Scientists are finding ways to take advantage of one of the biggest reserves of renewable energy in the known universe—the ocean. A team of researchers from the United States has made a significant leap in the development of a system that can extract hydrogen and oxygen from seawater while leaving the salt behind. This solves one of the biggest challenges encountered to date, and the potential is exciting if the technology is scalable.
Scientists have opened up new options for hydrogen extraction
The current worldwide focus on finding alternatives to energy produced by the burning of carbon-emitting fossil fuels has sparked a wave of technological advancements across almost every clean energy sector imaginable. The world’s oceans are massive resources that could be renewably tapped on a much larger scale with leaps in technology.
It’s a fact that hydrogen is a useful source of clean energy. If it could be more easily and viably extracted from the ocean at gigaton levels, we’d see it much more widely applied across the globe. A group of American researchers has been looking into ways to overcome the difficulties inherent in this level of production and they claim that their new electrode is a game-changer.
What’s the biggest challenge with producing hydrogen from seawater?
The company developing the technology is U.S.-based Equatic, which has a focus on carbon removal and clean energy generation, says their new electrode is capable of extracting hydrogen and oxygen from seawater while leaving the salt behind. This is significant because the salt usually produces toxic chlorine gas during electrolysis production systems.
Current hydrogen production relies on pure water, which is a resource that’s becoming more and more precious as the Earth gets warmer. Solving the salt and chlorine problem makes the viability of the process so much greater.
What’s the potential of Equatic’s new electrode technology?
Equatic’s innovative electrode technology involves using a direct air capture system that removes carbon from the atmosphere, which is a bonus function after the green hydrogen production. The anodes used are recyclable and maintainable, needing only a recoating of catalysts made from abundant materials every three years.
Thanks to funding support from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), Equatic has successfully developed oxygen-selective anodes (OSAs) that will have the potential to scale up hydrogen production via seawater electrolysis.
Equatic’s COO Edward Sanders is positive about future applications:
“Our method removes the largest barriers to participate in carbon removal and clean energy production, namely high cost and the availability of specific geological formations, such as underground aquifers, CO₂ pipelines, or desalination plants. This breakthrough is the crux of Equatic’s ability to scale to gigaton volumes and has global implications.”
ARPA-E Program Director Doug Wicks emphasized his confidence in the development of the hydrogen technology:
“Equatic’s OSAs eliminate the process’s dependence on pure water and it taps into the world’s most abundant water resource instead. This U.S. discovery will be manufactured by a team of highly-skilled technicians in San Diego, fueling our domestic clean economy and creating ripple effects that will be felt worldwide.”
What’s Equatic’s next step?
Equatic plans to produce the electrodes at its facility in San Diego facility. The first phase of real-world testing will take place in two locations: a commercial plant in Quebec and a test plant in Singapore. The commercial plant is expected to have an extraction capacity of 109,500 tons of CO₂ while generating 3,600 tons of green hydrogen by 2026.
The global drive towards cleaner energy sources has more momentum than ever as traditional systems are upgraded, tricky systems are scaled up, and new technological advancements are emerging on an almost daily basis.