New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
> "Initially, we did not believe it because the prevailing view is that Mn impairs the corrosion resistance of stainless steel. Mn-based passivation is a counter-intuitive discovery, which cannot be explained by current knowledge in corrosion science. However, when numerous atomic-level results were presented, we were convinced. Beyond being surprised, we cannot wait to exploit the mechanism," said Dr. Kaiping Yu, the first author of the article, whose PhD is supervised by Professor Huang.
This is the Cannot be explained bit
The three stooges effect I see. Too many corrosive elements, they stop each other from getting through the door.
This statement sounds like the type of language one uses when trying to get a patent.
However, "a counter-intuitive discovery" is true. Manganese is frequently used in stainless steels, but only as a cheap substitute for nickel, when this is considered as giving up the superior resistance to corrosion provided by nickel in exchange for the low cost provided by manganese.
The counter-intuitive result of the research is that there are circumstances when manganese provides improved corrosion protection, not only a lower cost.
The reason why this has not been discovered earlier is that manganese alone does not protect against corrosion, but only in an appropriate combination with chromium, when chromium protects both the steel and the manganese at lower electric potential differences, while manganese protects both the steel and the chromium at higher electric potential differences.
It is, however, incredibly tacky to talk about your research like this.
It sounds from the quote like even the researchers thought it was a mistake at first… and that on the basis of the literature PLUS their collective professional wisdom. Now, obviously, they did in fact try the thing, so maybe the idea was not quite so wacky as they paint it for the article.
But the point feels similar here as with LLMs and writing: they can do what’s come before pretty well, and they can exhaust a well-specified problem space through sheer muscle; but they seem to be less good at evolving the frontiers of the domain, and I see no mechanism by which to expect that to change.
So I tend to take the opposite lesson: surprises like this renew my hope that there will remain a place in science long into the AI era for meatbags and serendipity and the spirit of curiosity.
To hear it from the researchers, this feels like the sort of finding that, even in retrospect, is non-obvious from existing literature.
I remember hearing scientific progress described in terms of punctuated equilibrium: some Big New Idea, then a bunch of work generalizing that new idea to the rest of the problem space. I could see AI tools speeding up the second type of work: taking a new framework and chewing through everything that came before, in that new light.
But I have a hard time thinking about how the AI techniques could produce novel, surprising outcomes like this one—ones where it’s not just a permutation of existing knowledge, but where it turns out reality actually cuts against the accumulated written knowledge that came before. The “there is magic to be explained here!” aspect of science.
The comparison is not equivalent as a human isolated from the environment and unable to perform experiments would fair the same.
It is through conducting experiments that we make discoveries.
Once AI can hypothesize and run experiments from start to finish I see no reason why novel discoveries won't be made this way.
If you look at the knifesteelnerds article on H1 (https://knifesteelnerds.com/2019/06/24/h1-steel-how-it-works...), you'll find that it's an austentitic alloy (which is highly unusual for any sort of tool steel), and that it seems like it's likely a somewhat less corrosion resistant than usual variant on steels like 301 or 304. And the rather common stainless alloy used for non-tool applications where high levels of corrosion resistance is 316, which is more corrosion resistant than 304.
In any case, this new alloy is weird -- it seems like it specifically has excellent resistance to electrochemical corrosion when it is used as an anode, which is not what people usually use stainless steel for :)
That said, I have heard plenty of anecdotes confirming these properties from other folks. People losing a knife in a stream or field and then finding it the following year, etc.
> In any case, this new alloy is weird -- it seems like it specifically has excellent resistance to electrochemical corrosion when it is used as an anode, which is not what people usually use stainless steel for :)
100%. Probably almost no crossover into cutlery, but super cool regardless!
[edit]
I should also point out that the two alloys I mentioned are not particularly hard or tough for a knife steel.
It's not that unexpected.
Additionally, the rope length extends quite a bit of an anchor fails (and it partially recovers it’s elasticity before the other anchors engage). Later anchors would not get forces exceeding a normal ‘healthy’ bolts limits.
So there is some systemic failure involved in this scenario.
The limiting factor is that natural gas is very cheap and cracking it to make blue hydrogen is really easy at scale, and gives off CO2 which is useful for injection into wells to increase production. That sets a price ceiling of hydrogen.
At the other end of the scale, there are batteries to store 'free' electricity and resell later. That sets a floor price of electricity.
