Stanford University Water Splitter

Stanford scientists develop water splitter that runs on an ordinary AAA battery

Aug. 22, 2014
By Mark Shwartz

In 2015, American consumers will finally be able to purchase fuel cell cars from Toyota and other manufacturers. Although touted as zero-emissions vehicles, most of the cars will run on hydrogen made from natural gas, a fossil fuel that contributes to global warming.

Now scientists at Stanford University have developed a low-cost, emissions-free device that uses an ordinary AAA battery to produce hydrogen by water electrolysis. The battery sends an electric current through two electrodes that split liquid water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. Unlike other water splitters that use precious-metal catalysts, the electrodes in the Stanford device are made of inexpensive and abundant nickel and iron.

Water Splitter

Using nickel and iron, which are cheap materials, we were able to make the electrocatalysts active enough to split water at room temperature with a single 1.5-volt battery,” said Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford. “This is the first time anyone has used non-precious metal catalysts to split water at a voltage that low. It’s quite remarkable, because normally you need expensive metals, like platinum or iridium, to achieve that voltage.”

In addition to producing hydrogen, the novel water splitter could be used to make chlorine gas and sodium hydroxide, an important industrial chemical, according to Dai. He and his colleagues describe the new device in a study published in the Aug. 22 issue of the journal Nature Communications.

The promise of hydrogen
Automakers have long considered the hydrogen fuel cell a promising alternative to the gasoline engine. Fuel cell technology is essentially water splitting in reverse. A fuel cell combines stored hydrogen gas with oxygen from the air to produce electricity, which powers the car. The only byproduct is water – unlike gasoline combustion, which emits carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

Earlier this year, Hyundai began leasing fuel cell vehicles in Southern California. Toyota and Honda will begin selling fuel cell cars in 2015. Most of these vehicles will run on fuel manufactured at large industrial plants that produce hydrogen by combining very hot steam and natural gas, an energy-intensive process that releases carbon dioxide as a byproduct.

Splitting water to make hydrogen requires no fossil fuels and emits no greenhouse gases. But scientists have yet to develop an affordable, active water splitter with catalysts capable of working at industrial scales.

“It’s been a constant pursuit for decades to make low-cost electrocatalysts with high activity and long durability,” Dai said. “When we found out that a nickel-based catalyst is as effective as platinum, it came as a complete surprise.”

Saving energy and money
The discovery was made by Stanford graduate student Ming Gong, co-lead author of the study. “Ming discovered a nickel-metal/nickel-oxide structure that turns out to be more active than pure nickel metal or pure nickel oxide alone,” Dai said. “This novel structure favors hydrogen electrocatalysis, but we still don’t fully understand the science behind it.”

The nickel/nickel-oxide catalyst significantly lowers the voltage required to split water, which could eventually save hydrogen producers billions of dollars in electricity costs, according to Gong. His next goal is to improve the durability of the device.

“The electrodes are fairly stable, but they do slowly decay over time,” he said. “The current device would probably run for days, but weeks or months would be preferable. That goal is achievable based on my most recent results.”

The researchers also plan to develop a water splitter than runs on electricity produced by solar energy.

“Hydrogen is an ideal fuel for powering vehicles, buildings and storing renewable energy on the grid,” said Dai. “We’re very glad that we were able to make a catalyst that’s very active and low cost. This shows that through nanoscale engineering of materials we can really make a difference in how we make fuels and consume energy.”

Other authors of the study are Wu Zhou, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (co-lead author); Mingyun Guan, Meng-Chang Lin, Bo Zhang, Di-Yan Wang and Jiang Yang, Stanford; Mon-Che Tsai and Bing-Joe Wang, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology; Jiang Zhou and Yongfeng Hu, Canadian Light Source Inc.; and Stephen J. Pennycook, University of Tennessee.

Principal funding was provided by the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) and the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford and by the U.S. Department of Energy.

This article was originally published in the Stanford Report.

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Worldwide Jobs Crisis 2014-2030

In a report prepared for the G20 Labor and Employment Ministerial Meeting Melbourne, Australia, 10-11 September 2014, the World Bank warns the world faces a jobs crisis. 600 million jobs will need to be created worldwide by 2030 to cope with the expanding population. The report makes it clear that not only will there be a shortage of quality jobs, the income inequality will continue to widen within many G20 countries. Worse, the Bank has no “magic bullet” to solve the crisis, either in emerging or advanced economies.

