The main article ends by telling us, "Our author used artificial intelligence to enhance this article." The headline quote about hydrogen getting cheaper than ever is not sourced anywhere in the ghostwritten/plagiarized-by-AI piece carrying Noah Bennett's byline (Noah seems to be a veritable factory of AI co-authored hype articles.)
It looks like this may be an interesting small-scale proof-of-concept project, but it doesn't build credibility when the post opens with an AI image (why the hell would there be a spherical array of mirrors on the central tower?!) and the main article is a manifestly low-quality source. I had a weirdly hard time (given that this is a legitimate Australian government research institution) finding scholarly literature on this project beyond some theory articles related to the design of the system.
CSIRO's own article is a much better, though not entirely satisfactory. I would have expected to find links to peer reviewed articles or preprints in the CSIRO pages for the main investigators, but what we have at this stage is basically a data-free press release.
What they say about efficiency makes the project seem like a poor use of the solar resource. The PI states, “We’re not yet at industrial scale, but we’ve demonstrated strong reactivity under relatively moderate conditions, and with further refinement, it could match electrolysis in both performance and cost.”
Above that quote, the CSIRO piece says, "The project proved the full thermochemical hydrogen production cycle – from solar input to hydrogen output, which has a potential to achieve a solar-to-hydrogen efficiency of higher than 20 per cent. That’s higher than many existing systems, which typically operate around 15 per cent."
They don't state their actual efficiency, but what I'd take to be an upper limit on the efficiency of the process. Given that you're going to the trouble of building a concentrating solar power system, I don't see why one wouldn't generate electricity instead with a heat engine that could easily exceed 40% efficiency. But in fact, it looks like the real use case they have in mind isn't green hydrogen but the use of Australian solar energy to produce methanol for export to Japan.
The Solar Thermochemical Hydrogen Research and Development project will demonstrate Australia’s first solar thermal beam down system, concentrating solar energy from a heliostat field in order to heat a fluidised bed to 1300°C for reducing redox material. Water added to this bed will be split into hydrogen and oxygen by oxidisation of the reduced material, which completes a two-step chemical process for hydrogen production. Additional research will examine the conversion of the produced hydrogen into methanol that can be used as a hydrogen carrier to export markets such as Japan.
The project has three programs that cover different aspects of the technology, demonstration of the complete water splitting process under a new solar thermal beam down concept, development of new catalyst materials to improve performance and a techno-economic feasibility study of a methanol pathway for export of hydrogen.
What they mainly did was the build a nice testbed for the study of chemical processes driven by concentrated solar energy.
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