Between the floor price of the input and ceiling price of the output, there is no room for electrolysis, even at 100% efficiency, unless government policies mandate it or restrict batteries or blue hydrogen.
Now, yes, as long as natural gas is cheap(inbetween US or Soviet wars) it'll probably be the core for hydrogen, however batteries won't help much in the north since the transmission rather than usage is the cap even with batteries so excess production could be redirected towards hydrogen production.
I think we're going to see a repurposing of remote coal-fired plants with renewable stored heat. The Four Corners plant, perhaps? It's supposed to stop operating in 2031, I believe.
But also, other than Texas, I don't hear about a lot of regional over production. There's pretty good interconnection within and between the two major grids.
Assuming ultra low cost thermal storage becomes a thing, there's going to be a market for small externally heated engines to recover that heat as power. That (+ batteries) will enable complete off-grid operation with PV at small (maybe 100 kW) commercial scale and larger.
"Natural gas at Texas’s Waha hub is trading at negative $7.05 per million British Thermal Units, hitting a record low of negative $9.52 on April 15."
https://www.barrons.com/articles/natural-gas-texas-negative-...
There are different kinds of water electrolysis equipment, with different capital expenditure and operating expenses.
"Alkaline electrolyzers are cheaper in terms of investment (they generally use nickel catalysts), but least efficient. PEM electrolyzers are more expensive (they generally use expensive platinum-group metal catalysts) but are more efficient and can operate at higher current densities, and can, therefore, be possibly cheaper if the hydrogen production is large enough."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Efficien...
Anything using platinum-group metals will be very expensive. Therefor catalytic converters in cars use very little platinum-group metals.
"The amount of palladium in a converter can vary, but it is typically around 2-7 grams." https://vehiclefreak.com/how-much-palladium-is-in-a-catalyti...
Googling that tells me there was/is too much of it locally.
The gas is a byproduct of drilling for oil, and there was/is insufficient pipeline capacity to move it to consumers.
If this works out at scale (lots of problems can be found between a lab discovery and mass production), this is legitimately a very good thing for renewables.
Yes, but I think this the most likely outcome. Natural gas is only cheap in certain areas, and the past few years have made everyone very, very aware of the geopolitics involved in getting hold of it. While global warming is not going away, and I question the extent to which CCS actually happens with blue hydrogen.
Batteries are capital equipment in the same way as electrolysers are. They're great at short term storage, but medium-term is still a bit more of an issue. "Restrict batteries" is obviously not on the table except for stupid retail corner cases where utilities have captured the regulator.
There's a potential market for lots of green H2 in Haber nitrogen, metals refining, and synthetic jet fuel etc, but only if the cheap CO2 emitting option is priced out or banned, or H2 electrolysers get comparable capital prices to battery storage.
Huh?
I’d be interested in hearing about some scenario where this actually costs less, given the cost of building anything nuclear in 2026.
"The low efficiency of PV-electrolyzer systems can be attributed to several factors: intrinsic losses in both the PV and electrolyzer units, energy consumption by balance-of-system components (e.g., inverters, thermal management), and, most critically, ineffective electrical coupling. Although some researchers advocate for direct coupling as a cost-effective solution, variable solar input remains a major challenge. Fluctuations in solar irradiance can cause the power delivered to fall outside the acceptable operating range of electrolyzers, leading to frequent shut-downs and start-ups. These cycling events can accelerate degradation, particularly in PEM electrolyzers, and also affect the purity and yield of hydrogen"
"Recent studies also highlight the integration of battery energy storage systems (BESS) into large-scale PV-CSP hybrid plants as a strategic enhancement. With anticipated declines in battery costs, this integrated approach may become increasingly viable in the near future."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44373-025-00080-4
"Material selection, simulation, and experimentation of sulfuric acid decomposition in a pilot-scale sulfur-iodine thermochemical cycle for hydrogen production"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00162...
GP was talking about injecting the CO2 back into the well, not releasing it to the environment. There are even standards for specific injection wells used for long term storage (EPA Class VI).
Natural gaz may be cheap, but you can't beat free.
For this setup, the price of the hardware was a limiting factor.
It has to compete with pumped weight (usually water), pumped heat (salt, water, or underground), electric batteries, and so on.
So, as always, it's complicated.
