Flying cars, hoverboards and infinite energy from a cup of water are things that not long ago seemed impossible to achieve.

While we have a very long road ahead of us, fans might remember the iconic scene from the movie Chain Reaction (1996). In this scene, dr. Barkley is holding a glass of water and is presenting a new method of producing energy from a glass of water, enough energy to power the city of Chicago for a week. Featuring Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman, it is about the possibility to separate water into oxygen and hydrogen using a particular sound frequency.

While it feels almost like a dream, in the present days, water is split into oxygen and hydrogen, by a reaction called electrolysis, for example. For this reaction to take place, there needs to be a catalyst present and sometimes could be a rare metal like iridium, which is expensive and hard to find.

A new research paper presented by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology talks about how researchers have developed a new type of catalyst material, called a metal hydroxide-organic framework (MHOF), which is made of inexpensive and abundant components. This will help speed up the process of splitting water molecules and will pave the road to a new possible type of fuel for transportation.

The findings of this study are described in the journal Nature Materials, in a paper by MIT postdoc Shuai Yuan, graduate student Jiayu Peng, Professor Yang Shao-Horn, Professor Yuriy Román-Leshkov, and nine others.

Having clean energy could solve a large portion of the problems we face nowadays with global warming and climate change.

The production of Hydrogen (H2) at an industrial scale is made by reforming natural gas, which in turn produces greenhouse gas carbon dioxide while consuming a large amount of nonrenewable energy.

So, there have been developed many green energy systems that could help us achieve the goals, and some even found a way to split saltwater, a process that is known to be tedious, due to the corrosiveness of the salt. For example, this study from 2019, uses a nickel-iron hydroxide catalyst, two extremely abundant materials found in nature.

The materials were only used in the lab at a small scale, and it should begin testing in a commercial setting in the following years.

Science takes a long way in some respects, but we hope that everyone’s attention is now drawn to the need to develop clean energy and make the process in a safe way for the environment.

Source:

Yuan, S., Peng, J., Cai, B. et al. Tunable metal hydroxide–organic frameworks for catalysing oxygen evolution. Nat. Mater. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-022-01199-0

Yun Kuang, Michael J. Kenney, et al. Solar-driven, highly sustained splitting of seawater into hydrogen and oxygen fuels. PNAS (2019). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1900556116

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220225135649.htm