Can Seawater Fuel our Future? Green Hydrogen with Nasir Mahmood

You may recall that in Episode 12 we spoke about hydrogen fuel cell stacks. It was a very popular episode so I wanted to dig into the theme a bit more. As such, today we’re going to dig into green hydrogen itself.

Just a reminder that GREEN hydrogen is hydrogen derived from a renewable-energy powered electrolysis process that splits water molecules, H20, into their components H2, hydrogen and O, oxygen. 

One of the challenges of creating green hydrogen is the water source. Historically, for this to work, a very clean and pure source of water has been required. And this is not just expensive to procure, but it also uses our precious and increasingly scarce fresh water resources that may have a higher use case, like drinking water. This problem has garnered a lot of interest from researchers. 

Our guest today is one such researcher. And he made global news when he discovered a reliable method for creating green hydrogen using a water source that covers 70% of the planet: seawater. 

Nasir Mahmood is the Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University in Australia. We are incredibly lucky to have him here today.

Nasir Mahmood
RMIT University

Transcript

Abigail:

Welcome to the podcast today where we celebrate Innovation for a Happy Planet. I am your host Abigail Carroll. 

In Episode 12 we spoke about green hydrogen as part of the solution for reaching Net 0 emissions by 2050. That was a very popular episode so I wanted to dig into that theme a bit more. In that podcast we spoke to Tore Enger about applications for green hydrogen - specifically in marine and other types of transportation using fuel cells. 

Today we’re going to look at green hydrogen itself. If you remember, green hydrogen - which means clean hydrogen - is made by splitting a water molecule into its different parts. The hydrogen, the H2, and Oxygen, or O, using electrolysis, a type of electric current.

One of the challenges of this process is the water source. Historically, for this to work, a very clean and pure source of water has been required. And this is not just expensive to procure, but it also uses our precious and increasingly scarce fresh water resources that may have a higher use case. So this has garnered a lot of interest from researchers.

Our guest today is a scientist who has turned the water issue on its head - and he’s looked to the ocean for his inspiration. Nasir Mahmood is the Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University in Australia. And he made global news when he discovered a method for creating green hydrogen using seawater. I’m going to let Nasir tell you the rest, so let’s go to the podcast. 

Welcome to the podcast, Nasir.

Nasir Mahmood:

Thank you so much.

Abigail:

I am so excited that you're here today to tell us about the exciting work you're doing. Tell me about this university. It seems to have a different model than most universities. And tell us a little bit about the research you're doing there.

Nasir Mahmood:

Yes. RMIT is a very different model. It provides researchers free access to everything, and they provide a freedom to researchers to explore as they want to explore. So, like other universities, RMIT is also like, educational research oriented institute located at Melbourne in the city center. So I am leading a materials for a clean energy and environmental research group, within school of science. Basically what we do is design our materials and we design the materials based on the target applications. The main focus of a group, like I mentioned, is, materials for clean energy and environment. So the main focus goes towards energy and specifically for hydrogen and batteries.

Abigail:

Very interesting. So that is what caught my eye. I read some articles that were very interesting to me about your ability to use sea water to produce green hydrogen. And we did a podcast not too long ago about fuel stacks, and it got a lot of interest in that subject, from our listeners. So I would love to hear about this milestone. This is a really exciting new development that you've been able to achieve. So can you tell us specifically about this?

Nasir Mahmood:

Indeed. It is a big achievement. The reason why we say it's a big achievement, the demand of hydrogen in the future is going to be very huge. It is around 20 billion tons of water will be required to meet the demand of hydrogen. Equivalent to feeding the country with the 62 million people populations. So if we are using [Wow.] fresh water, so it means that will be a threat to survival of life, and it'll not be socially accepted, might be for time being. It is accepted because no one knows what will be the impact of generating hydrogen onto the water availability. So in this case, it is very crucial that we should explore the alternative water sources.

Among them, seawater is the one of the infinite source. We have plenty of seawater around us. We can utilize that one. And, second issue is that the hydrogen demand around 42% will be on the ports. And where we have the seawater is more accessible than the fresh water. We have most renewable energy sources are also concentrated on the coastal zones like wind energy, tidal energy, and solar energy. So in all these scenarios, seawater becomes, most valuable and most, accessible and cost effective source of water for the hydrogen generation. [interesting] But what happens when we want to use it, it's a very complex system. It has a lot of ions dissolving, it has a lot of other organic stuff in it, and it also has a biological life. How to make it useful. The simplest way is just purify it and then use it.

