Green hydrogen peroxide  production from water, air and electricity

Green hydrogen peroxide &nbsp;production from water, air and electricity

The production of hydrogen peroxide can be much safer and simpler through a process developed at Rice University. A reactor requires only air, water and electricity to make the valuable chemical in the desired concentration and high purity.



"If we have electricity from a solar panel, we can literally get hydrogen peroxide from just sunlight, air and water," said the author. "We don't need to involve organics or fossil fuel consumption. Hydrogen peroxide synthesis by traditional, huge chemical engineering plants generates organic wastes, consumes fossil fuels and emits carbon dioxide. What we're doing is green synthesis."


"Industrial hydrogen peroxide has to be transported in high concentrations to maximize the economics," the author said. "Transportation is hazardous and costly because the concentrated compound is unstable. Hydrogen peroxide also degrades over time, and has to be stored once it gets to its destination. "Our technology delocalizes the production of hydrogen peroxide," the author said. "As renewable electricity input gets cheaper, air is free and water is also cheap, our product should be competitive in terms of price.

"Instead of storing containers of hydrogen peroxide, hospitals that use it as a disinfectant could in the future turn on a spigot and get, for instance, a 3% solution on demand," the author said. "Instead of storing chemicals to disinfect pool water, homeowners can flick a switch and turn on the reactor to clean their pools."


"A fuel cell minimizes the production of hydrogen peroxide to produce just water with maximized energy efficiency," said the lead author. "In our case, we want to maximize hydrogen peroxide instead, and have tuned our catalyst to do so."


Co-lead author said, the catalyst proved robust enough to synthesize pure solution of 1%-by-weight hydrogen peroxide over 100 continuous hours in the lab with negligible degradation.

The lab plans to engineer both larger reactors and plug-and-play components with an eye toward testing with industrial partners. They see a great promise for industrial-scale applications like municipal water purification systems. The Rice lab has tested low concentrations of its product on campus rainwater and proved its ability to remove organic carbon contaminants.

"There are so many potential applications," the senior author said. "Before this, electrochemical synthesis of hydrogen peroxide was limited by its product separation or purification process, but we've solved the big barrier to practical applications."