Urine-Powered Electrolysis Systems Offer Energy-Efficient Green Hydrogen Production

slon writes:

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-05-urine-powered-electrolysis-energy-efficient.html

Researchers have developed two unique energy-efficient and cost-effective systems that use urea found in urine and wastewater to generate hydrogen. The unique systems reveal pathways to economically generate "green" hydrogen, a sustainable and renewable energy source, and the potential to remediate nitrogenous waste in aquatic environments.

Typically, we generate hydrogen through the electrolysis of water where water is split into oxygen and hydrogen. It is a promising technology to help solve the global energy crisis, but the process is energy intensive, which renders it cost-prohibitive when compared to extracting hydrogen from fossil fuels (gray hydrogen), itself an undesirable process because of the carbon emissions it generates.

In contrast to water, an electrolysis system that generates hydrogen from urea uses significantly less energy.

Despite this advantage, existing urea-based systems face several limitations, such as the low conversion efficiency of urea to hydrogen and the generation of undesirable nitrogenous by-products (nitrates and nitrites) that are toxic and compete with hydrogen production, further reducing overall system efficiency.

Researchers from the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Carbon Science and Innovation (COE-CSI) and the University of Adelaide developed two urea-based electrolysis systems that overcome these problems and can generate green hydrogen at a cost that they have calculated is comparable to or cheaper than the cost of producing gray hydrogen.

"While we haven't solved all the problems, should these systems be scaled up, our systems produce harmless nitrogen gas instead of the toxic nitrates and nitrites, and either system will use between 20-27% less electricity than water splitting systems," says COE-CSI Chief Investigator, Professor Yao Zheng.

The research for each system was published in separate papers, one in Angewandte Chemie International, the other in Nature Communications.

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