GoPro-Funded Startup's Tech Turns Seawater into Hydrogen

No details on what their process is though.

 

I hope it is true.
Meanwhile I will continue to use the technology that is here today to use renewable energy for transportation.

 

Hydrogen production comes naturally to ocean microbe : Nature News
My guess is they are using gmo cyanobacteria to use sunlight to split water. Most of these enzynamic spliting of water start ups promise low prices, but the lowest so far is about $7/kg versus less than $2/kg using SMR with natural gas.

Good point of such a system is it can be remote and it can work with brackish or ocean water. The bad point has always been cost. Can they figure out how to make it cost competitive with natural gas procedures. Remember natural gas based SMR is right now much more expensive than gasoline when put in a system where you need to pump it up to 10,000 psi and chill for fueling. How do you transport the hydrogen to fueling stations from the pools of hydrogen producing enzymes (bacteria, algea, or straight enzymes). LA and tokyo have expensive real estate so you would want to do this not right where the highest use of the hydrogen is.

 

It seems most of these bacteria based processes require a lot of sunlight which also means warm temps; neither of which Japan has in abundance.

 

They are looking at enzymes from bacteria, some of these work well at low termperatures. With algea you need co2, but not with the bacteria, or enzymes that you can use them to make. You do need water and sunlight, the less sunlight the bigger the pool. My guess is you do big storage to overcome low sun months, or suplement with smr. The problem again is cost. Lots of places for pools at a low cost, but then you need to transport, which may be expensive. Lots of cheap land in baja mexico with lots of sea water, but then you need to truck the liquid hydrogen. That might work for southern california. East bay production for the bay area of california. Perhaps you put solar panels up for the electricity to liquify the hydrogen, solar city seems like they can build for less than $3/kw. Use smr in nevada, etc, but these things always seem to have economic problems.

 

The discovered bug is a cyanobacter; a group once called, and still is by laymen, as blue-green algae. They photosynthesize like plants and algae, but the hydrogen formation process is a dark phase one. The researchers kept a culture for 4 days in the dark, and it kept making hydrogen.

So we can make hydrogen with this 'algae', but it will need a light source, and it was found in the Gulf of Mexico, so it likely prefers things warm. That leads to increased costs; either from production or transporting from a favorable spot. Without light, we will have to provide it with usable sugar or carbohydrates. Which raises the issues we have with making ethanol for fuel.

What is unique about this cyanobacter is that it produces the hydrogen in aerobic conditions. There are others, some gmo, that do so, and maybe at greater rates, but they need anaerobic conditions to do so. The hydrogen is a waste product of nitrogen fixation, and that enzyme, even in this newly discovered bug, is destroyed by oxygen. This little guy can pull the process off by 'burning' is cell oxygen off by metabolizing sugar. Because of that oxygen sensitivity, I don't us making the enzyme, and just using it for hydrogen production. On the plus side of using living cyanobacter, we might also get ammonia along with the hydrogen.