News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Hydrogen production from the air by wongarsu on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @06:40AM (#32748886)
If I read the abstract correct it's doing electrolysis of moisture in the air. That's a process that inherently uses more energy then you get back out of the hydrogen. After all burning hydrogen just turns it back into water, and we can't have more than 100% round-trip efficiency.

I could imagine it as a viable storage technology, e.g. if you want to install a solar farm in a remote location you could have it produce hydrogen from the air and sell that.

Re:Hydrogen production from the air by ncmncm on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @06:49AM (#32748928)
Obviously all conversions involve losses. If you have electric power but need hydrogen, you have to make the hydrogen, whatever the loss. This method has lower loss than others.

Probably ammonia will be a better transport medium than hydrogen, but you need hydrogen to make ammonia.

Re:Hydrogen production from the air by saalweachter on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @10:07AM (#32750843)
Regardless of energy transport, we will be making huge amounts of ammonia using green hydrogen in the future.

We need ammonia for fertilizer, and right now we get the hydrogen for that from methane, which can't be the plan long-term. At the moment switching to hydrolysis would double to quadruple the cost of the hydrogen, but eventually falling electricity and rising natural gas prices should invert that. The Haber-Bosch process itself doesn't require petrochemicals, it's just the cheapest way to run it in the current market.

Re:Hydrogen production from the air by ncmncm on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @10:41AM (#32751277)
"electrolysis". Hydrolysis is a wholly different activity.

The intent of the method presented is to make electrolysis energetically cheaper. It might end up financially cheaper, depending on what the apparatus costs, which will of course start out high and come down if used much.

Apparently there are practical catalytic processes to go directly from N2 and H2O to NH3 and O2. Everything will compete, and a few processes will win. Tolerance of impurities in the water has often been a problem. Where you have to distill the water first, that increases cost.