Nova Scotia researchers helping to fill in pieces of green-hydrogen puzzle | 24CA News

In a laboratory tucked away on the fourth flooring of the chemistry constructing at Dalhousie University, affiliate professor Mita Dasog factors to an illuminated tube containing a brown liquid, which researchers hope will assist shift society off fossil fuels.

The tube represents one a part of the lab’s work on producing inexperienced hydrogen by synthetic photosynthesis.

 “We’re essentially trying to mimic what plants do,” Dasog says. 

It’s a part of a spread of analysis the lab is endeavor that additionally consists of investigating methods to carry prices down, in addition to working with “alternative technologies.” 

Both the provincial and federal governments have set formidable targets for inexperienced hydrogen manufacturing. The federal authorities plans to start out shipments of inexperienced hydrogen to Germany by 2025. Nova Scotia goals to start granting leases in 2030 for offshore wind that may assist inexperienced hydrogen manufacturing. 

But at the same time as curiosity in inexperienced hydrogen grows, advocates and researchers say there are nonetheless boundaries to beat earlier than the promise of supporting the power transition may be fulfilled.

The price drawback

Nearly the entire hydrogen at present produced in Canada comes from fossil fuels — so-called “grey” and “black” hydrogen — which contributes to greenhouse gasoline emissions. 

But it may also be produced from water, utilizing electrical energy to separate the molecules into hydrogen and oxygen by a course of known as electrolysis. When that electrical energy comes from renewable sources, the outcome is called inexperienced hydrogen. 

But producing it’s costly, Dasog says. The price is roughly 3 times as a lot as gray hydrogen, partially as a result of valuable and uncommon metals like platinum and iridium are utilized in electrolysis. So Dasog’s lab is investigating supplies which have the identical properties however are extra ample, which might carry down the associated fee. 

After screening “hundreds and hundreds of materials,” Dasog says, they’ve discovered a inexpensive various that works in addition to platinum. 

But the lab’s work specializing in synthetic photosynthesis might scale back prices in one other means – by eradicating the necessity for electrical energy altogether.

This method makes use of what’s known as a photocatalyst. In Dasog’s lab, they’re utilizing supplies product of silicon which might be thinner than a billionth of a metre throughout and soak up daylight the way in which vegetation’ leaves do. These tiny photocatalysts may be suspended in water, or painted or printed on a floor, and react with the encompassing liquid.

“We can directly use the sunlight just like plants do to split water to make that hydrogen,” she says. “So we remove the capital costs associated with electricity generation.”

Sarrah Putwa is a graduate pupil in Dasog’s lab who’s engaged on bettering the longevity of the nanoparticles, which might make the know-how extra versatile. 

“We could have water running over a bed of these photocatalysts, and there would be hydrogen being produced,” she says. 

Putwa is from Tanzania, an East African nation extremely susceptible to the consequences of local weather change, and says she’s motivated by the know-how’s potential. 

“Working on a project that allows for the production in a sustainable fashion, I get that it won’t solve the energy crisis, but it definitely plays an important role in alleviating it.”

While the same method has been utilized in a pilot venture in Japan, synthetic photosynthesis would not exist but on the business degree. Part of the issue, Dasog says, is that there was a scarcity of funding within the area, a problem that was additionally recognized within the federal authorities’s hydrogen technique. 

“Now there’s a sudden interest and people want these mature technologies that unfortunately don’t exist,” she says, “they have not been able to go from lab to market because we haven’t had the funding mechanisms to do so.”

Renewables ‘needs to be a precedence’

Some advocates say the federal and provincial give attention to creating inexperienced hydrogen for export additionally ignores one other a part of the power transition: the usage of renewables to energy the grid straight.

Brenna Walsh, power co-ordinator with the Halifax-based Ecology Action Centre, says inexperienced hydrogen might assist deal with the intermittency of renewables. For instance, by utilizing wind energy to generate hydrogen when extra energy is being produced, that power might be saved for when the wind is not blowing.

But producing inexperienced hydrogen is a much less environment friendly use of renewable power than merely directing that power to the grid, Walsh says. 

“We currently have a grid that’s 50 per cent [fuelled by] coal. And so if we can have this renewable that directly displaces fossil fuels, that is something that should be prioritized,” she says. 

“Focusing on kind of the incumbent renewables — wind and solar — and how we can move those onto the grid in ways that are effective, should be, I would think, a higher focus.”

Nonetheless, Walsh says there’s nonetheless a long-term function for hydrogen in hard-to-decarbonize sectors, corresponding to fertilizers, aviation, marine transportation and long-distance trucking. 

Storage, transportation challenges

Some of the analysis underway in Dasog’s lab might be utilized in these contexts. One instance is a venture to make hydrogen from a powder that has obtained funding from Innovacorp to construct as much as business scale. 

This might make hydrogen simpler to move and retailer. 

Because hydrogen is a gasoline, it occupies a big quantity. Export initiatives have been proposed in Nova Scotia to transform it to ammonia or to compress it, however each of these processes require power.

Companies have additionally taken out licenses to discover utilizing Nova Scotia’s salt caverns for storage, and the province lately amended the Underground Hydrocarbons Storage Act to incorporate hydrogen.

The analysis at Dasog’s lab provides a special type of storage resolution — utilizing powdered silicon to generate hydrogen by a chemical response as wanted.

“This is hydrogen, but in a different form,” says Sarah Martell, a PhD pupil within the Dasog lab who’s researching on-demand hydrogen. “It’s easier to carry around a jar of this brown powder compared to lugging around a gas tank, for example. So paired with a portable fuel cell, you could get electricity whenever you need it.”

Martell says they’ve examined the method to point out that it really works as nicely with water from the Halifax harbour as with faucet water. 

The silicon itself might be produced from quite a lot of sources — corresponding to sand, recycled packaging or grain husks — which might enable it to be adjusted to the native context. 

“We don’t want any region to have monopoly over this material,” says Dasog.

It might be used to energy light-weight autos, as an influence supply in distant areas, or in emergency conditions. 

With this and different methods of manufacturing inexperienced hydrogen, Dasog says it is essential to recollect it isn’t solely a gasoline, however a means to assist different sectors decarbonize.

“It’s going to have an impact on many different sectors, and I think it’s important to highlight that, because the scope is quite broad and the opportunities are quite broad.” 

And whereas inexperienced hydrogen alone will not remedy the power disaster, Dasog says, the improvements her lab is engaged on might be a part of the puzzle. 

“We really need multiple solutions.”