Raw biomass electroreforming coupled to green hydrogen generation

Hu Zhao,Hong Li,Yan Zhou,Jiarui Wang,Bo You,Wenguang Tu,Dan Wu,Zhichuan J Xu,Dan Lu,Pingqi Gao,Sili Deng,See Wee Koh

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-22250-9

Abstract

Despite the tremendous progress of coupling organic electrooxidation with hydrogen generation in a hybrid electrolysis, electroreforming of raw biomass coupled to green hydrogen generation has not been reported yet due to the rigid polymeric structures of raw biomass. Herein, we electrooxidize the most abundant natural amino biopolymer chitin to acetate with over 90% yield in hybrid electrolysis. The overall energy consumption of electrolysis can be reduced by 15% due to the thermodynamically and kinetically more favorable chitin oxidation over water oxidation. In obvious contrast to small organics as the anodic reactant, the abundance of chitin endows the new oxidation reaction excellent scalability. A solar-driven electroreforming of chitin and chitin-containing shrimp shell waste is coupled to safe green hydrogen production thanks to the liquid anodic product and suppression of oxygen evolution. Our work thus demonstrates a scalable and safe process for resource upcycling and green hydrogen production for a sustainable energy future.

Highlights

Despite the tremendous progress of coupling organic electrooxidation with hydrogen generation in a hybrid electrolysis, electroreforming of raw biomass coupled to green hydrogen generation has not been reported yet due to the rigid polymeric structures of raw biomass
We find chitin oxidation reaction (COR) is more favorable than oxygen evolution reaction (OER) thermodynamically and kinetically in the alkaline water electrolysis (AWE) setup
Since the products on the anode are soluble in the electrolyte, there is negligible gaseous product produced if COR dominates the anodic reactions

Summary

Introduction

Despite the tremendous progress of coupling organic electrooxidation with hydrogen generation in a hybrid electrolysis, electroreforming of raw biomass coupled to green hydrogen generation has not been reported yet due to the rigid polymeric structures of raw biomass. Our work demonstrates a scalable and safe process for resource upcycling and green hydrogen production for a sustainable energy future. A sustainable development for the future needs conversion and storage of renewable energy that replenishes naturally and swiftly such as solar and wind. Large-scale implementation of energy storage using batteries could be hampered by the low earth abundance of key materials including lithium and cobalt[5]. To this end, the storage of renewable energy in chemical energy carries is attractive to complement the electrical storage devices. Worldwide efforts have been devoted towards energy storage in hydrogen fuel such as power to gas[8], power to X9, and

Methods

Findings

Conclusion