So if you start purifying it requires a lot of capital investment, and it also require ongoing cost. So, that kind of a capital investment and the capital infrastructure is not suitable at every site and every country. So we need to find a way where we can utilize it directly, just plug and play directly getting the seawater and utilizing it. So normally it has been, even reported previously, that it can be utilized, but what happens, they produce chlorine on one side and hydrogen on the other side. And chlorine is, again, a toxic gas. If we start producing chlorine to meet the hydrogen demands, it means we are releasing millions of tons of chlorine into the environment. So what we will do with that extra chlorine in the environment, so we are solving now the problem of a carbon dioxide.

Tomorrow, we will be trying to solve the problem of a chlorine. So that's not a sustainable solution. So we have to do something now that is sustainable and more efficient and acceptable by our next generations. And we are not leaving any problem for them. So that's the long term thinking behind this, that why we need to focus now on direct water splitting without creating any secondary pollutant into the environment. So when we achieve it, that make it a really valuable and a big achievement and a big milestone in the hydrogen space.

Abigail:

Right. I mean, because I think you know, when people started looking at green hydrogen, they were having to use actually purified water. It wasn't even just normal, you know, river water. Um, so you've, you've taken it many, many steps further.

Nasir Mahmood:

Yes, there is, like at the moment, cost of hydrogen is very higher around $9 to $7 per kg for the green hydrogen. That's really costly, and especially if we move it to renewable energy, that may further go high. So we need to bring it in the range where it is affordable. So we need to cut every bit of basis of the cost that is associated with any process, either purifying water or anything else. Improving the efficiency of the system, to produce the hydrogen. So that was the aim that we, how we can do it while we are not, stressing out our fresh water reserves so that we leave that one for the survival of life.

Abigail:

Right. And what is the price point that we need to get to, to have hydrogen be a competitive source of energy? 

Nasir Mahmood:

If we can take it to $1.5 a kg, then it'll be a competitive source, uh, of energy. And it is affordable source of energy, which is a bit far at the moment. But, the current advancements making it possible, and especially when we look at our catalyst efficiencies to split the water, uh, specifically energy efficiency, because that's the most cost driving factor in hydrogen production. And we are very, very confident that we can achieve those targets set by [inaudible] to reduce the cost for the hydrogen production.

Abigail:

And can you speak to how you solved this chlorine problem and how you got rid of it? 

Nasir Mahmood:

What happens the main function in the electrolyzer to produce hydrogen is done at the surface of the catalyst. So catalysts play a role. So water molecules comes on the surface of a catalyst, and they split into the hydrogen and oxygen. What catalysts do by its name that it try to reduce the energy consumption that required traditionally to split the hydrogen and water molecules. So what happens normally at the anode side of the system where we produce oxygen, and on the one side we produce hydrogen. So chlorine production reaction becomes a competed with oxygen because thermodynamically chlorine production is much more favorable than the oxygen production. So, when it reached the surface of the catalyst, it start evolving over there. So what we did we modify the surface of the catalyst in such a way that it repel the chlorine away, only produce oxygen at the surface.

So that's the advantage of it. And while we were doing this, we make sure that we are not involving any complicated senses, or we are not doing any complex, post-treatment of the surface because that's not a viable and doable at large scale. We modify the inherent properties of the catalyst so that they become more easy to synthesize at the large scale when industry need them to be implemented. Because if you look at the recent progress, there has been a huge report on the catalyst development, but none of them has yet to implemented into the commercial electrolyzers. Commercial electrolyzers still use that traditional expensive catalyst. And so if we want to replace them, we need to make these catalysts efficient. At the same time, we need to make them stable and be easily produced at large scale. So we solve all those issues. We try to build a catalyst system, which is easily scalable, which can control the properties. What we develop in the lab, same properties at the large scale, so that they can be implemented with those kind of a specific surface reactions that they only produce pure hydrogen and oxygen to make the water life cycle sustainable.

Abigail:

That's amazing. So, to be clear, green hydrogen is only as green as the components that are energizing that catalyzer. So that's another struggle here. So how are we gonna get all of those different levels of the process to $1.50? Is your catalyzer gonna use fewer kilowatts of energy from wind and solar to produce that hydrogen with seawater? Is that part of how you're thinking?

