Harvesting hydrogen from air... free energy with graphene?

I read this news article about harvesting hydrogen from air using graphene membrane technology. My knee-jerk reaction to the concept is one of pseudoscience, but then I read that it was published as a Nature letter and that the study was led by Nobel Laureate, Sir Andre Geim?

The press reports:
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/23/tech/innovation/tomorrow-t...
and
http://www.hexapolis.com/2014/12/06/graphene-could-help-extr...

And the ?press release? from the University of Manchester:
http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/article/?id=13372

Will probably be going viral soon in the media as a 'free energy' story, while the term is of course not used anywhere, I think it's clear that this is implied as they do say this harvested hydrogen could power fuel cells.

None of the stories link to the article itself, but I think they are referring to the Nature letter [1] referenced below.

Now a cursory search turned up that the hydrogen content in air is about 600 parts per billion [2], rather dilute.

I think there is a way to thermodynamically calculate the minimum work required to enrich a gas from one concentration to another, say from a partial pressure of 0.6 mPa in air to 101325000 mPa or 1atm I think comparing that to the maximum thermodynamic work that could be derived from reacting the hydrogen with air would debunk this pretty quickly... or not.

Now the science behind the work and the discovery that protons diffuse through graphene while hydrogen does not, is very important and good, but I have serious doubts about the harvesting hydrogen from air claims... sounds like the energy equivalent of harvesting gold from seawater.

I'd sooner harvest hydrogen from water

BTW, is the diffusion of protons through graphene possibly a quantum tunneling effect?

Your thoughts?

References:

[1] S. Hu et al. (2014). Proton transport through one-atom-thick crystals [letter to the editor]. Nature 516, 227–230.

[2] E. Glueckauf and G. P. Kitt. (1957). The hydrogen content of atmospheric air at ground level. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 83 (358), 522–528.

[Edited on 24-12-2014 by deltaH]

My thoughts exactly.

I have this little pet hate... when scientists put little asides to their research/articles, like "could one day be used for..." this or that, when any scientist well knows it has no chance in hell of being used in that way, somehow inflating the potential importance of their research.

While this might be innocent at times, it's gotten out of hand, in fact so out of hand that people publish utter lies in this respect. Like in energetics, when some insanely complex molecule gets synthesised with mediocre properties and then they say... could one day be used for propellants, yeah right, like anyone wants to pay $10000 per bullet or $100000000000000000 for a rocket.

Anyway, this particular case about the... could one day be used to harvest hydrogen from air and solve all our energy needs is just so far off the edge that it just proves how dangerous these claims are getting.

Anyhow, maybe I'm wrong and I'll stand corrected... wouldn't be the first or last time

Quote: Originally posted by deltaH

My thoughts exactly. I have this little pet hate... when scientists put little asides to their research/articles, like "could one day be used for..." this or that, when any scientist well knows it has no chance in hell of being used in that way, somehow inflating the potential importance of their research. While this might be innocent at times, it's gotten out of hand, in fact so out of hand that people publish utter lies in this respect. Like in energetics, when some insanely complex molecule gets synthesised with mediocre properties and then they say... could one day be used for propellants, yeah right, like anyone wants to pay $10000 per bullet or $100000000000000000 for a rocket. Anyway, this particular case about the... could one day be used to harvest hydrogen from air and solve all our energy needs is just so far off the edge that it just proves how dangerous these claims are getting. Anyhow, maybe I'm wrong and I'll stand corrected... wouldn't be the first or last time

I thought that it was well understood that the only useful part of a journal article is the experimental section?! The rest of the waffle is merely the authors trying to explain to themselves why they bother getting out of bed every morning to mix chemicals together.
Merry Christmas!