Here, corrosion of steel is also part of the problem, as you are burying steel pipes in piles of hot dirt.
Another, or perhaps related, limiting factor is just how difficult hydrogen is to handle safely - compared to natural gas, batteries, or other alternatives - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_safety. And it does not take many surprise explosions & fires to give a technology a bad rep. Especially when people feel there are obviously-safer alternatives.
I can see the argument for use in industrial processes like steel manufacturing as a reducing agent, but not as a power source.
The cost of batteries for long-term storage is still prohibitively high. In contrast, large hydrogen (or methanol, etc further products) are relatively cheap to store.
Those two things put together is pretty much it. There is massive room for additional wind capacity in northern europe (and solar in north africa, etc). In order for constructing that additional capacity to make any sense, there needs to be more demand that can idle for ~2/3rds of the time, and make economic sense to run a third of the time. In these conditions, the roundtrip efficiency is an entirely uninteresting statistic, and the capital cost of capacity is what matters.
How strange utility grids are spending on HVDC transmission and not hydrogen infrastructure.
HN commenters should ring up their local electrical grid operators and set them straight /s
Also, if you have extremely low cost of electricity: you build manufacturing nearby that needs massive amounts of energy, like metal refineries. Or you subsidize electric transport.
You don't pour money into a fuel that is a logistical headache and a half, a fuel that nobody uses, and can only be converted back into electricity with the standard terrible internal combustion / turbine efficiencies.
BSS is usable when you need hours of storage, not when you need days.
> How strange utility grids are spending on HVDC transmission and not hydrogen infrastructure.
HVDC makes sense in certain conditions, but not others. You need to have alternate consumers/producers available that are not correlated with you.
> Also, if you have extremely low cost of electricity: you build manufacturing nearby that needs massive amounts of energy, like metal refineries. Or you subsidize electric transport.
Extremely low costs some of the time. Not low at all average costs. Metal refineries have significant capital costs and shutdown costs. You are not going to profitably operate one if you need to shut it down when the wind calms down, or if you are running it on batteries. The kind of existing industries that can make use of intermittently cheap power have already been scaled up, and we need more to keep building more renewables.
> HN commenters should ring up their local electrical grid operators and set them straight /s
I don't have to, because there are significant pilot projects ongoing.
This is new, and requires higher initial capital outlay than batteries (which have the significant advantage that it's easier to do small projects and then scale them up), so of course it's going more slowly. But there are things that hydrogen (+ things derived from hydrogen. Storing it as gas is not usually the best option, but if you have the gas you can refine it further at very low cost.) can in principle do that batteries simply cannot, like time-shift production by 3 months.
But seriously, you need to consider different metrics for different situations. If your data is from California or Australia, maybe consider that it is not applicable to all of the rest of the world?
A battery can definitely store power for three months. What do you mean? Say it loses 10-15% charge in 3 months, that still sounds more efficient than electrolysis (and storing hydrogen will have a nonzero amount of loss too, compounding its lower efficiency.)
And using batteries, the cost of that is currently bonkers.
The lowest cost large-scale BESS projects that have been completed are in China, with the record-holder currently being ~$51k/MHh.
As a comparison, OL3, the most expensive nuclear plant in the world, and which is generally held up as an example of nuclear plants being too expensive to be worth it, cost a total of €11B. It produces net 1600MW electric. That is, if you have the lowest construction, labor and battery costs in the world for the battery project, if you want to store more than ~6.5 days of production, it makes more sense to instead build the world's most expensive nuclear power plant and idle it when you don't need the power.
> sounds more efficient than electrolysis
NOBODY CARES ABOUT EFFICIENCY. Nobody should care about efficiency. If you care about efficiency, you do not understand the problem. If you can get capital costs low enough, your competition for that power is curtailment. The cost of input electricity can be assumed to be zero.
BESS is useful and important for stabilizing the grid, and for leveling production/consumption over a day. Hydrogen solves a different problem, namely, how to run your entire grid on renewables without using coal or nuclear as baseload, and without natural gas as peakers, when your production varies greatly over time.
I'm tired of Internet Experts(tm) announcing how dumb the specialists are for not seeing the Obvious Facts.
Not everything is about "muh EV".
There is a reason that countries that have built significant Solar PV and Wind Turbine manufacturing capacity like China, Germany, SK, Japan, and India have also been investing in H2.
