"Exceptional" new catalyst cheaply splits hydrogen from seawater

Good news! We are apparently making noticeable progress on splitting water into hydrogen and on desalination!

"... Today [2/13/2023], scientists at Australia's RMIT announced another approach with great potential for highly efficient, low-cost green hydrogen generation straight from seawater, without generating chlorine. ..."

From the abstract:

"Hydrogen is emerging as an alternative clean fuel; however, its dependency on freshwater will be a threat to a sustainable environment. Seawater, an unlimited source, can be an alternative, but its salt-rich nature causes corrosion and introduces several competing reactions, hindering its use. To overcome these, a unique catalyst composed of porous sheets of nitrogen-doped NiMo3P (N-NiMo3P) having a sheet size of several microns is designed. The presence of large homogenous pores in the basal plane of these sheets makes them catalytically more active and ensures faster mass transfer. The introduction of N and Ni into MoP significantly tunes the electronic density of Mo, surface chemistry, and metal-non-metal bond lengths, optimizing surface energies, creating new active sites, and increasing electrical conductivity. The presence of metal-nitrogen bonds and surface polyanions increases the stability and improves anti-corrosive properties against chlorine chemistry. Ultimately, the N-NiMo3P sheets show remarkable performance as it only requires overpotentials of 23 and 35 mV for hydrogen evolution reaction, and it catalyzes full water splitting at 1.52 and 1.55 V to achieve 10 mA cm−2 in 1 m KOH and seawater, respectively. Hence, structural and compositional control can make catalysts effective in realizing low-cost hydrogen directly from seawater."

"Exceptional" new catalyst cheaply splits hydrogen from seawater

Scientists make hydrogen straight from seawater The process saves a lot of energy and money normally spent on desalination.

How to make hydrogen straight from seawater – no desalination required (press release) Researchers have developed a cheaper and more energy-efficient way to make hydrogen directly from seawater, in a critical step towards a truly viable green hydrogen industry.

Nitrogen-Doped Porous Nickel Molybdenum Phosphide Sheets for Efficient Seawater Splitting (open access)

Left to right: Dr. Muhammad Waqas Khan, Dr. Nasir Mahmood and Mr Suraj Loomba, part of the RMIT team working on this advance (A very politically incorrect photograph, no female or colored researcher? Just kidding! 😊)

Illustration of the synthesis of porous N-NiMo3P and the electrochemical seawater splitting process. The porous sheets of N-NiMo3P, owing to its large surface area with abundant active sites and pores, lead to better mass transport providing exceptional electrochemical performance in a seawater electrolyte. Note: the ball stick model is presenting the fundamental structure of oxide and phosphide not the surface chemistry of the sheet.