New Device Can Make Hydrogen When Dunked in Salt Water

This is a story that was in the queue before the database crashed.

Device structure does energy-free desalination before water is split:

With renewable energy becoming cheaper, there's a growing impetus to find ways to store it economically. Batteries can handle short-term fluxes in production but may not be able to handle longer-term shortfalls or seasonal changes in power output. Hydrogen is one of several options being considered that has the potential to serve as a longer-term bridge between periods of high renewable productivity.

But hydrogen comes with its own issues. Obtaining it by splitting water is pretty inefficient, energy-wise, and storing it for long periods can be challenging. Most hydrogen-producing catalysts also work best with pure water-not necessarily an item that's easy to obtain as climate change is boosting the intensity of droughts.

A group of researchers based in China has now developed a device that can output hydrogen when starting with seawater-in fact, the device needs to be sitting in seawater to work. The key concept for getting it to work will be familiar to anyone who understands how most waterproof clothing works.

[...] On the outside, there's seawater, with its standard collection of salts. On the inside, there's a concentrated solution of a single salt-potassium hydroxide (KOH) in this case-that's compatible with the hydrogen-producing electrolysis process. Submerged in the KOH solution is a set of electrodes that produce hydrogen and oxygen on either side of a separator, keeping the gas streams pure.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.