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Israeli researchers succeed in producing “green” hydrogen

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Israeli researchers from Tel Aviv University have announced success in using green electricity and a biocatalyst to produce high-efficiency “green” hydrogen without creating air pollution, Techxplore reports. Hydrogen is essential for agriculture and industry, but most of this raw material is wrought from coal or natural gas and emits 9-12 tons of carbon dioxide for every ton of it produced.

The clean method of producing hydrogen was developed by TAU doctoral student Itzhak Grinberg and Dr. Oren Ben-Zvi, under the guidance of Prof. Iftach Yacoby of the School of Plant Sciences and Food Security at the Faculty of Life Sciences and Prof. Lihi Adler-Abramovich of the School of Dental Medicine and the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Techxplore said. Their work has been published in the journal Carbon Energy.

“Hydrogen is very rare in the atmosphere, although it is produced by enzymes in microscopic organisms, which receive the energy for this from photosynthesis processes, Itzhak Grinberg said in a statement about the work. “In the lab, we ‘electrify’ those enzymes, that is, an electrode provides the energy instead of the sun. The result is a particularly efficient process, with no demand for extreme conditions, that can utilize electricity from renewable sources such as solar panels or wind turbines,” he said.

However, Grinberg explained, the enzyme ‘runs away’ from the electric charge and must be held in place through chemical treatment. The researchers, therefore, used a hydrogel (a water-based gel) to attach the enzyme to the electrode and were able to produce green hydrogen using a biocatalyst, and with over 90% efficiency.

“Today, ‘green’ hydrogen is produced primarily through electrolysis, which requires precious and rare metals such as platinum along with water distillation, which makes the green hydrogen up to 15 times more expensive than the polluting ‘gray’ one,” Dr. Oren Ben-Zvi said in a further explanatory statement. “We hope that in the future, it will be possible to employ our method commercially, to lower the costs, and to make the switch towards using green hydrogen in industry, agriculture, and as a clean energy source,” he said.