If implemented worldwide, this option might fill the void.

Universal Basic Income

America is running out of jobs. It’s time for a universal basic income.
The politics of a guaranteed income get a lot easier when you acknowledge that the U.S. is no longer the land of opportunity

Free money for everyone!

With weak job growth, rising poverty, and the rich continuing to devour nearly all economic growth, it’s an idea that is gaining more credence. Arguments for a universal basic income (UBI) — in which everyone without exception would receive an equal stipend — have flourished in policy-centric areas of the internet, including The Week. Advocates of UBI see it as a blunter, more effective means of reducing poverty and shrinking the inequality gap.

But even if UBI proponents are right on the merits, Tyler Cowen argues that the politics of the issue are not favorable.

Under most plausible assumptions about the Basic Income level, most people would not be recipients, nor would they expect to be potential net gainers from the program. And in general voters put much more importance on common sense notions of “desert” than do economists. So I think the “why send money to people who aren’t working?” intuition will crowd out the “I want to think of myself as someone who helps other people” feeling. [Marginal Revolution]

Let’s set aside Cowen’s erroneous assertion that UBI would benefit only a certain few — the whole idea is that everyone would be included. He does have a point that UBI is politically implausible. Conservatives, in particular, typically propose policies that would slash social insurance while sharply cutting taxes on the rich. And even fairly liberal Democrats are uncomfortable with programs that straight-up transfer cash unless it goes to retired people; recall that it was President Clinton who “reformed” traditional welfare into a program that helps almost no poor people.

However, it is a mistake to view these attitudes as cast in stone. The idea that work is a bedrock of society, that absolutely everyone who is not too old, too young, or disabled must have a job, was not handed down on tablets from Mount Sinai. It is the result of a historical development, one which may not continue forever. On the contrary, based on current trends, it is already breaking down.

The history of nearly universal labor participation is only about a century and a half old. Back in the early days of capitalism, demand for labor was so strong that all the ancient arrangements of society and family were shredded to accommodate it. Marx’s Capital famously described how women and very young children were press-ganged into the textile mills and coal mines, how the nighttime was colonized for additional shifts, and how capitalists fought to extend the working day to the very limits of human endurance (and often beyond).

The resulting misery, abuse, and wretchedness were so staggering, and the resulting class conflicts so intense, that various hard-won reforms were instituted: the eight-hour day, the weekend, the abolition of child labor, and so forth.

But this process of drawing more people into the labor force peaked in the late 1990s, when women finally finished joining the labor force (after having been forced out to make room for returning veterans after World War II). The valorization of work as the source of all that is good in life is to a great degree the result of the need to legitimate capital’s voracious demand for labor.

These days, capital’s demand for labor is looking very, very soft. During the Great Recession, the prime working-age employment rate crashed, and has barely budged since:

As an obvious consequence, the labor force participation rate (the percentage of people working or looking for work) has been steadily declining:

Why this is happening is an interesting question. Undoubtedly the most important part of the story is poor macroeconomic management: aggregate demand collapsed in 2008, and due to centrist and conservative obstruction, the policy response was insufficient.

However, there are other trends that may be interacting with and exacerbating this original sin. Automation and globalization had already largely hollowed out America’s manufacturing employment base; most jobs created during this “recovery” have been in crappy low-wage work. And when one takes automation to its obvious logical end, it’s hard not to conclude that robots will soon be putting just about everyone out of a job.

The reality of this situation is chewing at the roots of American politics. The fundamental bargain of American society is that for anyone willing to hustle, there is a decent job to be found, or one that will at least prevent abject destitution. It underpins our national mythos as the land of opportunity and self-reliance. It has always been less true than anyone wanted to admit, but for an increasingly large fraction of the population — start with the 16 percent of Americans who regularly don’t have enough to eat — it’s a sick joke.

Therefore, one can easily imagine the historical process described by Marx going in reverse. In today’s labor market, where there are still twice as many job seekers as job openings, the constant conservative carping about the “dignity of work” sounds more jarring and vindictive by the day.

