This video is brought to you by Brilliant. Hydrogen is number one on the periodic table,
but it’s still a straggler in the renewable energy race. Like many other renewable technologies,
hydrogen has dominated headlines for years now, but inefficiencies in the production and storage
of hydrogen hold it back. There’s a lot of pieces to the hydrogen puzzle and one of those pieces
has had some recent breakthroughs that may help with those downsides.
Is green hydrogen within reach? Let’s see if we can come to a decision on this.
I’m Matt Ferrell … welcome to Undecided.
If you’ve been to my channel in the past few years, you’ve probably already heard
about hydrogen power before. I tend to talk about it a lot. Partly because,
for decades, it failed to materialize as promised, but there is still some hope.
I’m fascinated by that dissonance. But for a super quick recap on where things stand:
Hydrogen is LITERALLY all around us. It’s the most plentiful element in the universe, and it’s also
one of the most clingy elements out there (meaning it binds to other elements easily, which makes
it one of the best energy carriers around). It’s also very clean. How clean? Well, add
in a little oxygen in a fuel cell, and hydrogen power leaves behind only water as a byproduct.
You can get hydrogen power from a variety of sources, including fossil fuels and biomass
(more on that later!) To get hydrogen alone, because it’s very clingy, you have to break it
away from other elements (like the oxygen in water). This takes energy and time,
which is the root of hydrogen’s unfortunate energy inefficiency.
It takes more energy to produce the hydrogen than you get out of it, and that loss is huge compared
to other power technologies like batteries in EVs. You’re losing about 60% from start to finish!
The way that we get that energy also matters. Hydrogen power has been classified into three
categories: gray hydrogen (which gets that energy from fossil fuels),
blue (when you combine carbon capture with gray hydrogen practices),
and green hydrogen (which comes from renewable energy sources like solar and wind).
Obviously, green is the goal here. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier in theory than in practice.
The two main ways we get green hydrogen are through a renewables-powered electrolyzer
(a.k.a. power-to-gas (P2G) technology) and steam reforming of biogas, with or without
carbon capture. Most hydrogen power today comes from steam reforming of natural gas,
but natural gas is a limited and highly-sought-after resource in itself.
Using electrolyzers, on the other hand, has been notoriously expensive and inefficient.
So that’s where we last left our discussion on hydrogen power: still struggling
with the efficiency, scale, and the overall carbon footprint of this technology in real life.
We still need something new and innovative to help us create, store,
and transport hydrogen properly. The question is has the efficiency
of these systems improved with the latest technological developments?
Hysta’s new capillary-fed electrolyzer brings a fresh new take to the technology itself.
Polymer electrolyte membrane tech (or PEM, for short) has a problem:
as cool as it is, it’s still wildly inefficient. Hydrogen stores more energy per weight than other
technologies like batteries, but it also leaks that precious power at every step.
You try keeping the smallest element on the planet from literally seeping through
the cracks! From its birth in electrolysis to its final resting place in a fuel cell,
you’re constantly losing that potential energy. So how can you stop the bleed?
Hysata may have found the culprit and the answer: bubbles. Yes, bubbles. Remember,
electrolysis converts water into hydrogen and oxygen. Bubbles in that electrolyte fluid are
nonconducting, and when they build up on the electrodes, it is blocking parts of the
electrode and hindering the process, reducing the efficiency. PEM lets the cathode side keep
running to the electrolyte (which can produce hydrogen gas by bubbling it through a liquid),
but Hysata’s capillary-fed electrolyzer takes this a step further. They use a reservoir at the bottom
of the cell which keeps the electrolyte away and out of contact with both the anode and the cathode
until it’s drawn through an inter-electrode separator (which is both porous and hydrophilic).
This is the “capillary action” part: think of it like water rising up a straw
due to the change in pressure. It’s relatively simple physics, with some major impacts.
The result: the electrolyte keeps direct contact, but only on one side, and the gasses
are still produced without that annoying bubbling action that just gets in the way.
Since water isn’t being drawn to the side with the electrode, the other side can keep releasing gas
unhindered. As water is electrolyzed out of the separator, the capillary action
naturally draws up more water to replace it, keeping everything running smoothly.
So how efficient can these electrolyzers be without those pesky bubbles in the way?
According to Hysata’s peer-reviewed study, it can be as much as 98%.
That’s over 10% more than a state-of-the-art commercial electrolyzer on the market today,
which boasts an efficiency of only 83%.
If these capillary-fed electrolyzers can get into gigawatt-scale production by 2025
(as their CEO claims), it may just fill the need for a cheaper,
super-efficient electrolyzer: exactly what hydrogen power needs to really get going.
Of course, Hysata isn’t the only one in the electrolyzer improvement race.
But before getting to that, if you’d like to learn more about the science behind electrolyzers,
potential energy, and conservation of energy, I'd strongly recommend checking out Brilliant.
They have fantastic interactive courses that have helped me to get a better understanding
of the physics and chemistry behind all of this, which includes interactive courses in
topics that range from Electricity and Magnetism to Logic. They've got something for everybody.
Both the Science Essentials course and The Chemical Reaction course tie directly
into some of the concepts from this video. The Science Essentials course lays out the
basics of energy and energy conservation, while The Chemical Reaction course walks
you through how matter transforms. I had a good time going through both of these.
All of the concepts are taught through fun and interactive challenges to help
you understand the "why" of something ... not just the "how." It helps
to develop your intuition, which is my absolute favorite part about Brilliant.
Go to https://brilliant.org/Undecided to sign up for free. And also, the first 200
people will get 20% off their annual premium membership. Thanks to Brilliant and to all of
you for supporting the channel. Now back to the other electrolyzer advancement.
