A new catalyst developed by University of Toronto researchers could make it cheaper and easier to produce hydrogen from water – a process some say is key to storing energy from renewable, but intermittent, sources like solar and wind.
The new catalyst, developed in the lab of University Professor Ted Sargent, uses abundant, low-cost elements to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen under conditions like those found in ordinary seawater.
That, in turn, could make it feasible to use renewable electricity to produce hydrogen from water and then later reverse the process in an electrochemical fuel cell, resulting in clean power on demand.
“Hydrogen is a hugely important industrial feedstock, but unfortunately today it is derived overwhelmingly from fossil fuels, resulting in a large carbon footprint,” says Sargent, who is the senior author of a paper in Nature Energy that describes the new catalyst.
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