A study by a team of researchers from Technische Universität Berlin (TUB) and Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft has found that direct seawater splitting for hydrogen production has substantial drawbacks compared to conventional water splitting and offers almost no advantage. In an open-access paper in the RSC journal Energy & Environmental Science , the researchers report that their analysis shows that direct seawater purification is less promising than a two-step scenario for splitting seawater—first purification by reverse osmosis and then splitting in a conventional water electrolyzer—as the capital and operating costs of water purification are insignificant compared to those of electrolysis of pure water. For the implementation of a sustainable energy economy, the greatest challenge is the weather-depending, fluctuating electricity production of wind and solar power plants. To meet this challenge and to satisfy the constant energy demand of society, electricity must be stored in times of overproduction to provide energy […]