The research team of Heping Xie (academician of CAE) has made a major breakthrough in the field of direct hydrogen production from seawater, and published in Nature a research paper entitled "A Membrane-Based Seawater Electrolyser for Hydrogen Generation". Heping Xie is the first and corresponding author of this paper. The Institute of New Energy and Low-Carbon Technology of our university and the Institute of Deep Earth Sciences and Green Energy of Shenzhen University are the joint corresponding work units
“Here we propose a direct seawater electrolysis method for hydrogen production that radically addresses the side-reaction and corrosion problems. A demonstration system was stably operated at a current density of 250 milliamperes per square centimetre for over 3,200 hours under practical application conditions without failure. This strategy realizes efficient, size-flexible and scalable direct seawater electrolysis in a way similar to freshwater splitting without a notable increase in operation cost, and has high potential for practical application. Importantly, this configuration and mechanism promises further applications in simultaneous water-based effluent treatment and resource recovery and hydrogen generation in one step.”(Patents: CN202110197054; CN114481164a; CN202210704439; CN2022107488884; PCT/CN2022/128225)
As the reviewers of Nature put it, "This work provides an attractive strategy to use non drinking water for the production of sustainable fuels in society and ecology. I think this is a major breakthrough.” This technology can integrate "the utilization of renewable energy such as offshore wind power - the utilization of seawater resources - the production of hydrogen energy", transforming the inexhaustible "sea water resources" into "sea water energy" in a real sense. It is expected to become the key to the large-scale development of far-reaching renewable power in the sea, and accelerate the formation of China's original "marine green hydrogen" global emerging industry with multiple energy complementarities. The review experts ofNaturecommented: ‘Few papers can convincingly achieve large-scale and stable hydrogen production from seawater, but the work of this paper has exactly achieved this. They have perfectly solved the harmful corrosivity, which has long plagued the field of hydrogen production from seawater, and will open the door to low-cost fuel production, which is expected to promote change towards a more sustainable world.’
Design of the SES
Scale-up and generality
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05379-5
