Hydrogen from Biomass
The price of hydrogen produced with sustainable alternative processes, such as electrolysis and water splitting using sunlight, still makes these technologies uncompetitive from an economic point of view. In the context of the European Union Green Deal and the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), which promote a sustainable energy transition, new technologies to produce hydrogen are in an advanced stage of study, such as the photoreforming of water and alcohols derived from biomass waste. This technology allows to combine a greater production of hydrogen and to valorise waste chemical compounds in added value products.
Important results have been published in Chem Catalysis by an international team of researchers coordinated by Prof. Paolo Fornasiero (University of Trieste and head of the URT CNR-ICCOM of Trieste), and colleagues from the Czech Advanced Technology and Research Institute of Olomouc, of the Palacký University and the Technical University of Ostrava (Czech Republic), the University of Trieste and CNR-SPIN of Trieste.
The study describes the use of titanium dioxide in the brookite form, suitably engineered, for the realization of efficient photocatalysts capable of producing green hydrogen from sustainable resources, such as alcohols derived from biomass, which will guarantee lower costs than those of other technologies used today, contributing to a faster transition towards sustainable energy production.
S. M. Hossein Hejazi, Mahdi Shahrezaei, Piotr Błonski, Mattia Allieta, Polina M. Sheverdyaeva, Paolo Moras, Zdenek Badura, Sergii Kalytchuk, Elmira Mohammadi, Radek Zboril, Stepan Kment, Michal Otyepka, Alberto Naldoni, and Paolo Fornasiero. Defect engineering over anisotropic brookite toward substrate-specific photo-oxidation of alcohol. Chem Catalysis 2, 1—14, May 19, 2022.