Nasir Mahmood:

Yes. If we want to produce a green hydrogen, the entire process should be green. It should be based on the renewable energy sources, not on the traditional dirty energy that we call coming from the fossil fuels and producing a carbon footprints. So it should be completely free of a carbon footprints at each stage from catalyst development to electrolyzer development. And then, operation of the electrolyzers. So our catalysts, they are integrate-able with the renewable energy sources like either the solar or a wind, so they can work fine with them. And what we are anticipating our catalysts will be utilizing under 40 kilowatt of energy that makes the process much more energy efficient and producing hydrogen at a low cost.

Abigail:

So we're getting really close on this hydrogen model.

Nasir Mahmood:

Yes, indeed. 

Abigail:

After the break we’ll talk about how Nasir is thinking about green hydrogen’s applications and understand where he’s going to focus his attention next. 

BREAK

Abigail: 

Welcome back to Happy planet. As we talk about applications, you’ll hear me compare combustion engines and fuel cell stacks.  The combustion engine would burn hydrogen as a fuel where the fuel cell stacks would convert the hydrogen to electricity. 

So you mentioned, you know using seawater is very interesting and helpful because so many of the applications are on the ocean. So how do you see the applications rolling out? What do you think are the most important and impactful applications of hydrogen moving forward?

Nasir Mahmood:

I think, the hydrogen the thing most powerful is in the industry site. So industry required a lot of hydrogen, that's a green hydrogen that they need. Steel industry or many other industries they required a hydrogen. And second is the like power generation from the hydrogen that will be also very huge consumptions. And also transportation, like a heavy transportation, like a trains, airplanes and, marine, whole marine transportation because they produce a lot of carbon footprints and they use a lot of, uh, energy. So that can be easily moved because they can't be sustainable on the batteries or they can't be electrified. In fact, we are dreaming that we can electrify the airplanes or we can electrify the trains. But that's not a sustainable. Batteries do not provide that much energy that we can drive those kind of big transportation systems. Yes, they will be very fine with driving cars or driving buses or might be trucks, they can't be, uh, utilized into the trains and the airplanes and those kind of things. So we need,alternative fuel that's a hydrogen because it carry a lot of energy.

Abigail: 

Interesting. So Toyota just recently made an announcement that they're going in pretty, seriously with hydrogen cars, but they're now producing a combustion engine made for hydrogen rather than fuel cell stacks. [Yes.] And so how do you fall on this issue? What do you think the future is gonna be?

Nasir Mahmood:

This is the thing that need to be done. So if we have the combustion engine based on hydrogen, we are further improving the efficiency of process because otherwise when we produce hydrogen from through electrolyzers and then converting back into electricity, it losses a lot of efficiencies, a lot of energy. But once it move towards the combustion systems, that will be really useful. I'm also going to speak to the, one of the panelists along with that, one of the panel members from that Toyota, uh, like how the hydrogen will be more important towards driving. We are talking about these issues. Yes. Once we have those kind of engines that can be directly combustion engines utilize hydrogen, that will be a game changing. Even there is also, suggestions are coming up, like what we can do if it's not feasible to drive a hundred percent hydrogen, let's make 70% hydrogen, 30% diesel, and other, fuel sources that will be also, again, reducing a lot of carbon footprints and making the system workable. So that there's a different kind of models are coming up.

Abigail: 

Yeah. Because in the end, there's no silver, silver bullet. I've spoken to a lot of people who care a lot about the ocean in the last, you know, 20 some episodes and you know, are we gonna be deep sea mining for these elements that we need to make batteries? There are a lot of big questions right now that don't have easy answers

Nasir Mahmood:

Because that already make our few metals very, very precious. And, we don't have that much resources to produce of a millions of batteries once we move towards electrifying the system. Like Europe is implementing that by 2030, we will not have any traditional fuel based cars on the road. So how you will fill the gap from where you will get that much raw lithium and to make those kind of batteries. And if you are moving to other alternative batteries, they are not yet to be ready to be implemented. So we need to move towards hydrogen. That's the best fuel to answer all those questions.

Abigail: 

Very interesting. 

Nasir Mahmood:

Secondly, one thingI will like to add here, if we try to utilize that much battery setup, so what we will do with them, like at the moment, everyone is thinking how to recycle the solar panels. We are installing everywhere, but we haven't think that much how we will be, overcoming the waste with this one. Same, same will happen with the batteries cuz battery life is not that long. It's a very short life. And with that short life, we will be producing millions of tons when in fact I will say billions of tons of batteries. And what we will do with that one, we don't have any efficient, uh, method developed yet tackle with that waste.

Abigail: 

So what is it gonna look like? I mean, do you think solar and wind are gonna be there principally to make hydrogen?