H2 as an energy market helps subsidize additional H2 usecases such as Ammonia/NH3 production for fertilizers (this has become critical due to the ongoing Iran War), steelmaking via H2 direct reduced/sponge iron, and (for China and India) coal gasification.
Additionally, REEs and critical minerals have increasingly become a bottleneck so additional options is good to have depending on the country, which is a major reason Japan heavily invested in hydrogen along with sodium solid state battery R&D.
And finally, the brutal truth is no major country actually cares about climate change - they care about energy security. Most larger countries have the ability to afford the externalities that arise from climate change, the three largest CO2 emitters in the world (China, US, India) are seeing CO2 emissions rise (mind you at a reduced rate, but still unsustainable from a climate change perspective), and in China and India's case continue to leverage coal as an energy security tool especially after the Iran War supply chain crisis highlighted the criticality of coal gasification for the fertilizers and agriculture.
You build an electric arc furnace.
Factorio may be an excellent game, but life is more complicated than it.
... hardened valves and valve seats, stronger connecting rods, non-platinum tipped spark plugs, a higher voltage ignition coil, fuel injectors designed for a gas instead of a liquid, larger crankshaft damper, stronger head gasket material, modified (for supercharger) intake manifold, positive pressure supercharger, and high temperature engine oil.
For CNG or LPG conversion I think some fuel system components need to change but the rods, valves, head gasket, etc. are all unchanged.
My guess as to the reason is that hydrogen will basically detonate in the cylinder, whereas methane or propane will burn more like gasoline.
You can probably make electricity directly from H2, and you can probably make special pressure vessels that'll store that H2 (though even then it'll have a 7 year "inspect thoroughly" and a 15 year "throw it out regardless" lifespan.)
H2 is a silly fuel unless you're making rockets. Or if you're trying to distract people.
Imagine dividing farmland by 10x by feeding hydrogenotrophs with solar H2.
I haven't checked to see how that went, but it sounded like the perfect test case for hydrogen's viability.
The problem with hydrogen electrolysis is its energy requirements to split water. The energy requirements for the desalination of water before that is a rounding error. It's not worth the hassle to develop electrolyzers that can deal with seawater.
https://www.nemaco.com/blogs/304-vs-316-stainless-steel-diff...
As I understand one of the reasons against using materials like stainless steel or other alloys for cars is that is is harder to work with, but most new cars today are written off - rather than being repaired - after even minor accidents, so that doesn't really seem like it's a realistic concern.
Also, you can coat your car underbody in an oil based coating 1-2x a year, and it won't rust. Its just an annoying chore that most people don't want to even think about.
Plus there's also futures where harvesting salt / lithium from seawater leaves clean ish water as a by product, or a future where when it's sunny, just boil water to evaporate it with nearly free solar, then electrolyse it. And you'd need near free electricity to make this economic.
WTF is "anti-COVID-19 stainless steel" I wonder.
Edit: Turns out it's a high-copper alloy that has antiviral properties.
Or maybe there are uses for these? Releasing chlorine (diluted!) into the atmosphere might be a way to accelerate the scrubbing out of methane. Chlorine is photolysed by sunlight into chlorine atoms, which immediately react with methane.
Destruction of methane by chlorine has been observed naturally, for example after the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption in 2022 (although the chlorine-mediated destruction there was less than methane injected by the volcano itself.)
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-massive-volcano-destroyed-met...
They're not exactly talking about destroying methane. The methane is turning into chlorinated organic compounds.
No, the methane isn't being turned into chlorinated organic compounds. The reaction mechanism is CH4 + Cl --> CH3 + HCl. (Caveat: I don't think the side reaction CH4 + Cl --> CH3Cl + H occurs, but I need to confirm.) The chlorine ends up as hydrochloric acid, which washes out in rain. If you object to the acidity, note that the electrolysis of seawater was leaving behind the sodium ions as sodium hydroxide, so there would be no net increase in acidity. The methyl radical is also produced by the natural oxidation of methane by OH radicals, and would continue along that natural oxidation chain.
The link I referenced (and the paper it cites) do not, as far as I can tell, discuss any chlorinated organic products.
If anyone else is reading along, please do not attempt to use chlorine gas to "destroy" methane in air that anybody's going to be breathing. That would be very dangerous.
