Planetary Hydrogen stores carbon while it generates hydrogen with renewable electricity.
I don’t understand this technology, but the writer of this Treehugger story does, and he seems excited about it. So here’s an excerpt. You figure it out.
Treehugger has often been skeptical of two "silver bullets" for the climate crisis: the hydrogen economy and carbon capture and storage (CCS). However, a company in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia called Planetary Hydrogen mashes the two together in a double-barrelled approach that makes a lot of sense.
In the pre-industrial natural carbon cycles, most atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) was absorbed by plants, but about a quarter of it was absorbed by the ocean in a process where CO2 in rainwater dissolves calcium and other minerals in rocks and washes into the ocean. This is converted by animals into calcium carbonate for their shells, which when pressed together over millions of years stores CO2 in limestone. Needless to say, such a process happens in geological time, millions of years, a very slow carbon cycle. However, now we are putting so much CO2 into the atmosphere – 7% of it by undoing this process by cooking limestone to get the CO2 back out of it and making cement – that the ocean can't keep up and is acidifying.
This is all a very slow process, and as Planetary Hydrogen CEO Mike Kelland notes, "we don't have 100,000 years to fix this problem." His company takes fossil-fuel-free electricity from wind, solar, or water power and uses an electrolyzer to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, building on the work of Dr. Greg Rau, who has written a number of papers on the subject going back to the 1990s. Planetary Hydrogen adds a little something to the mix, turning it into negative emissions hydrogen or NE H2.
"Our innovation is that by adding a mineral salt, we force the electrolysis cell to also create an atmosphere-scrubbing compound called mineral hydroxide as a waste product. That hydroxide actively binds with carbon dioxide, producing an “ocean antacid” very similar to baking soda. The net effect is the direct capture and storage of CO2 while producing valuable pure hydrogen. The system can consume as much as 40kg of CO2 and permanently stores it for every 1kg of hydrogen it produces."