A team from the Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) says that it’s tested
a new type of membrane that solves the corrosive problem in electrolyzer production.
As I mentioned, most electrolyzers use proton exchange membranes (PEMS) which
allow positively-charged hydrogen ions to pass through to the cathode and ultimately combine with
electrons to form the hydrogen gas. Unfortunately, this acidic environment is super harsh on
the equipment, which means these companies need to use expensive metals like platinum,
ruthenium, or iridium in their electrodes (as well as titanium on their separator plates).
Also, to speed up the reaction, one of the major expenses is the use
of these Platinum Group Metals (PGMs) as a catalyst. These catalysts are
extremely expensive and are subject to poisoning by various impurities,
such as carbon monoxide and other gasses that may be contaminants in the input gas stream.
The usual solution to this problem is to use anion exchange membranes (AEMs) instead.
These membranes and electrode assemblies allow negatively-charged hydroxide ions to pass
through and recombine to make water molecules at the anode, ultimately allowing the hydrogen
atoms to gravitate towards the cathode. AEMs work under even alkaline conditions,
so they generally don’t need the fancy metal catalysts of their PEM counterparts (which
can be 3,000 times more expensive). However, AEMs haven’t quite caught their footing in the market,
mainly because they generally don’t perform as well and tend to break down more easily.
KIST has recently tested a new membrane and electrode assembly
that outperformed their AEM counterparts by a factor of six,
and also lasted ten times as long. It even performed 20% better than current PEM
technology! They did this partially by increasing the specific surface area within the structure and
combined this with poly(fluorenyl-co-aryl piperidinium) (or PFAP)-based materials,
which have a high ion-conductivity. That’s more surface area, more conductivity, and
(in theory) more energy produced over its lifespan, and ultimately, lower costs overall.
The hydrogen industry looks like it hasn’t lost any steam.
The question is, are these new developments all that they promise to be?
First, let’s talk about efficiency. Hysata’s capillary-fed electrolyzer, for example,
only takes 41.5kWh per kilogram of hydrogen to run, compared to 52.5 kWh of current commercial
electrolyzers. That’s a whopping 95% overall system efficiency, which blows the industry’s
standard 75% efficiency out of the water. (And to their credit, they’re not just throwing out this
record-breaking claim without any backup: their research was peer-reviewed and published in the
March issue of Nature Communications if you’d like to see more. Their design ensures that you
squeeze out every drop of hydrogen that you can, without a single bubble of it going to waste.
On the other side of things, you have developments like the KIST AEM. Their
membrane outperforms current PEM technology, but it falls short in terms of longevity.
Even though this AEM last six times as long as other AEM counterparts,
PEM technology still leaves them both in the dust. PEM electrolyzers typically last around
50,000 hours (or nearly six years), while AEM may only last 3,000 hours..
Sure, replacing the KIST AEM may be cheaper, but you’re still replacing them more often,
which cuts into your cost savings over time. You also have to consider the versatility. Professor
Young Moo for Hanyang University believes this membrane has a crucial role to play
not only in electrolysis but also in hydrogen fuel cells, carbon capture utilization,
and direct ammonia fuel cells: aka, the next generation of the hydrogen industry.
It’s a tricky balancing act: you want to capture as much hydrogen as possible,
without adding in a bunch of extra steps in the process that guzzle time and energy as a result.
The more we streamline and perfect this tech, the more the efficiency rate goes up, which
helps green hydrogen stack up a little bit better compared to its other renewable counterparts.
Of course, this tiny element that offers so much potential has a problem:
costs. Besides energy costs, developing hydrogen infrastructure is expensive.
The tech right now takes a lot of precious materials, such as PGMs and rare earth metals,
as well as energy to get things going. According to the International Renewable Energy Authority,
rare metals factor into the total cost of the PEM system (especially for iridium),
but at most, they represent about 10% of the total cost. The rest comes from the design itself.
The goal is to make hydrogen power cheaper, but will this tech make that a reality?
Unfortunately, that largely still remains to be seen: at least, in the wild.
Many of these breakthroughs are still in the early stages. Some are projects in the
works or just past their trial stages. They’ll need an infusion of funding and
lots of trial and error to get them up to the scale that hydrogen enthusiasts dream about.
Hysata is already planning to have their capillary-fed electrolyzer tech commercialized
and up to gigawatt-scale production capacity by 2025. Their tech is meant to cut back on
capital and operation costs, too: the gear can be air-cooled, and you don’t need liquid circulation,
gas-liquid separator tanks, or any of the related piping, pumps, and fittings. By generating more
hydrogen AND reducing capital/operation costs, this tech could potentially drive the cost of
green hydrogen down, which they say could bring the cost of hydrogen to $1.50 per kilogram.
For reference, right now, you’re looking at about $11 per kilogram … that’s quite
the discount! The good news is that green hydrogen’s costs are already on the decline,
with renewable and electrolysis costs steadily dropping about 50% every 5-6 years.
So is hydrogen power finally in its spotlight moment? Well…maybe not quite. A lot of these
technologies are still getting their feet wet, and more seem to come out every day;
several were announced while writing this script, and if I held off to make sure they all got
included, well, this video may never have been finished! (I didn’t even get to talk about how
we can turn plastic into hydrogen fuel—now that may be a fun discussion for later!) In the end,
these advancements show that this industry is still alive and kicking,
which is a great sign as we need a variety of clean energy sources for a cleaner future.
So are you still undecided? Do you think these kinds of advancements will spur more interest
in hydrogen? Jump into the comments and let me know. If you liked this video, be sure to check
out one of these videos over here. And thanks to all of my patrons and welcome to new members Alec
Bowman and Mayaud Christophe. And thanks to all of you for watching. I’ll see you in the next one.