Even ignoring toxic organics and organochlorides ... the proposal to release chlorine gas seems to demand very careful thought. Similar programs were tried during World War I, with negative effects on human subjects.
Not loving the HCl either, though I've read your comments on that.
Splitting water into free hydrogen and oxygen is important because it is an essential step for using electrical energy in the chemical and metallurgic industries.
For long term energy storage, free hydrogen is not a good solution, but it can be used to synthesize hydrocarbons, which are suitable for long term energy storage or for aerospace transportation.
Even with abundant and cheap dihydrogen, using it for energy storage in vehicles is a bad idea.
It's important to always appear to be argumentative, even when in agreement.
I've noticed this too, even when agreeing lots of comments start with a negative.
Perhaps it's reflexive.
What I meant is that for rational companies there would be no reason to be happy about this development, because it does not solve any of the problems that prevent free hydrogen for being suitable for energy storage, especially in vehicles.
It is not the cost of generating hydrogen that makes uncompetitive the cars with hydrogen, but difficulties in its storage and transportation.
Most of the energy used by living beings also passes through splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen, but the hydrogen is never stored as such, but it is immediately used for synthesizing reduced carbon compounds, which are suitable for long storage and easy to carry by mobile beings. This has been proven in practice for billions of years as a suitable solution for long term energy storage.
Japanese car manufacturers were late to EVs, and in order to prevent a gap in the market where EV-first competitors can steal market share from them, they lobby the government to subsidize and create a new market segment in the form of hydrogen cars. There they have a head start via some latent research and more reuse of ICE car platforms. I'm sure the hydrogen division is well aware that they are doing research on a dead-end technology (at least for the automotive sector).
The exact same thing happened in Germany. In 2020 there was a huge push from politicians to push more hydrogen technology to distract from the fact that German car manufacturers were lagging behind, as well as general missed initiatives for renewable energy. Now, 6 years later those initatives are deader than ever.
CNG fleet vehicles work out for many fleets; especially those that have vehicle depots where fueling happens.
I haven't looked into detail for the hydrogen cars, but I wonder if they made the same kinds of designs with regard to the fuel tanks. On pressurized fuel vehicles, the tanks expire after 15-20 years; on most CNG cars, the tanks take a lot of labor to replace, so most vehicles will expire when their tank does; I suspect the same for the hydrogen cars. Fleet vehicles tend to do a lot of miles, so a time based tank expiration is less of a problem.
The case for BEVs becomes even more clear when you look at complexity. BEVs are just simpler, even simpler than today's IC engine cars. IC engines have become baroque and expensive. The tooling needed to make these engines has become a boat anchor on the old car companies. And similarly for transmissions: the transmission of a BEV is a very simple thing, just a single stage of gear reduction without a clutch.
Fuel cell cars were a bet on the proposition that BEVs would be inhibited by range and charging time concerns, but rapid charging and widespread availability of such high power chargers has nixed that.
Looking at a CNG car and thinking the reason they didn't get adopted is ICE and not gaseous fuel is pretty silly. Fuel cells are cool, but they don't solve the problem of tank expiration, and hydrogen storage is harder than CNG storage.
ICE may be complex, but most of the complexity comes from emissions controls / efficiency mandates. CNG "solves" emissions. You could burn hydrogen, and you'd really solve carbon emissions, if your hydrogen wasn't just coming from natural gas anyway. You'd probably need DEF, because high combustion temperatures with air intake from the atmosphere is going to generate NOx. Might not be as efficient as fuel cell vehicle, but it really doesn't matter when the problem is the fuel.
BEVs are clearly going to win as ICE is pretty close to fully optimized and batteries are still getting better. Although, if you could make a fuel cell vehicle based on a STP liquid that is energy dense and reasonably non-corrosive, it would have a chance.
Production of Toyota Prius started 28 years ago.
If we manage to get enough solar such that energy essentially becomes infinite then the inefficiency would no longer matter. Otherwise, it would only make sense in vehicles that require high energy density like airplanes.
[0] The 2nd chart on https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2025.05.28/chart2.s...
That chart is showing some curtailment in winter because the grid knows to expect less production. It is already tuned to spin up more gas because solar will underperform relative to Summer.
Uh, dumb question, how is 1.7 volts "ultra high potential" ? Is that even enough to do electrolysis like they're talking about?
"Hong Kong researchers develop corrosion-resistant steel for seawater hydrogen electrolysis"