An Australian startup has developed a way to create hydrogen fuel cheaply and without emitting massive amounts of planet-overheating air pollution in the process, Bloomberg reported. The new technology could be a huge deal for clean energy adoption.
While hydrogen fuel has been hailed by some as the future of clean energy, as it produces zero planet-overheating pollution when burned, it also has some severe limitations. The processes used to create the fuel are typically highly polluting, per Earthjustice, defeating the purpose. Alternative processes developed to create hydrogen fuel cleanly have, so far, been prohibitively expensive.
The new technology from startup Hysata aims to solve both of those problems at once. The company's method relies on a process called "capillary action," one of the forces that trees use to draw water from the ground. By essentially mimicking the way that trees work, Hysata was able to create a cell that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen with an efficiency of 95%. That number astounded even the company's founders.
"I couldn't believe it was real," said Gerry Swiegers, a professor at the University of Wollongong and Hysata's co-founder. "I thought there may be an error in our experiments, so we got my best people to reproduce the experiments repeatedly. And we kept getting these good results."
Swiegers predicted that this new method's cost savings in the hydrogen fuel-making process are huge. And if green hydrogen becomes more economically viable to produce, it could soon be cleanly powering even more of our previously most heavily polluting vessels, such as airplanes and cargo ships.
In order to reach the goal of emitting no more net planet-overheating air pollution by 2050 — which is crucial to protecting humans from extreme weather caused by rising temperatures — we will need to rely on every source of clean energy we have at our disposal, including wind, solar, wave energy, and green hydrogen.
According to Bloomberg, Hysata's CEO, Paul Barrett, expects the company's technology to be commercially available as early as 2025. The startup received $111 million from investors, including British oil giant BP Plc, which it will use to scale its technology, workforce, and manufacturing capacity.
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