Highly Efficient Oxygen Catalyst Found 156
eldavojohn writes "As detailed in the journal Science (abstract), a new compound composed of cobalt, iron and oxygen with other metals presents us with the most efficient way (found so far) of splitting oxygen atoms from water. These ten known compounds provide a reactivity rate that is at least an order of magnitude higher than what is currently known as the gold standard in such reactions. During their research, the team discovered that the reactivity is dependent on the configuration of the outermost electron of transition metal ions, which they exploited to develop this efficient catalyst. For rechargeable batteries and hydrogen fuel, this is exciting work from MIT's Jin Suntivich, Kevin J. May, Hubert A. Gasteiger, and Yang Shao-Horn, and the University of Texas's John B. Goodenough."
Looks like it was... (Score:1)
More than Goodenough.
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I was expecting Johnny B. Goodenough
I'll get my coat...
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Hydrogen (Score:5, Funny)
But I thought it was hydrogen we wanted from water. What good is being able to split off oxygen?
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Damn, you beat me to it... :-(
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But I thought it was hydrogen we wanted from water. What good is being able to split off oxygen?
God, I hope you're being sarcastic...
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But I thought it was hydrogen we wanted from water. What good is being able to split off oxygen?
God, I hope you're being sarcastic...
Ditto
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But I thought it was hydrogen we wanted from water. What good is being able to split off oxygen?
God, I hope you're being sarcastic...
Ditto
But I thought it was hydrogen we wanted from water. What good is being able to split off oxygen?
God, I hope you're being sarcastic...
Ditto
But I thought it was hydrogen we wanted from water. What good is being able to split off oxygen?
God, I hope you're being sarcastic...
Ditto
- I was, and i think the poster was, too.
God
Re:Hydrogen (Score:5, Funny)
The thing about Water, is that if you pull out the Oxygen, you end up with Hydrogen. It's pretty cool how that happens, I know.
Re:Hydrogen (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless of course the hydrogen binds to another chemical in the process of catalysing.
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A catalyst is, by definition, not consumed in the catalyzed reaction. If they created a catalyst, then it will not bind to the hydrogen.
Re:Hydrogen (Score:5, Interesting)
No, but other things may bind to the hydrogen, especially if the reaction occurs in open air. I thought about this after I posted, and went and checked the article. The article states that another catalyst is needed to separated out the hydrogen, indicating that it does bind to something other than the oxygen or the catalyst. The reason the article focusses on the oxygen-separating catalyst is that it is the bottle-neck, and not the hydrogen-separating catalyst.
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Hydrogen is such a clingy bitch sometimes.
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I don't know... That Hydrogen! I just don't trust her, she'll bind with damn near anyone, and give her just a little oxidizer and BOOM, there goes that explosive temper.
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I thought it was just a mediocre car...
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The thing about this catalyst is, it works in alkaline solutions to produce water and oxygen. From the article (I know, I'm not supposed to actually read on /.) the reaction is 4OH- > O2 + 2 H2O + 4e-
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Just for a split second, I almost had an aneurysm. Thank you.
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Hydrogen aside, there are plenty of situations where it would be handy to have a ready source of oxygen. E
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The electricity in the grid could also come from fission, wind or water. Especially wind+hydrogen is interesting, as hydrogen could function as the a buffer demand to soak up extra wind power in times of high winds.
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Because they have no place to put the endless tons of soot! You insensitive clod! You want to save the world? Invent a delicious high fiber cereal made from soot!
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Mmmm.. Open fire on a submarine.. or a spaceship.. That sounds lovely, as long as it's not the ship I'm on. Let me know how that works out for you.
Compressing pure carbon may not have the desired results. You'd probably prefer coal or charcoal. You may impress your girlfriend with the compressed coal though.
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I was just bringing that from the gp of your post.
I'm sure party animals over at NASA could find something to do with hydrogen, carbon dust, and salt water (err, urine).
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I'm sure there are some very useful things carbon can be turned into, other than coal. Imagine if you have solar panels/nuclear reactor providing energy, you split your water and CO2 and you get H2, O2 and C. I wonder just how many useful compounds are made up of those 3 elements.
Hope? (Score:1)
Let's hope this works out better than the prospects for cold fusion.
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Nope. It is a MIT press release of their typical "world changing" science that, for some reason, never sees the light of day. They make one of these astounding announcements every few months.
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But, I want my fuel cell powered laptop that recharges quickly and easily :(
Water water everywhere not a drop to drink (Score:1)
This device is perfect for those days when breathing is more important than drinking.
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This device is perfect for those days when breathing is more important than drinking.
