Seawater

A new California-based startup is trying to take on climate change by simultaneously taking carbon dioxide out of the ocean and air while creating hydrogen as an alternative fuel. Boeing has already inked an agreement with Equatic, the company that launched last week. The deal is for Boeing to purchase 2,100 metric tons of hydrogen from Equatic that it can use in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). The hydrogen is a byproduct of Equatic’s efforts to filter planet-heating CO2 out of air and seawater. Boeing has also agreed to…

Believe it or not, seawater makes an excellent base for fuel. That’s because seawater contains a cocktail of elements like hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, and others, all of which are essential for life on Earth to thrive. The fuel part here comes from the hydrogen found in seawater. Unfortunately, pulling the hydrogen gas from the rest of the elements has been quite a challenge, at least until now. According to a new paper published in the journal Joule, researchers with the Department of Energy’s SLAC National…

A representation of the team’s bipolar membrane system that converts seawater into hydrogen gas. Credit: Nina Fujikawa/SLAC National Accelerator LaboratoryThe cocktail of elements in seawater, including hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, and others, is essential for life on Earth. However, this intricate chemical makeup poses a challenge when attempting to separate hydrogen gas for sustainable energy applications.Recently, a team of scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford…

A research group from the Osaka Metropolitan University Graduate School of Engineering has created an environmentally friendly and inexpensive adsorbent material using baker’s yeast and trimetaphosphate that selectively recovers rare earth elements (REEs). Experiments with synthetic seawater and hot spring water showed that the material could adsorb REEs even with a high content of other components.Success in recovering trace rare earth elements in environmental water.An Osaka Metropolitan University research group has…

Few climate solutions come without downsides. “Green” hydrogen, made by using renewable energy to split water molecules, could power heavy vehicles and decarbonize industries such as steelmaking without spewing a whiff of carbon dioxide. But because the water-splitting machines, or electrolyzers, are designed to work with pure water, scaling up green hydrogen could exacerbate global freshwater shortages. Now, several research teams are reporting advances in…

Pulling greenhouse gases out of water is an odd-sounding idea, but the oceans are the planet's number one carbon sink, and direct air carbon capture has pretty serious problems: it costs a lot, and uses a lot of energy. According to IEA figures from 2022, even the more efficient air capture technologies require about 6.6 gigajoules of energy, or 1.83 megawatt-hours per ton of carbon dioxide captured. Most of that energy isn't used to directly separate the CO2 from the air, it's in heat energy to keep the absorbers at…

Green hydrogen can't be viewed as environmentally friendly if it drinks huge amounts of fresh water, or results in the bulk output of toxic chlorine, according to RMIT researchers who say they've come up with a cheap technique that does neither.Research into green hydrogen production is advancing at a rapid rate right now, as countries worldwide jockey to establish themselves in what's expected to become a huge global market for clean fuels. Australia's vast renewable energy potential and export-focused economy place it…

Researchers at the University of Adelaide announced this week that they made clean hydrogen fuel from seawater without pre-treatment. Demand for hydrogen fuel, a clean energy source that only produces water when burned, is expected to increase in the coming years as the world (hopefully) continues to pivot away from fossil fuels. The findings could eventually provide cheaper green energy production to coastal areas. “We have split natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen with nearly 100 per cent efficiency, to produce…

PTI Melbourne, February 3Researchers have successfully split seawater without pre-treatment to produce green hydrogen.According to the international study, the researchers split natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen with nearly 100 per cent efficiency, to produce green hydrogen by electrolysis.They used a non-precious and cheap catalyst in a commercial electrolyser, the study said.A typical non-precious catalyst is cobalt oxide with chromium oxide on its surface.“We used seawater as a feedstock without the need…

An international team from the University of Adelaide, Australia, Tianjin and Nankai Universities in China and Kent State University in the US has published new research claiming that a simple, cheap acid layer over the catalyst in an electrolyzer allows it to split seawater with "nearly 100 per cent efficiency," without any pre-treatment other than filtering.A typical electrolyzer catalyst, says the team, might be made from cobalt oxide, with chromium oxide on its surface. Seawater would generally ruin these catalysts…