Georgia Tech improves the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of water-splitting process
to double production of carbon-free green hydrogen.
The climate crisis requires ramping up usage of renewable energy sources like solar and
wind, but with intermittent availability, scalable energy storage is a challenge.
Hydrogen —especially carbon-free green hydrogen—has emerged as a promising clean energy carrier
and storage option for renewable energy such as solar and wind.
It adds no carbon emissions to the atmosphere, but currently is costly and complex to create.
One way to produce green hydrogen is electrochemical water splitting.
This process involves running electricity through water in the presence of catalysts
to yield hydrogen and oxygen.
Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI)
have developed a new water-splitting process and material that maximize the efficiency
of producing green hydrogen, making it an affordable and accessible option for industrial
partners that want to convert to green hydrogen for renewable energy storage instead of conventional,
carbon-emitting hydrogen production from natural gas.
The Georgia Tech findings come as climate experts agree that hydrogen will be critical
for the world’s top industrial sectors to achieve their net-zero emission goals.
Last summer, the Biden Administration set a goal to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen
by 80% in one decade.
Dubbed the Hydrogen Shot, the Department of Energy-led initiative seeks to cut the cost
of “clean” or green hydrogen to $1 per kilogram by 2030.
Scientists hope to replace natural gas and coal, currently used today for storing extra
electric energy at the grid level, with green hydrogen because it doesn’t contribute to
carbon emissions, making it a more environmentally friendly means for storing renewable electricity.
The focus of their research is electrolysis, or the process of using electricity to split
water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Georgia Tech’s research team hopes to make green hydrogen less costly and more durable
using hybrid materials for the electrocatalyst.
Today, the process relies on expensive noble metal components such as platinum and iridium,
the preferred catalysts for producing hydrogen through electrolysis at scale.
These elements are expensive and rare, which has stalled the move to replace gas for hydrogen-based
power.
In fact, green hydrogen accounted for less than 1% of annual hydrogen production in 2020,
in large part because of this expense, according to market research firm Wood Mackenzie.
The researcher says that their work will decrease the use of those noble metals, increasing
its activity as well as utilization options.
In research published in the journals Applied Catalysis B: Environmental and Energy & Environmental
Science, the research team highlighted the interactions between metal nanoparticles and
metal oxide to support design of high-performance hybrid catalysts.
Their work relied upon computation and modeling from research partner, the Korea Institute
of Energy Research, and X-ray measurement from Kyungpook National University and Oregon
State University, which leveraged the country’s synchrotron, a football-field-sized super
x-ray.
This research could help lower the barrier of equipment cost used in green hydrogen production.
Besides developing hybrid catalysts, the researchers have finetuned the ability to control the
catalysts’ shape as well as the interaction of metals.
Key priorities were reducing the use of the catalyst in the system and at the same time,
increasing its durability since the catalyst accounts for a major part of the equipment
cost.
A key finding was the role of the catalyst’s shape in producing hydrogen.
The surface structure of the catalyst is very important to determine if it’s optimized
for the hydrogen production.
That's why the researchers try to control the shape of the catalyst as well as the interaction
between the metals and the substrate material.
Some of the key applications positioned to benefit first include hydrogen stations for
fuel cell electric vehicles, which today only operate in the state of California, and microgrids,
a new community approach to designing and operating electric grids that rely on renewable-driven
backup power.
The team is currently working with partners to explore new materials for efficient hydrogen
production using artificial intelligence (AI).