As someone with a nice, stimulating job, I agree that work can help people flourish. But in an economy that is flatly failing to produce enough jobs to satisfy the need, a universal basic income will start to seem more plausible — even necessary.

Ryan Cooper
Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.

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Original article at http://theweek.com/article/index/267720/america-is-running-out-of-jobs-its-time-for-a-universal-basic-income

Selling Water & Energy To China

Here’s further proof, should it be needed, that the most cost-effective way to reduce the abysmal (and growing) gap in the distribution of income and wealth in the United States is to create a mechanism for the American working classes to produce hydrogen by electrolysis of seawater and sell it to China and other untapped similar markets. The outline of the plan is found here.

China has 22% of the world’s population but less than 10% of its arable land, and 1/5th of that is severely polluted.

China’s rainfall map (click to enlarge)

The western half (or more) of the country has little or no rainfall or surface bodies of water. Without water, cities cannot be built and agriculture is impossible. China will need to develop the arid west to feed its growing population, and the only way to do so is to bypass nature’s limitations and aquafacture water. If China (or any other country with similar needs) could switch from nuclear and fossil fuels to hydrogen to generate all its electricity, it could use the byproduct -an entirely new source of drought-proof pure water- to supplement the natural cycle and support growth.

On April 17, 2014 China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection issued a report, based on seven years’ worth of tests on 6.3 million Km2 (2.4 million Sq Mi) of land, that determined that 16% of the country’s soil is contaminated, with 1% heavily polluted. Major pollutants in the farmland include heavy metals such as cadmium and arsenic, and organic pollutants due to widespread pesticide use. Worse, southern China, where most of its rice is grown, is more polluted than the northern provinces. All told, 2.4% of the country’s arable land is too degraded for farming.

The importance of China’s sparsely populated west cannot be overstated. The land may be dry and fallow, but it is not polluted. If the American working classes could produce enough hydrogen to satisfy this untapped potential market, the resulting income stream might well rival the great river of wealth currently flowing to the shareholders and executives of multinational corporations. This alternative would not require internal redistribution of wealth by way of additional taxes.

The concept is not a secret, the cost-effective technology to produce hydrogen from electrolysis of seawater exists, and the desperation for water will only grow. Already heretofore great rivers no longer reach the sea, large bodies of water, such as the Aral Sea, have all but disappeared, and the full effect of global warming has yet to be felt. It’s no longer a question of if mankind will ever aquafacture water, but when. In the end, all it will take is some small country to start raking in the money, and everyone else will follow.

Water-vulnerable American Cities

This study at the Environmental Hydrology Laboratory at the University of Florida ranks 225 American cities with populations greater than 100,000 on fresh water availability and vulnerability.

For method details, see Padowski, J. C., and J. W. Jawitz, 2012. Water availability and vulnerability of 225 large cities in the United States, Water Resources Research, 48, W12529, doi:10.1029/2012WR012335.

Urban areas of population greater than 100,000 are ranked by fresh water availability based on liters per person per day. Absolute water availabilities have been normalized by scaling to the maximum value in the set. Vulnerability accounts for both mean water availability and variability about the mean (for example, drought frequency).

This method incorporates not only renewable water flows, but also the extracted, imported, and stored water that urban systems access through constructed infrastructure. These constructed sources represent important components of urban water supply, yet are typically excluded from water scarcity assessments. In this analysis, water availability is measured as the sum of the mean annual volume of water available to cities from both naturally-occurring and constructed sources. Natural availability is also constrained here by environmental limits on withdrawals. Urban water vulnerability is expressed as the susceptibility of those urban supplies under low-flow (drought-like) conditions.

High-ranking cities tend to be adjacent to very large lakes, such as the Great Lakes, and large rivers, such as the Mississippi or Columbia. For example, the highest-availability city (Duluth, MN) is the only US city on Lake Superior, the third-largest freshwater body in the world (by volume). The other Great Lakes have smaller volumes and are shared by more (and larger) cities. Low-ranking cities are often found in arid regions (for example Los Angeles and Las Vegas), have low storage per capita (for example Miami and Atlanta) or share sources with multiple other cities (for example Chicago and Tallahassee). This national, cross-cutting assessment required several assumptions for cases where limited data regarding source characterization or allocation exist (for example cities sharing the Great Lakes or large aquifers). Therefore, the current vulnerability assessments for an individual city should be considered in the context of the data available for each city. Population data in the table below are from the 2000 US Census.

