According to a study conducted by scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, perovskite materials have the potential to play a significant role in a process for renewable hydrogen production.
Hydrogen has emerged as a critical carrier for renewable energy storage, as an alternative for fossil fuels used in transportation, ammonia manufacturing, and other industrial applications. The ability to accomplish the Department of Energy’s Hydrogen Energy Earthshot—a recently stated target of reducing the cost of clean hydrogen by 80 percent to $1 per kilogram in a decade—is critical to the successful use of hydrogen as a fuel.
The NREL scientists examined a new water splitting technology called solar thermochemical hydrogen (STCH) production, which has the potential to be more energy efficient than the more conventional electrolysis method of hydrogen production. Electrolysis is a chemical process that requires electricity to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. STCH is a two-step chemical process that involves heating metal oxides to temperatures greater than 1,400 degrees Celsius and then reoxidizing them with steam at lower temperatures to generate hydrogen.
“It’s certainly a very challenging field, and it has a lot of research questions still unanswered, mainly on the materials perspective,” said Zhiwen Ma, a senior engineer at NREL and lead author of a new paper, “System and Technoeconomic Analysis of Solar Thermochemical Hydrogen Production,” which appears in the journal Renewable Energy. His co-authors, all from NREL, are Patrick Davenport and Genevieve Saur.
“The material has not necessarily been found,” Saur said, “but this analysis is to provide some boundaries for where we think the costs will be if the materials meet some of the targets and expectations that the research community envisions.”
This research is funded by the Department of Energy’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office.
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