Researchers leverage renewable electricity for widespread, distributed hydrogen fuel production.
The idea of using ammonia as a carrier for hydrogen delivery has gained traction in recent years because ammonia is much easier to liquify than hydrogen and is therefore much easier to store and transport. Northwestern’s technological breakthrough overcomes several existing barriers to the production of clean hydrogen from ammonia.
“The bane for hydrogen fuel cells has been the lack of delivery infrastructure,” said Sossina Haile, lead author of the study. “It’s difficult and expensive to transport hydrogen, but an extensive ammonia delivery system already exists. There are pipelines for it. We deliver lots of ammonia all over the world for fertilizer. If you give us ammonia, the electrochemical systems we developed can convert that ammonia to fuel-cell-ready, clean hydrogen on-site at any scale.”
Haile is Walter P. Murphy Professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering with additional appointments in applied physics and chemistry. She also is co-director at the University-wide Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern.
In the study, Haile and her research team report they are able to conduct the ammonia-to-hydrogen conversion using renewable electricity instead of fossil-fueled thermal energy because the process functions at much lower temperatures than traditional methods (250 degrees Celsius as opposed to 500 to 600 degrees Celsius). Second, the new technique generates pure hydrogen that does not need to be separated from any unreacted ammonia or other products. Third, the process is efficient because all of the electrical current supplied to the device directly produces hydrogen, without any loss to parasitic reactions. As an added advantage, because the hydrogen produced is pure, it can be directly pressurized for high-density storage by simply ramping up the electrical power.
To accomplish the conversion, the researchers built a unique electrochemical cell with a proton-conducting membrane and integrated it with an ammonia-splitting catalyst.
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