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A representation of the team’s bipolar membrane system that converts seawater into hydrogen gas. Credit: Nina Fujikawa/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory The 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 University, University of Oregon, and Manchester Metropolitan University has discovered a method to extract hydrogen from the ocean. They accomplish this by funneling seawater through a double-membrane system and...

A silicon-based powder that generates hydrogen when mixed into water EPRO Advance Technology Stir this silicon-based powder into water, and hydrogen will bubble out, ready for immediate use. Hong Kong company EPRO Advance Technology (EAT) says its Si+ powder offers an instant end to the difficulties of shipping and storing green energy. This is the second powdered hydrogen advance we've learned about this week, designed to solve the same problems: transporting hydrogen is difficult, dangerous and expensive, whether the costs are for cryogenic cooling in a liquid hydrogen system, or for compression to around 700 times the normal sea-level air...

Ning Yan and co-workers grew their nanogardens on a cloth consisting of carbon fibers of around 10 micrometers in diameter, a common electrode material in the fuel cell and electrolyser industries. The gardening started with depositing a layer of "soil" by hydrothermally encapsulating the fibers with a dense layer of cobalt hydroxide. This layer increased the structural stability of the nanostructures. Through variation of the ion concentration and temperature, they were able to induce the "sprouting" of grass-like features that are strongly "rooted" in the soil. These grasses have an average length of 1.5 mm and a thickness of around...

Pure hydrogen fuel is non-polluting. Current methods of extracting hydrogen, however, use energy derived from sources that pollute. Finding ways to use the sun's energy to split water to extract hydrogen would make for a truly clean energy source. Several research efforts are using materials engineered at the molecular scale to tap the sun as an energy source to extract hydrogen from water. Researchers from Pennsylvania State University have constructed a material made from titanium dioxide nanotubes that is 97 percent efficient at harvesting the ultraviolet portion of the sun's light and 6.8 percent efficient at extracting hydrogen from water....

Copper -- the stuff of pennies and tea kettles -- is also one of the few metals that can turn carbon dioxide into hydrocarbon fuels with relatively little energy. When fashioned into an electrode and stimulated with voltage, copper acts as a strong catalyst, setting off an electrochemical reaction with carbon dioxide that reduces the greenhouse gas to methane or methanol. Various researchers around the world have studied copper’s potential as an energy-efficient means of recycling carbon dioxide emissions in powerplants: Instead of being released into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide would be circulated through a copper catalyst and turned into...

An inkjet printer has been repurposed to create a huge library of potential catalysts. To make the technology work with inorganic reagents that have different chemistries, a collaboration between chemists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, US, and Zhejiang University in China, has created special 'inks' made of colloidal nanoparticles of different metal precursors and polymers that direct the formation of the resulting nanoparticle structures.Different nanoparticle inks can then be loaded into seperate ink containers and combined in precise amounts, resulting in up to 1 million new formulations an hour, containing up to eight different components. That resulting...

As the world's accessible oil reserves dwindle, natural gas has become an increasing important energy source. The primary component of natural gas is methane, which has the advantage of releasing less carbon dioxide when it's burned than do many other hydrocarbon fuels. But because of the very stable structure of the methane molecule, it can be difficult to access the energy stored within. When unburned methane escapes into the atmosphere, it's a greenhouse gas 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Now, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, along with collaborators from Italy and Spain, have created a material that...

Enlarge Image Artificial leaf. A new device absorbs sunlight (blue) and sends that energy to catalysts that split water (green) and generate hydrogen gas (black). Credit: S. Y. Reece et al./Science Two independent research teams report today in Science that they've taken key strides toward harnessing the energy in sunlight to synthesize chemical fuels. If the new work can be improved, scientists could utilize Earth's most abundant source of renewable energy to power everything from industrial plants to cars and trucks without generating additional greenhouse gases. Today, humans consume an average of 15 trillion watts of power, 85% of...

Contact: Michael Mitchellmichael.mitchell@epfl.ch 41-798-103-107Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne A chance discovery may revolutionize hydrogen production Molybdenum-based catalysts now enable a more cost-effective hydrogen production IMAGE: Using a molybdenum based catalyst, hydrogen bubbles are made cheaply and at room temperature. Click here for more information. Producing hydrogen in a sustainable way is a challenge and production cost is too high. A team led by EPFL Professor Xile Hu has discovered that a molybdenum based catalyst is produced at room temperature, inexpensive and efficient. The results of the research are published online in Chemical Science Thursday the 14th of April. An international...

Enlarge Image Catalysts are prized for their ability to speed chemical reactions by grabbing molecular building blocks and knitting them together. But most catalysts are either on or off—and there hasn't been much scientists could do to flip the switch. Now, however, researchers have created a sandwich-shaped scaffold for turning on and off nearly any catalyst at will. If developed further, the new design could allow researchers to detect minute amounts of a wide range of small molecules—from explosives such as TNT to neurotransmitters that carry messages in the nervous system. Unlike industrial catalysts, many enzymes—biological catalysts made from...

French scientists have demonstrated the potential of a new fuel cell catalyst inspired by hydrogenase enzymes. Although its activity doesn't yet match that of platinum, the researchers say it is the first useful biomimetic catalyst capable of operating under fuel cell conditions.In a hydrogen economy, power would be generated by oxidising stored hydrogen in fuel cells. This reversible reaction - the opposite of which produces hydrogen through the electrolysis of water - can be driven by platinum-based catalysts. Nature, however, in hydrogenase enzymes, has evolved a way of doing this without the need for such rare metals and thus borrowing...

The discovery of a bimetallic palladium(III) complex that can catalyse formation of carbon-heteroatom bonds adds a new facet to our understanding of the chemistry of one of the most widely-used metals in catalysis, say US chemists.Tobias Ritter and David Powers from Harvard University, Massachusetts, have shown for the first time that a palladium(III) complex is responsible for conversion of a C-H bond to a C-Cl bond. While such reactions were known before, the nature of the catalyst had not been studied in detail. 'This work was about analysis of how this kind of transformation works,' says Ritter, 'and we found this Pd(III)...

New studies with different fuel cell catalysts show promising results As the automotive industry is betting that hydrogen can become the fuel of the future, technology is taking steps to bring that hope closer to reality. Three papers being published by the journal Science promise to fill some of the most significant gaps in what could someday be an environmentally friendly cycle of hydrogen production and consumption. --snip-- Platinum is also commonly used on the consumption side, in the fuel cells that turn hydrogen back into water and produce electric currents. In Science‘s August 1 issue, researchers at Monash University...

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have developed an advanced concept in nanoscale catalyst engineering – a combination of experiments and simulations that will bring polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells for hydrogen-powered vehicles closer to massive commercialization. Sponsored Links (Ads by Google) The results of their findings identify a clear trend in the behavior of extended and nanoscale surfaces of platinum-bimetallic alloy. Additionally, the techniques and concepts derived from the research program are expected to make overarching contributions to other areas of science well beyond the focus on electrocatalysis. The Argonne researchers, Nenad Markovic and Vojislav...