A breakthrough into splitting water into its parts could help make renewable energy pay off, even when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
A breakthrough into splitting water into its parts could help make renewable energy pay off, even when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
Using solar and wind power when it is available for water splitting, a process that uses electricity to split H2O into hydrogen and oxygen, offers a way to store energy in the form of hydrogen fuel.
Currently the most popular system used for water splitting, or water electrolysis, relies on precious metals as catalysts, but a collaborative research team, including scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Washington State University, has developed a system that uses less expensive and more abundant materials. They describe the advance in a paper published in Nature Energy on March 9.
“The current water electrolysis system uses a very expensive catalyst. In our system, we use a nickel-iron based catalyst, which is much cheaper, but the performance is comparable,” said Yu Seung Kim, a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and corresponding author on the paper.
Read more at Washington State University
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