Research project ‘SaltCat: Can seawater impurities improve hydrogen catalysis?’ receives funding from NWO as part of the Open Competition Domain Science-XS package 26-2. At DIFFER, researcher dr. Nabil Khossossi aims to identify whether specific seawater ions and catalyst combinations can improve hydrogen production.
Green hydrogen production through water splitting normally uses pure water, but in the real world, large-scale deployment will rely on seawater instead, since purifying water at an industrial scale is expensive. Seawater contains dissolved salts and minerals such as sodium, chloride, magnesium, calcium and sulfate that are generally assumed to poison catalyst surfaces.
This project challenges that assumption, using machine learning and quantum-mechanical simulations (density functional theory, DFT) to systematically investigate whether some of these dissolved ions could actually enhance, rather than hinder, hydrogen production on nickel-iron catalysts.
Dr. Nabil Khossossi, researcher at DIFFER’s Autonomous Energy Materials Discovery research group: “The approach builds on the machine-learning and simulation pipeline we built in earlier work, where we screened hundreds of thousands of catalyst surfaces for hydrogen production. The goal is to identify whether seawater ions and catalyst combinations can improve hydrogen production and use those findings to establish design rules for catalysts that work directly in seawater without a purification step.”
Innovative and impactful
Screening catalyst performance under realistic seawater conditions is, so far, largely uncharted territory. Khossossi: "To the best of my knowledge, the effect of specific seawater ions on hydrogen evolution has not been studied systematically for earth-abundant catalysts such as NiFe. That gap is exactly what makes it worth pursuing. It lets us ask a well-posed question that the field has so far left open."
Regarding scientific impact, the work of Khossossi opens a new direction in realistic electrolyte screening for computational catalysis, moving beyond the idealised pure-water models the field has relied on so far. The potential payoff is practical, too. Even a small reduction in the energy needed to split seawater would add up at the scale of the large hydrogen projects now being planned for the North Sea. By mapping the most favourable ion-catalyst pairings computationally, the project can hand experimental groups a clear shortlist to pursue, turning what would otherwise be a slow and costly search at the bench into a focused set of experiments worth running.
About the NWO Open Competition-XS grants
The Open Competition Domain Science-XS grants of a maximum of € 50,000 are intended to support promising ideas and to facilitate innovative and more speculative initiatives within the seven Domain Science disciplines. The proposed research is ground-breaking and high-risk. What counts is that all results, be they positive or negative, must contribute to the advancement of science.A total of 2.8 million euros has been allocated. For more information and other funded research projects, visit the NWO website.
Go to the News page.