“We have split natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen with nearly 100% efficiency in order to produce green hydrogen by electrolysis using a non-precious and cheap catalyst in a commercial electrolyzer,” stated team co-leader Professor Shizhang Qiao. Typically, seawater must be cleaned before electrolysis can separate it into hydrogen and oxygen. According to the researchers, their findings employing cobalt oxide with chromium oxide on its surface as the catalyst was comparable to a common procedure of adding platinum and iridium catalysts to highly filtered and deionized water.
