To wean itself off fossil fuels, the world needs cheaper ways to produce green hydrogen—a clean-burning fuel made by using renewable electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Now researchers report a way to avoid the need for a costly membrane at the heart of the water-splitting devices, and to instead produce hydrogen and oxygen in completely separate chambers.
As a lab-based proof of concept, the new setup—reported this month in Nature Materials—is a long way from working at an industrial scale. But if successful, it could help heavy industries such as steelmaking and fertilizer production reduce their dependence on oil, coal, and natural gas.
“This is an innovative concept,” says Shannon Boettcher, a chemist at the University of Oregon who was not involved with the new study. Boettcher adds that the new design appears to work efficiently with variable amounts of electricity, an advantage that could make it easier to pair with the intermittent power supplied by wind and solar farms.
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