If the reaction rate is good enough then getting water out of this is a matter of re-combining the H and O. I guess the open question is how the energy rates compare with RO.
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Water + Energy (+ Catalyst) => Hydrogen + Oxygen (+ Catalyst)
Hydrogen + Oxygen + Energy => Water + Energy
Notice anything funny about that? I do... if the energies were just right (namely, less in than out), it'd be a perpetual motion machine.
Hint: the energies aren't right, and it's not. You'll have to put more energy into it than you'll get back in a useful form. No catalyst will ever get you to the point where it takes less energy to split the water than you'd get back by recombining the H and O.
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Hint: the energies aren't right, and it's not. You'll have to put more energy into it than you'll get back in a useful form. No catalyst will ever get you to the point where it takes less energy to split the water than you'd get back by recombining the H and O.
That doesn't matter if you're trying to make drinking water. RO uses lots of energy too, both on the manufacture of the membranes and in the running of the plants.
Yes, but you're still forgetting something (Score:2)
You might have to have pure water to begin with for this catalyst to give you pure hydrogen and pure oxygen. They probably started with DI water from their RO unit, before they added whatever alkali they needed to activate the catalyst.
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If it works with salt water then you're not taking away drinking water...
In fact by combining the Oxygen and Hydrogen seperated afterwards you can get safe drinking water from a non-safe source (such as the ocean)
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I find that liquid water with the oxygen removed is generally far too cold to drink comfortably.
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Yeah, but you only have such experiences when you're under pressure. You're better off with the vapors, trust me. It'll be a gas. And not like those experiences with the free radicals, either.
Conservation of matter. . . (Score:2)
Chemical reactions do not destroy or change the elements in the compounds. Water is a Hydrogen atom plus an oxygen atom. Nature has been splitting water, then re-forming it for those same billions of years you're talking about. We're not really doing anything new here. We're just doing it in a new way.
When the hydrogen gets used, mostly it'll be "used" by recombining it with oxygen, either in a combustion reaction, in which case the water is re-formed and vented into the atmosphere where it will eventually
Correction: Two hydrogen atoms (Score:2)
Slight slip up while typing. What I typed was, "Water is a Hydrogen atom plus an oxygen atom.". What I *meant* to type is, "Water is two Hydrogen atoms plus an oxygen atom."
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What? You think Slashdotters are pedantic enough to see that you mis-typed your response and call you on it anyway? What do you think we are?
Oh wait, I think I answered my own question ...
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Besides the other points, (ice) comets are raining water on us constantly.
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Go Johnny (Score:1)
Bollocks (Score:1)
I just posted my own version before finding this
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But he could read a reaction just like ringing a bell
Go go! Go johnny go!
Catalyst Theory? (Score:3)
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Is there a good theory on how catalysts work...?
Maybe John B has a Goodenough theory for you?
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Re:Catalyst Theory? (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about this paper. I haven't read it yet, but from the abstract, it looks like it's about a group of researchers finding a single parameter that controls the activity of a particular, narrow class of materials for a particular reaction, and then exploiting that to create an optimal catalyst within this class of materials for that reaction. And for doing that, they were published in Science, which suggests that it's fairly clever, important, and original work. That should give you an idea about what the state of the art is in catalyst design.
John Goodenough, by the way, is about 90 years old, still sharp as a tack, and a world expert in metal oxides (what the catalysts in this study were made out of). Back in the 70s, he "invented" (that's probably not the best word) the cathode material that's still being used in most commercial Li-ion batteries. I just say that to make the point that this research was probably not something that many people have the depth of understanding to do.
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I'm surprised.
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Some questions here. (Score:4, Interesting)
First, "at a rate 10 times the previous gold standard" is interesting, but meaningless. What is the actual rate, and how is it measured?
Second, what is the cost and availability of the materials needed for the catalyst? Does this require some kind of unobtainium? The article is very vague here.
Third, Is this something we can practically manufacture in any kind of real scale or are we talking microscopic results measurable only in the lab?
Re:Some questions here. (Score:5, Informative)
If I'm not mistaken, the materials are listed right there, in the abstract:
Ba0.5Sr0.5Co0.8Fe0.2O3
(Barium, Strontium, Cobalt and Iron, all abundant)
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First, "at a rate 10 times the previous gold standard" is interesting, but meaningless.
Rp = Reactions per time unit
Rn = 10 (Rp)
For Rp previous best rate, Rn new rate
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That still doesn't mean much. It would be nice to know what percentage of incoming energy from the light is actually converted into splitting water molecules.
Does this compare favorably with a regular PV cell + electrolysis, for instance ?
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You mean the second airplane flew only 120 feet, and the first one flew a foot.
