Compared to conventional alkaline electrolysis at around 70% apparently.
Doesn't brine electrolysis also produce chlorine, or has Factorio fed me some horseshit?
Doesn't brine electrolysis also produce chlorine, or has Factorio fed me some horseshit?
> "In all cell processes, the filtered brine is heated and passed through a bed of salt in a saturator in order to increase its salt concentration before feeding it to the electrolyzers. In some plants, the brine feed is acidified to improve the cell current efficiency. The acidification reduces the alkalinity, which would otherwise react with the chlorine in the anolyte compartment, forming chlorate."
https://knowledge.electrochem.org/encycl/art-b01-brine.htm
At neutral-alkaline pH with seawater you can get hypochlorite (ClO-), basically relatively weak chlorine bleach formation at 0.5-1%, this is used when seawater is used for industrial cooling systems (see nuclear power plants etc.):
> "A more realistic picture of the problems DSS faces can be gained from on-site hypochlorite generators, a technology established since the early 1970s for industrial water cooling systems. There, low concentrated hypochlorite is used to avoid the growth of marine organisms as they tend to foul equipment and worsen heat transfer. The hypochlorite is formed by direct oxidation of Cl- from the filtered seawater feed. The electrolysers are one compartment cells made of titanium, and the electrodes are comprised of a titanium core with a precious metal oxide coating (Ru, Ir, Pt)."
source: Hausmann et al. (2021). Is direct seawater splitting economically meaningful? (sci-hub)
Hydrogen from seawater directly seems pretty speculative, be interesting if it works, you could have hydrogen production at sea maybe. Scale might be an issue (giant barges with solar panels making hydrogen for fueling shipping?)
It seems quite promising.
But if they manage to get H2 from it then the sodium, oxygen, and chlorine have to bind into something else than usual I guess.
"Electrochemical Acceleration of Chemical Weathering as an Energetically Feasible Approach to Mitigating Anthropogenic Climate Change"
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es0701816
It was mind blowing for me at the time! Subsequent approaches to accelerated silicate weathering like Project Vesta dropped the chemical component and just used mechanical crushing of rocks to accelerate weathering. The all-mechanical approach is less complicated and energy intensive.
Biological processes are far more efficient at fixing carbon into biomass and using unlimited free solar energy. Bio CCS.
You'd need a hell of a lot of chlorine to compensate for current methane injection, though.
It's the same electrolysis process used today in swimming pools to generate chlorine. The hydrogen evaporates, the chlorine ends up in the water, and the chemical reaction ends up producing the same salt it started with. You don't have to add salt[0] and the chlorine pretty quickly evaporates and breaks down in sunlight if you don't put cyanuric acid in the water to bind it.
Mostly it could be ignored, though if the chlorine level got high enough it would kill the organic things.
[0] except for losses due to other reasons than chlorine generation
(Edit n/m, 100% efficiency was now removed from the headline)