BP, Nouryon, and Port of Rotterdam Explore Green Hydrogen via Water Electrolysis

May 10, 2019

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by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) From the Netherlands arrives the news that BP, Nouryon (formerly AkzoNobel Specialty Chemicals), and the Port of Rotterdam have joined forces to explore the opportunity of making ‘green hydrogen’ via water electrolysis for BP’s refinery in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, which has the potential for significant reductions in CO2 emissions.

The refinery currently uses hydrogen made from hydrocarbons, to desulphurize products. Replacing this entirely with green hydrogen produced from water using renewable energy could potentially result in a reduction of 350,000 tons of CO2 emissions per year based on current circumstances.

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New path to green hydrogen production via algae

In addition to this new project, there’s research afoot in the hydrogen field worth watching.

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Lead researcher Katarzyna Sokół at St John’s College explains: “Hydrogenase is an enzyme present in algae that is capable of reducing protons into hydrogen. During evolution, this process has been deactivated because it wasn’t necessary for survival but we successfully managed to bypass the inactivity to achieve the reaction we wanted – splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen.” So, with this advance, solar energy, via photosynthesis, can be used to produce green hydrogen, which in turn is an important energy carrier, and can be used in stationary or mobile fuel cells. Check out the Toyota Mirai here, by the way.

The story summary is here and the underlying paper was published in Nature, here.

New pathway to green hydrogen via saltwater

Meanwhile, reporters working on the Stanford campus report on a new means to generate hydrogen fuel from saltwater instead of expensive and hard-to-fine purified water.

Here’s the problem in generating hydrogen via traditional water-splitting techniques, which use electric current to supply the energy for the reaction. The anodes simply corrode, and in fact they corrode faster when higher amounts of electric current are applied. In fact, they fall apart in as little as 12 hours.

But a Stanford team has found a new coating for the anode which repels chloride, making it possible to use cheap seawater with a system that can run for more than 1,000 hours, and handle up to 10 times more electric current. The more current, the faster rate for water splitting.

More about this advance, right here.

The DOE investing in hydrogen technology R&D

Meanwhile, the DOE is taking a lead and investing heavily in hydrogen’s future. Last month the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy released a Funding Opportunity Notice aimed at priorities in hydrogen among other topics.

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We noted recently that ENI signed an R&D collaboration to produce hydrogen from non-recyclable plastic packaging waste, here. We looked at that algae proton pathway in work from Germany, hereand we highlighted purple bacteria that turns sewage into hydrogen energy, here.

The Bottom Line

Hydrogen continues to march along. We covered the field in some detail in Tapping biogas for the renewable hydrogen that we really, really need here and Affordable, green hydrogen — it is here, near, or nowhere in sight (again)? here and Are electrics a bridging technology, and hydrogen fuel cells the future? here.

Hydrogen has its share of skeptics — no one questions that fuel cells work — in fact, they provided the Apollo Moon shot with power. It is a question of economics, and infrastructure to transport hydrogen to support fuels at scale. READ MORE

Scientists pioneer a new way to turn sunlight into fuel (University of Cambridge)