And the point about 10x efficiency is well understood, but it would be nice if the old or new efficiency was mentioned in the article using some reference that could be understood.
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First, "at a rate 10 times the previous gold standard" is interesting, but meaningless.
Rp = Reactions per time unit
Rn = 10 (Rp)
For Rp previous best rate, Rn new rate
Rp is just the benchmark of a standard method, not the previous best rate. So this isn't necessarily a 10x improvement over previous methods. Kinda like saying a standard lead-acid battery is the gold standard for batteries.
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Well, it might be if we could just perfect Alchemy.
Won't save us. (Score:2)
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I smell a new SYFY movie (Score:2)
Cobalt-9. All the water on Earth gets transformed due to this. Then explodes in a highly combustible way.
How does this catalyst work? (Score:3)
Do you still run electricity through the water, but first you 'dope' the water with the catalyst, and the hydrogen/oxygen separation happens with same rate with less energy input/faster rate with same input?
They mentioned something in the article about an "artificial leaf", so does that mean that you use sunlight as the energy input instead of electricity, and the sunlight drives the reaction with the catalyst?
Re: Can't reduce the energy required, period. (Score:1)
Sorry, there is no way to reduce the amount of energy it takes to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen.
This magic catalyst makes it go faster, but there is an absolute, defined energy required, and it would take an Act of God to modify this.
If you want hydrogen fuel, great, but you have to put in as much energy as you get out later. Some forms of energy are more convenient than others, for instance "sunlight in desert" is less useful than, say a couple gallons of gasoline. Catalysts let you shuffle the
100% efficiency. . . (Score:3)
Wait, so you're saying that we were already at 100% efficiency? My understanding of it (which may be flawed), is that previously, with electrolysis, a lot of energy was being *wasted*? That is, it wasn't being used to split they water, but I dunno, generate waste heat or something?
So, unless you are at 100% efficiency, you should be able to generate hydrogen with less energy if you can find a way to reduce the *wasted* part of the energy. There is, sure, an upper limit on how low the energy can go, since I
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You are correct, there is a definitive minimum energy required to split up a water molecule and get out hydrogen and oxygen. This energy is the same as the potential energy that would be released if you burned the two gases together in an exothermic reaction, getting the water back. Typically though electrolysis uses much more energy than that, because there is a certain "activation energy" threshold that you have to reach before the reaction can occur. Without a catalyst you have to put in extra energy
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"plus the lower environmental impact."
This is a statement I see repeated very frequently (in some form or another) by environmentalists. It may even be true. The problem is, I've yet to see a rigorous defense of this claim. . .
Most environmentalists don't seem to take into account:
The rare earths and toxic compounds needed to build lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of Wind Turbines, Solar PV panels, or Solar reflectors (for concentrated solar-thermal power plants).
When you mine rare-earths, you will probab
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How does your list of ecological atrocities compare to that for the extraction of fossil fuels? Unless it is wildly out of balance (and it's not), the net gain comes from not injecting X amount of mega-million-years-old sequestered carbon per joule created into the atmosphere.
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The turbines, panels, reflectors, etc are 'infrastructure' which exists in the current system of power plants as well. So generally speaking those cancel each other out - obviously not exactly but since you have to build multiple power plants composed of massive amounts of steel and other components. That requires significant mining and other processing befor
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See, this is one of those writeups that sounds entirely plausible, but isn't quantified.
You are assuming an aweful lot. This is NOT a rigorous defense of the claim. Has anyone done an actual study, which has been peer-reviewed and accepted as reasonable, which really tries to put some defensible numbers on such claims?
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying, I don't see the data. I think a lot of people underestimate just how much infrastructure you need to get a lot of "renewable" power.
Let's take, for exa
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This is wrong. It's not wrong that you can put solar panels on your roof. What's wrong is that you still need all the same infrastructure PLUS your solar panels
Correct. However I think you'll agree you'd need less of the infrastructure for power transmission because more power is being generated at the point of use. This is a significant reduction in what renewable needs versus conventional.
Some buildings are not suitable for being powered by rooftop solar panels
Solar film panels that st
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"Refuting my assumptions with your own unsubstantiated statements isn't much of a refutation ;-)"
Are you referring to the claim about needing about 3 and 1/2 times more nameplate capacity? Because I did substantiate it. I talked about the difference in capacity factors, which is where I derived that figure from. If the capacity factor of wind is 35%, you need almost 3 times as much capacity to generate the same power. If the capacity factor of Solar is, at best, 20%, you need a bit more than 4 times as much
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You are making the assumption that "one nameplate" costs exactly the same for all types of power generation. Perhaps solar costs more, perhaps less, for a "namepate" (a weird term I have never seen before). It does not confirm or deny your argument.
