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Who says you're making necessarily making oxygen gas? I don't know the details of current industrial processes, but you can easily free hydrogen by displacing i
by orib 18y ago
Who says you're making necessarily making oxygen gas? I don't know the details of current industrial processes, but you can easily free hydrogen by displacing it with something that binds more tightly (eg, Sodium: 2H2O + 2Na => H2 + 2NaOH) and produce free hydrogen gas with sodium hydroxide waste. I suspect that a similar sort of process is happening currently when water is hydrolyzed with a "catalyst" in current processes.
Platinum is often used in catalysts. It works by providing an alternative reaction pathway that takes less energy to fuel the reaction. An analogy is that instead of rolling a rock up a hill to get it from point A to point B, the catalyst provides access to a tunnel through the hill.
- ars 18y agoIf you're reacting sodium to water to get hydrogen you're not exactly electrolyzing water now are you? The same is true with current processes, if your catalyst is being used up to bind oxygen then a: it's not a catalyst it's a reactant, and b: well don't, and c: you're not electrolyzing water, you're doing some more complicated reaction. So emitting O2 from electrolysis is not even the slightest bit new. That part of the article was basically nonsense.