To produce hydrogen from solar energy, a group of Australian researchers came up with the idea of using selenium as a catalyst material — more common, safer and cheaper than the cadmium and platinum currently employed.
Hybrid, electric and hydrogen: these are the current solutions for a form of mobility that reduces or even eliminates CO2 emissions from cars. In particular, several processes are being studied for hydrogen, so that its production too can take place in the most sustainable way possible: there are those who have considered extracting it from plastic waste, and those who have looked at solar energy. In this second case, some researchers at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, have devised a process that is cheaper and safer than the one used until now.
Current methods for creating hydrogen from solar energy involve the use of semiconductors based on cadmium, which is highly toxic, in combination with very costly noble metals including platinum, iridium and ruthenium, to derive energy from sunlight and transfer it into fuel. "We thought of using zinc selenide instead," explained the project leader, Guohua Jia. "In this way we can produce hydrogen using a catalyst material that is much less costly, more abundant and less toxic".
Among the car manufacturers that were first to believe in this resource is Toyota, which has long been developing the Mirai hydrogen saloon. The fuel-cell vehicle, which emits only water vapour, will be available in Italy from 2019. Not only that — last spring Toyota also launched Sora, the first hydrogen bus, with plans to introduce around a hundred of them onto the streets of Tokyo for the 2020 Olympics.