Also your capacities for solar are comparing them to how much energy they would generate if they faced the sun at a right angle for 24 hours a day. You might as well mark the capacity of a coal plant based on the potential energy of every C+H bond in the coal, no
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The problem with electrolytic hydrogen is that electricity is expensive, not that the process is inefficient.
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Hydrogen is only expensive because you have to pay for the fuel used to split the molecules. So now in hydrogen we have a way to actually store the energy of the sun/wind/earth for use at a later time and place. (Ok granted, oil technically does the same thing, but it takes a few million years to go from sun to fuel
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The source of energy might be free, but that doesn't mean the electricity generated from it is.
Nothing is 'free'. But with solar, you only pay for the infrastructure...which as it happens you also pay for with gas. Solar doesn't have the fuel part of the which is the lions share of what you pay at the pump.
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The electricity costs whatever it is worth at the power line, regardless of the source.
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The problem with electrolytic hydrogen is that electricity is expensive, not that the process is inefficient.
Well more accurately, it is both expensive and inefficient. The best catalysts (the ones which operate at the lowest overpotential) are often expensive iridium oxides. Catalysts made from more abundant elements tend to require a higher applied voltage, which reduces the efficiency of the system. That said, if you're burning natural gas to make electricity to split hydrogen from water, you're much better off steam reforming the methane directly to hydrogen in terms of efficiency.
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Ok, so since it's ultimately driven by electricity, it sounds like you could use other sources like hydro, geothermal, nuclear, or wind. The artificial leaf is a novel idea, but I'm also interested in how useful this application might be for industrial-scale hydrogen production using non-fossil-fuel energy sources other than sunlight.
Water Purification (Score:2)
This could be a source for water purification.
I would think you would need some way to reduce the salt first tho.
Perhaps large solar based plastic evaporator collectors. The condensate would flow into cells based on these catylsts producing clean water.
The "leafs" they showed here a few weeks ago might be a better solution tho.
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I'm not sure. Seems like it should be tho. just me not thinking.
But desalination plants use active filtering I believe so I guess condensation wouldn't have a high enough volume.
A joke. (Score:2)
It's friday... cut me a break.
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H2O walks into a Barium and says, "Lets split"
Gold? (Score:2)
Gold standard? I thought Platinum was the pretty standard cat in such cases?
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That last guy has the greatest name ever.
Don't know about best, but Goodenough.
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Not exactly.
If the catalyst were to lower the activation energy to, for example, the amount of energy present in water at 219 kelvin (around 4 degrees), then refrigerated water would simply fizz off when exposed to the catalyst. Water kept colder than the standard 4 degrees in the fridge--say 3.5 degrees--would remain water until some external force applied heat.
Of course we get the other obvious problem here. When you burn hydrogen and oxygen, you get water and heat; when you reverse this process, obv
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It's not going to get colder. You might want to study thermodynamics a bit!
To turn water into hydrogen + oxygen takes energy input. The huge deal with this announcement is that supposedly a larger percentage of that energy is used to split it, rather than turning *INTO* waste heat.
If your water-splitter got colder then you are using more than 100% of the input energy. Such a technology would have a lot larger implications than just making solar energy cheaper!
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It's not going to get colder. You might want to study thermodynamics a bit!
To turn water into hydrogen + oxygen takes energy input.
Look, it's this simple: Hydrogen + Oxygen = Water + Energy; therefor Water + Energy = Hydrogen + Oxygen.
As I said, a catalyst lowers the activation energy of a reaction. Think of it like an electric mold, a molecule shaped such that its charge structure attracts but also stretches another molecule. So the hydrogen pulls further from the oxygen, but no reaction occurs with the catalyst. Because of this stretch, the bonds are weakened, and lower levels of energy can break them.
Now, if you reduce the
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I'm not clear if you are *actually* claiming that a catalyst could in theory be so good that the reactor will freeze. If so you might want to check your facts.
Yes the reaction will stop if you lower the energy input enough. What I am saying is that it MUST stop before the energy input is lowered below the actual amount of useful energy contained in the reaction products. Therefore there will always be a non-negative amount of input energy going into waste heat. There is NO way the reactor will get colder.
If
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Look. It takes a certain amount of energy to burn things. Like paper has to reach a temperature of, let's say, 451 degrees farenheight to ignite. Now, in the presence of a catalyst (say a catalytic gas), paper's activation energy becomes lower. Paper will now ignite at 378 degrees farenheit. With me so far?
If we bring the temperature below 378 degrees farenheit, the paper will stop burning. Of course, once you ignite paper, the combustion reaction releases energy, keeping the temperature up and all