Nasir Mahmood:

Of course if we need a green hydrogen, we need an alternative sources. Energy, wind and solar is the most popular ones. But, there several other energy sources available. Like peoples are trying to utilize some sort of osmosis driving energy production from the sea. They're utilizing tidal energies from the sea. And, because hydrogen is not only to produce electricity, hydrogen is also required to meet the industry demand because industry is utilizing a huge amount of hydrogen for the chemical production of a different kind of products. They also need a big amount. So they're also thinking if we can also utilize the nuclear energies to produce hydrogen and then meet the demand of the industry for the hydrogen to make them green.

Abigail: 

It seems like there are a lot of people who just wanna figure out the greenest sort of application of hydrogen itself, but we're still haven't quite figured out how to get the catalytic process green.

Nasir Mahmood:

Yes. The key challenge comes when we say that we need to make the electrocatalytic water splitting green is the renewable energy sources because they are intermittent they won't provide the, uh, energy 24/7. So we need some backups or we need some sort of a system which, integrated with them. Like when there's no energy, they still still sustain their structure. They don't lose their abilities to work once the energy is available for them. So that's what I said, that coastal zones are the best because some sort of energies always available there. So, multiple sources can be harvested at the same time in the daytime, solar is there, in the night wind and tidal energy is there, so that there they can provide the continuous supply of energy. And then we have the continuous supply of water from there. And then the whole package make is like a more sustainable rather than if we need a cleaning up and then we taking it to some other points and producing hydrogen over there. So that is like more, difficult to us.

Abigail: 

Yep, it's definitely a complicated array of questions we have in front of us. Why did you choose hydrogen? What was interesting to you about that, to get involved in that study?

Nasir Mahmood:

This is very interesting question. So, I saw several photos, from the different big cities and one of them I lived like Beijing. So when I lived there and I saw what we did with our environment is really, really, really a bad thing that, I normally in my talks, I always present, uh, two, uh, two images, one from Beijing and one from London. And that shows that what we did to our environment. And then I show one photo how we can survive in this environment is we have to put the mask, humans can put the mask, how about the animals and other creations on the planet? 

So that is the one inspiring thing,behind this research that's make me think about it. Let's do something into the space that might be, I can contribute towards cleaning the environment. So first I started work on the batteries to store that because we thought that it'll be contributing, into the renewable energy backup and, uh, providing us alternative energy sources. And with ongoing, I think from last six years, seven years, I start thinking, no, there should be some other ways to do. And then hydrogen caught my attention that this is something that no researchers are thinking is the best to do it. Then we start working on it. And from last three to four years, when we dig more into it, that what are the challenges behind this? How we can make it more affordable, acceptable, and sustainable.

Then we think about this water supply system that I, everyone is talking about. We need hydrogen, we need efficient, we need low cost hydrogen, but no one think about if we are utilizing our fresh water or even tap water what we will drink. Because that every day our demand for energy is increasing. So we shift our work from fresh water to other water sources. Among them is the wastewater and the seawater. Cuz seawater is at the coastals where we have all energy, but when we need at our populated areas to produce hydrogen, we have a wastewater. If we can utilize that one, which is another liability on us to treat it. 

So then we start focusing on these, we purposefully start developing catalyst for these two water streams and try to make them more effective. So we already reported one that you saw in the news, and uh, now we already have, uh, got their second and third generation of catalysts, which are much more efficient than what we already reported. That catalysts are already efficient than the commercial ones, but now we make even more than 80%. We enhanced efficiency of our own catalyst compared to what we reported. So that makes us more confident that yes, now we can meet those energy requirements set by the arena and other energy agencies that we will be utilizing much more energy that what you set to reach the target of $2 and now it's, it's the time to implement them into the commercial systems.

Abigail: 

That is amazing about wastewater too. I mean especially if you could reduce maybe some of the chemicals going out in the environment from the treatment of wastewater if it were treated once and then became energy, that would be very, very cool. So alright, you're ready for the market it sounds like. You're in a university. Are you going to commercialize this? And how does that work?

Nasir Mahmood:

We are very open on that  side. So RMIT normally prefer that we can license IPs to the manufacturers who commercialize the product. On some commercial agreements that, benefits and protect the IP, for in a long run. And RMIT also allows to spin off the company. So at the moment we are talking to many different industrial partners. If some are the end users, some are the producers and some are the system level integrators. So we are talking to many different, uh, industrials and we are screening out who will be the best partner for us, who will be more beneficial for us, as well as for the product to be commercially available at low cost and make it more, uh, uh, sustainable for the everyone's,, access. And based on that, we will be able, because we have RMIT as a commercialization and partnership teams, they will be assessing it and helping us. Okay. What will be the best way, to move forward either to spin off your own, on setup or to align with those kind of companies and then start the commercialization of this technology?

