Professor Woo-Jae Kim develops world's best environment-friendly hydrogen energy production technology
- Date2020.07.30
- 5378
Up to 1.7 times more production than the current technology...No GHG emissions.
Professor Woo-Jae Kim of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science from the College of Engineering and his team co-developed an eco-friendly technology for producing hydrogen, a future clean energy source, at the world's most considerable level with a research team of Professor Ah-Hyung Alissa Park from Columbia University.
The team recently succeeded in developing an eco-friendly technology that can produce much more hydrogen than before without greenhouse gas emissions. Hydrogen is recently gaining much more attention as a hydrogen car energy source. The study was published in the world-renowned journal Nature Communications on Wednesday, July 29 under the title of 'Alkaline Thermal Treatment of Seaweed for High-Purity Hydrogen Production with Carbon Capture and Storage Potential.' (Links to the thesis: https://rdcu.be/b5VTm)
Hydrogen, taking up 75% of the space mass, is a key green energy in the hydrogen economy, but only 0.00005% of Hydrogen exists at room temperature as gas. Since hydrogen rarely exists independently, it is absolutely vital to have a technology that can extract hydrogen from compounds containing it, such as water, methane gas, and biomass. A new green method to generate Hydrogen is in need as the conventional method of “electrolysis of water”, where water is decomposed by electricity is high-cost, while methods using LNG(methane gas) and extracted hydrogen have their limits of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and the limit of production, respectively.
Professor Kim’s research team developed a method that uses marine biomass (such as seaweed) that absorbs carbon dioxide 21 times better than conventional terrestrial biomass (such as rice, corn, etc.) as a renewable energy source and produces hydrogen by utilizing alkaline thermal treatment. It is an innovative technology that can produce more than 1.5 liters of green hydrogen per 1g biomass by extracting more than 85% of the hydrogen element from biomass in the form of high purity hydrogen gas. As the new technology allows a 170% increase in hydrogen production compared to the current maximum capability, it is now possible to produce the most considerable hydrogen in the world.
김우재 교수(가운데) 지도 하에 연구에 참여한 화학신소재공학전공 석사과정 안효정, 정혜민 씨
In particular, the research team's new technology is eco-friendly as it produces little carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, other than hydrogen, while it does not produce any carbon monoxide, which can poison fuel cell catalysts. For those reasons, it can be used directly in fuel cell cars without special post-processing processes. It is expected that it will be a next generation green hydrogen production method, since its process cost is 28% cheaper than the current method.
"My team hopes the ‘new affordable carbon-free hydrogen mass production technology’, which can be applied not only to seaweed but also to various territorial and marine biomasses, can play a crucial role in helping Korea with its journey toward a leading hydrogen economy." Professor Kim said.