A breakthrough has been made by a team of South Korean scientists in the race towards clean hydrogen production, and, incredibly, it is a familiar household technology that could be a gamechanger for greenhouse gas emissions reduction and slowing global warming.
Hydrogen is a potentially important energy source since it can be used in fuel cells to generate electricity, power and heat. Everything from vehicles, industry, homes and businesses can benefit. However, until now, it has been very challenging to produce hydrogen in a green way, since it is so expensive to try to generate hydrogen without combustion of fossil fuels, which releases CO2. The thermochemical metal oxide reactions needed are traditionally found to occur after lengthy treatment at ultra high temperatures of up to 1,500°C (2,732°F), meaning they guzzle energy and are hard to scale up for mass consumption.
But, pooling their interdisciplinary knowledge of nuclear physics and mechanical engineering, researchers at Pohang University of Science & Technology (POSTECH) developed a way of deploying household microwave technology in hydrogen production.
Thermal energy use slashed by 75%
Most people have heard of microwaves as a result of their domestic culinary use. We know they can speed up the time it takes to cook a baked potato or defrost a chicken. In this instance, however, they were used to drive the thermochemical reaction required to release hydrogen faster and more efficiently than usual. Publishing their findings in A Journal of Materials Chemistry, the POSTECH team announced that they had been able to produce hydrogen at just 600℃ (1,112 °F); that’s a whopping reduction in temperature of 60%.
What’s more, the use of microwave energy was found to replace 75% of the thermal energy needed for the reaction, a huge step forward towards sustainable hydrogen production, the team explained in a press release. It is the proportion of microwave energy used that makes all the difference, they said, since the advance had been made possible thanks to the way the microwave energy speeds up the creation of material “defects” or oxygen deficiencies, which are essential for splitting water into hydrogen. Conventional methods take hours to produce the same effect.
Revolutionary
The team’s discovery of the new microwave mechanism and the way it overcomes the limitations of existing processes were hailed as “major achievements” by co-lead author and research team member Professor Hyungyu Jin.
He highlighted that the research “has the potential to revolutionize the commercial viability of thermochemical hydrogen production technologies” and said it “will also pave the way for the development of new materials optimized for microwave-driven chemical processes.” The prospect of faster, cheaper hydrogen production and new material applications is potentially big news for the planet’s journey to net-zero.
