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IEEE Spectrum has a story on research into graphene which shows protons can pass through the material. One of the key properties of graphene was that it was previously thought to be impermeable to gases and liquids:
But as Geim and his colleagues discovered, in research that was published in the journal Nature, monolayers of graphene and boron nitride are highly permeable to thermal protons under ambient conditions. So hydrogen atoms stripped of their electrons could pass right through the one-atom-thick materials.
This has significant applications in fuel cells, since proton exchange membrane fuel cells require a barrier that only passes protons, and this discovery could be used to improve the efficiency of existing designs. However in addition to this it could also allow the cells to extract hydrogen directly from humid air
It is conceivable, based on this research, that hydrogen production could be combined with the fuel cell itself to make what would amount to a mobile electric generator fueled simply by hydrogen present in air.
“When you know how it should work, it is a very simple setup,” said Marcelo Lozada-Hidalgo, a PhD student and corresponding author of this paper, in a press release. “You put a hydrogen-containing gas on one side, apply a small electric current, and collect pure hydrogen on the other side. This hydrogen can then be burned in a fuel cell.”
Additional detail is available at Science Daily and in the original press release from the University of Manchester.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday December 05 2014, @02:04AM
Ah, but you don't necessarily have to split the water molecules. At least in liquid form a certain percentage of water molecules spontaneously dissociate into hydrogen and hydroxide (which is why pure water is acidic rather than neutral as one would naively expect). If you have a filter that lets only the hydrogen escape you should be able to exploit that. Of course you probably have to do something to avoid a buildup of hydroxide, I'd imagine that at some concentration its presence would choke out the dissociation.