Abigail: 

So are you personally eager to leave the university and go into a business and grow it there? Or are you interested in spinning it off and staying and continuing to do different types of research on different types of energy sources? 

Nasir Mahmood:

I'm very clear in that space, I love doing research. I will remain at university and I will let like, either one person from my group, if they are interested to go and lead this research, I will be very supportive to those guys. And if the companies they want to commercialize it, we will be more than happy to be their scientific advisors and keep producing the further generations of these catalysts. So all those things, whatever the legalities allow us to help them in any means, we will be there to help them. But my passion is to keep working the, onto the developing, different solutions, whatever society is facing.

Abigail: 

So what are some of the other types of solutions that you think are really urgent right now?

Nasir Mahmood:

I think for time being, we need to look like what I normally say, wherever I talk whenever we find a solution for something, the first thing that we must consider is to see what we are thinking is a solution, does it is bringing another challenge for the future. So if it's going to bring the challenge in, in a near future are a bit far future we need to think about that challenge now, then find a solution that should be more sustainable. Because if we create a solution that is just for a short term and then is going to create a secondary solution that's a big challenge for our next generations, then it means we are not doing something very wisely. So we already make things very dirty. We destroy this planet now is our responsibility to at least make something correct that recover those damages.

Abigail: 

I mean, are you optimistic about our meeting, all of these sort of UN deadlines and are reducing carbon in the atmosphere? I mean, you're right at the center of this research. Should we be hopeful?

Nasir Mahmood:

We should be hopeful we will be doing that one, but, might not be like exactly by 2050 that we set the targets that by 2050 we will make everything net zero. That might not be possible, but we will be very close to it. If we keep with the same passion and we keep doing the things that we need to do and, uh, we keep investing into the new technologies to see that how they work, uh, we will be, we will be at least making much more cleaner environment.

Abigail: 

And what are some of the actions that people can take, you know, who aren't gonna be changing the world through their scientific research. What can we do on a daily basis to be more involved?

Nasir Mahmood:

That's a few small things that can be considered. Like, if some things we don't need, we shouldn't use them. That even can be the smart technologies are, that can be, just a simple use of energy. Specifically if when we are using energy, we need to make sure that the energy we are utilizing should be the clean energy or at least a less dirty energy. So that will be contributing a lot because we are the humans who are using by some way those kind of dirty energies to make this environment that much bloated. So if we start thinking about it, like, okay, what I'm using, I really need it, or if I need it, how much I need it, and how I can further improve. Because if we just rely on, someone will come and they should develop the technologies which is less energy efficient.

They should do the things for us. Of course, or the researchers, they are doing things, but like a common man, we should also be thinking about it like. Like if I have a solar panel at my home, I should be trying to do my all works in the daytime so that I'm not utilizing that dirty energy at the night if I don't have a battery backup. Even I have, I should be saving that energy for someone else, for my neighbor who don't have, so that can help us to reduce the consumption of the dirty energy, even the renewable energy. So that can be utilized in somewhere else.

Abigail: 

I like that technology may be able to save the planet, but we shouldn't rely on it.

Nasir Mahmood:

Yes. We should be relying on ourselves.

Abigail: 

I like it very much. Well, this has been really, really interesting. Thank you so much. It's been just a pleasure to hear about this and congratulations on an amazing, amazing achievement.

Nasir Mahmood:

Thank you so much for inviting me and giving me the time and talking about the research that what we are doing.

Abigail: 

Hydrogen is having a moment and I am so excited to have had the opportunity to dig in here with Nasir. The idea that we could one day use wastewater to create green hydrogen is pretty interesting. I’m also incredibly appreciative of Nasir’s desire to make every step of the hydrogen process green so that we can truly move in the right direction for the planet. With people like Nasir pushing the envelope of what’s possible, I think we can all feel confident that we may be moving towards a happier planet.

Thank you for listening. Please follow Happy Planet wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review - it really helps new listeners discover the show. Happy Planet was reported and hosted by me. I am also the Executive Producer. The talented Dylan Heuer is our producer and editor. Composer George Brandl Egloff created our theme music. Learn more about my work and get in touch by visiting happyplanetpodcast.com.