Maybe I'm missing something crucial but they make two moles of H2 in a PEC cell without needing a significant bias voltage, so far so good...
... but to do so, they sacrifice one mole of furfural?! Maybe I've been out of the game for too long but requiring such a complex organic as input isn't viable at all for large scale H2 production. What's more, IIRC aqueous furfural oxidation is exothermic and spontaneous at standard conditions; the whole photocell might be a facade in a molecular pyramid scheme.
If furoic acid can be stored economically then for industries needing furoic acid and H2 this can maybe be useful. So if there is 1/2 Mt of FA per year need, that means there can be a lot of hydrogen created as well.
(they can even use H2 for "primitive" inputs like burning it to provide process heat, like for example some reactors generating sulfuric acid generate H2 as a "waste" which is used in helping to distill said sulfuric acid in next step.)
Paper states that "exothermic heat" is consumed so cell is not heating up too much.
Furfural is produced on a massive scale from dehydration of plant matter, and lots of feedstocks exist. I'm not sure why furfural dispropriation to furfurol and furfuric acid is preferred over the oxidization in current industrial practice.
replacing one reactor for another makes sense if new reactor is more efficient, energetically or does not produce "waste" they had to get rid of/no use for.
if this is case here i do not know, i do not work in that area.
... but to do so, they sacrifice one mole of furfural?! Maybe I've been out of the game for too long but requiring such a complex organic as input isn't viable at all for large scale H2 production. What's more, IIRC aqueous furfural oxidation is exothermic and spontaneous at standard conditions; the whole photocell might be a facade in a molecular pyramid scheme.
I'd love to be proven wrong though...
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