but instead we could fill up with hydrogen gas produced by this water-splitting reaction. Compared to lithium-powered electric vehicles this could be done in a matter of minutes, versus needing hours to charge a battery.
At the moment in our fossil fuel economy, we have this huge incentive to move to a hydrogen economy so that we can be using hydrogen as a clean energy carrier which is abundant on Earth. We’ve been talking about the hydrogen economy for ages, but this time it looks as though it’s really coming, said Prof Zhao.
As for the price difference; iron and nickel are priced at $0.13 and $19.65 a kilogram, compared to ruthenium, platinum, and iridium priced at $11.77, $42.13 and $69.58 per gram. The cost and the economic impact that this can have pretty much made this discovery a no-brainer moving forward.