College and the Middle Class

Student Debt

The zip code effect

Comparative resources to pay for higher education

Contrary to what some have been led to believe, a college education is not a panacea, only a distraction from the real reasons for our predicament. The fact is, even if colleges and universities wanted to accept each and every high school graduate, they do not have the physical capacity to do so. And even if they could, and did accept them, the nation would still need farmers, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, mechanics and cops, among others, many of whom are chronically unemployed or underemployed. A large, healthy middle class is absolutely essential to any society, and that means wages high enough to own a modest house in a safe neighborhood, to raise kids and pay for their education, to save for retirement, and to have enough disposable income to make their lives worth living. These are not the outrageous, intolerable expectations of the 47% of the population accused of demanding government entitlements and not paying taxes; not long ago they were the American norm and the envy of the world.

The Labor Participation Rate

As of March 2013, the percentage of working-age adults in the labor force -known as the participation rate- fell to 63.3%, the lowest since May 1979. Since unemployed people who stop looking for work are not counted as unemployed, the official unemployment rate is grossly understated. Part of the trend can be explained by the baby boom generation’s gradual retirement, but that does not consider the fact that many boomers who need to work, can’t; they simply retire to a life of abject poverty. One reason so many people -of all ages, not just boomers- can’t find well-paying jobs is because manufacturing wages have declined over time.

China’s Achievements

In less than two generations, without vast oil reserves or mountains of debt, China has peacefully transformed itself into the world’s preeminent manufacturing powerhouse, and for that it deserves the highest praise and admiration. America’s trade deficit with it stems in part from China’s lower labor and medical care costs, its Confucian culture of self-sufficiency, and its well defined and scrupulously enforced policy of currency manipulation. But the most important reason for the size and longevity of the deficit is China’s anemic consumption of consumer goods manufactured in the United States by American workers, a situation reminiscent of the period that preceded the Opium Wars. There is of course an important difference between then and now: China is no longer economically or militarily weak, and it is using its hard currency reserves -the world’s largest- to acquire wealth-creating assets worldwide, even in the United States. While China does not have a reputation for seeking to expand beyond what it considers its historical sphere of influence, it is also true that never has it depended so much on so many others for its economy’s lifeblood -energy and raw materials.

There’s no indication that any of this is about to change, to the contrary. The need to survive and the irresistible lure of its millions of potential customers will continue to entice American and European businesses to invest in China. Those with the means to do so will profit at an increasing rate. The rest, -who lack the capital and mobility of their ex-bosses- are and will continue to be barred from the great river of wealth emanating from China’s booming economy, condemned instead to meager jobs selling the same foreign-made goods they once manufactured. It doesn’t take rocket science to extrapolate what the distribution of wealth will look like in another generation -with all its consequences- if remedial action is not taken now, immediately, to rescue the increasingly vestigial American middle class.

Public Debt

Currently the only way the government can maintain its liquidity is thanks to the Federal Reserve, which as of April 2013 holds 16% of total outstanding Treasuries -essentially Federal IOUs purchased by the Fed with money created out of thin air. How long this can continue is anyone’s guess.

Trade Deficit

Trade Deficit 1970-2012
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Foreign Trade Division

The trade deficit is a direct consequence of the fact that more workers in other nations are employed producing goods and services for the United States than the other way around. So far, this wealth hemorrhage has been confined to the middle class, compelled to choose between unemployment and underemployment. But that is economically, politically and socially unsustainable; the massive, ongoing loss of well-paying middle class jobs that began in the 1970s has resulted in a dismal labor participation rate, 63.3% in April 2013. Worse, more than 50% of the jobs created in the same month were in low-paying industries such as retail trade (29,000) and leisure and hospitality (38,000). The writing is on the wall: in 2012, 284,000 college graduates had jobs that paid minimum wage, a 70% increase over the previous decade (Wall Street Journal, March 30, 2013). Presumably, those without college degrees were pushed deeper into the abyss of unemployment, underemployment and despair. No wonder the drug trade has so many eager participants. Furthermore, lower wages mean lower tax revenue and fewer dollars to offset China’s growing defense expenditures as a percent of its economy.

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