Transport and storage of hydrogen as energy sources are vital for our future. A microbe's enzyme show how to produce hydrogen in a faster and cheaper way.
The future of energy lies in transforming electrical energy into chemical energy that can be used again if necessary. The main problem is achieving this as fast and inexpensive enough to be a viable solution.
Wherever there is a source of energy, even in the comfort of your own home, hydrogen can be extracted from water. With a storage cell, it can be converted back into electricity. As long as the electricity needed for the process comes from renewable sources such as windmills or solar cells, it is a clean energy, hydrogen is a versatile energy carrier and can be made from environmentally friendly sources such as wind or solar energy.
Storage cells need a catalyst to accelerate chemical reactions for conversion of hydrogen to water and electricity. Platinum is excellent in this role, but is a very rare and expensive.
Some microbes produce enzymes for billions of years, enzymes that can can take this role with cheap metals such as iron and nickel. The problem is that these enzymes are difficult to obtain and do not survive outside microbes.
Researchers have managed to create a synthetic version, more resistant to these enzymes. So far, managed to take the first step, uniting the two atoms of hydrogen extracted from water and generate hydrogen gas. Furthermore, the synthetic enzyme behaves even better than natural, is 10 times faster and produce 100,000 molecules of hydrogen gas every second.
However, despite the increased speed, the process consumes too much energy to be viable in practice. Even so, is a first step in obtaining low-cost hydrogen, using iron and nickel catalysts, according to the authors of the research.
by "environment clean generations"
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