Technology

A Breakthrough Technology to Produce Renewable Hydrogen and Natural Gas

HyperSolar is developing a breakthrough technology to produce renewable hydrogen and natural gas using sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. These renewable gases can be used as direct replacements for traditional hydrogen and natural gas to power the world, without fracking, drilling or CO2 emissions.

Inspired by photosynthetic processes that plants use to effortlessly harness the power of the Sun, we are developing a novel solar-powered nanoparticle system that mimics photosynthesis to separate hydrogen from water. The free hydrogen can then be reacted with carbon dioxide to produce methane.

Designed for Real World Economics

Our scientific team has several decades of combined experience studying the science and economic viability of renewable hydrogen production from water. Making hydrogen is the most important part of the renewable natural gas challenge. To be cost competitive with conventional natural gas, which is simply extracted from the ground, a new technology such as ours to "manufacture" natural gas must exhibit low capital costs and low operating costs.

Our breakthrough technology was conceived using real world economic constraints learned from DOE hydrogen research projects and techno-economic studies. The result is an elegant solution that features the following:

Solar Power – Just like plants and microorganism that sustain life effortless by using the power of the Sun, the only input energy to our system is free and unlimited solar energy.
Bio-inspired Nanoparticle – By studying the core solar conversion and chemical reactions inside plant leaves, we have designed a solid-state photoelectrochemical nanostructure that contains all the core elements needed to mimic photosynthesis to extract hydrogen from water using solar energy.
Lower Cost Manufacturing – Using innovative chemical engineering techniques based on molecular self-assembly, we are designing low cost processes to manufacturing these nanoparticles.
Wastewater Feedstock and Valuable Byproduct – Instead of using pure water, a very expensive starting point, we are optimizing our technology to work with wastewater containing organic molecules of all kinds, such as municipal and industrial wastewater. Our process photo-oxidizes (detoxifies) wastewater to simultaneously produce molecular hydrogen and clean water. Waste steams containing acids, such as hydrogen bromide and hydrogen chloride from industrial facilities, can be processed to produce pure bromine and chlorine, which are valuable and marketable byproducts.
Highly Scalable System – Our nanoparticles are self-contained solar powered systems. Just like plant leaves lying under the Sun, billions of our nanoparticles can float in low cost transparent wastewater vessels all independently bubbling up renewable hydrogen and natural gas. If one nanoparticle fails, there are many more that will continue working. To increase the scale of this system, we simply add more vessels and more nanoparticles.

Breakthrough Nanotechnology

At the heart of our breakthrough technology is a nanoparticle that serves as a self-contained photoelectrochemical system that contains a solar absorber, encapsulated in a protective shell, which creates an electric charge upon absorbing a photon that then drives the chemical reactions at the cathode and anode. By changing the composition of the solar absorber, cathode and anode, we can “program” our nanoparticles to react with different kinds wastewater streams.

For almost a century, scientists have tried and failed to “split water” cost effectively to produce hydrogen and oxygen. Our process does not produce oxygen (O2), which has no significant value and is an expensive and slow reaction. Unlike conventional electrolysis, where hydrogen and oxygen atoms are completely disassociated using a large voltage, we designed our reactions to use a very small voltage and only produce hydrogen (H2). By elegantly engineering the reaction kinetics toward H2 generation in conjunction with wastewater, our nanoparticles function as one-way machines that detoxify wastewater, and produce clean water and pure hydrogen in the presence of sunlight. No other energy source is required, making this an extremely economical and commercially viable approach to hydrogen production.

Organic Wastewater –> H₂ + Water + Byproducts

Low Cost Reactor

The hydrogen gas generated in the solution can then be easily reacted with CO2 gas injected into the solution to produce methane under a well-known reaction called the Sabatier reaction.

CO₂ + 4H₂ –> CH₄ + 2H₂O

Unlike other approaches to hydrogen and methane production that may require high temperature and high-pressure systems, our reactions are designed to occur at normal pressure and temperature. This allows our reactor to be very low cost and very simple, such as a glass vessel or even clear plastic bag. To achieve world scale operation, we envision acres of very inexpensive reactors installed on vacant, non-productive land, producing massive amounts of renewable carbon free hydrogen and carbon neutral methane that can be piped into the existing natural gas infrastructure for everyday use in homes, power plants, factories, and vehicles. Additionally, the valuable byproducts extracted from wastewater can be sold in the global chemical market to further reduce the production cost of renewable natural gas.

Using CO2 to Produce Carbon Neutral Natural Gas

In the 2011 World Energy Outlook report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that the world is firmly on a devastating course to reach the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change if drastic measures to reduce CO2 emissions are not taken by 2017. It is generally accepted that a global temperature of 2 degrees Celsius is the upper limit of tolerance for maintaining the current planetary climate patterns. However, due to projected increase in fossil fuel consumption by many more countries in the 21st century, a once unimaginable global temperature of 6 degrees Celsius is now being predicted.(1) The IEA and leading scientists predict that such a rise in temperature would have cataclysmic and irreversible consequences for the Earth, threatening the very basis of human civilization.

With so much infrastructure already invested in the natural gas economy, the only meaningful approach to solving the climate change problem is to fundamentally change the source of natural gas from fossil to renewables. HyperSolar's breakthrough technology uses CO2 in the manufacturing of pipeline ready methane gas for the existing natural gas infrastructure. If the CO2 is obtained from carbon positive sources such as coal fired power plants and natural gas power plants, then the renewable natural gas made from HyperSolar's technology approaches carbon neutral. If the CO2 is obtained from carbon neutral sources such as biofuels, then the renewable natural gas made from HyperSolar's technology is permanently carbon neutral where no new CO2 is introduced to the atmosphere after combustion. We believe this is a sustainable game-changing paradigm that reduces climate change by growing the existing natural gas economy.

(1) IEA World Energy Outlook 2011