Oregon State University research shows that hydrogen can be cleanly produced with much greater efficiency and at a lower cost. The new research into the design of catalysts offers a lower cost than is possible with current commercially available catalysts.

The new findings, which describe ways to design catalysts that can greatly improve the efficiency of the hydrogen production process, have been published in Science Advances and JACS Au.

An active phase of a catalyst based on amorphous iridium hydroxide exhibited efficiency 150 times that of its original perovskite structure and close to three orders of magnitude better than the common commercial catalyst, iridium oxide.

The findings are significant because the production of hydrogen is important for “many aspects of our life, such as fuel cells for cars and the manufacture of many useful chemicals such as ammonia,” said the OSU College of Engineering’s Zhenxing Feng, a chemical engineering professor who led the research. “It’s also used in the refining of metals, for producing human-made materials such as plastics and for a range of other purposes.”

Producing hydrogen by splitting water via an electrochemical catalytic process more sustainable than the conventional method of deriving hydrogen from natural gas via a carbon-dioxide-producing process known as methane-steam reforming, Feng said. But the cost of the greener technique has been a barrier in the marketplace.

In facilitating reaction processes, catalysts often experience structural changes, Feng explained. Sometimes the changes are reversible, other times irreversible, and irreversible restructuring is believed to degrade a catalyst’s stability, leading to a loss of catalytic activity that lowers reaction efficiency.

Feng, OSU Ph.D. student Maoyu Wang and collaborators studied the restructuring of catalysts in reaction and then manipulated their surface structure and composition at the atomic scale to achieve a highly efficient catalytic process for producing hydrogen.

“We found at least two groups of materials that undergo irreversible changes that turned out to be significantly better catalysts for hydrogen production,” Feng said. “This can help us produce hydrogen at $2 per kilogram and eventually $1 per kilogram. That’s less expensive than the polluting process in current industries and will help achieve the United States’ goal of zero emissions by 2030.”

Feng noted that the U.S. Department of Energy Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office has established benchmarks of technologies that can produce clean hydrogen at $2 per kilogram by 2025 and $1 per kilogram by 2030 as part of the Hydrogen Energy Earthshot target of cutting the cost of clean hydrogen by 80%, from $5 to $1 per kilogram, in one decade.

The water electrolysis technology for clean hydrogen production that Feng’s group is focused on uses electricity from renewable sources to split water to make clean hydrogen. However, the efficiency of water splitting is low, he said, mainly due to the high overpotential – the difference between the actual potential and the theoretical potential of an electrochemical reaction – of one key half-reaction in the process, the oxygen evolution reaction or OER.

“Catalysts are critical to promoting the water-splitting reaction by lowering the overpotential, and thus lowering the total cost for hydrogen production,” Feng said. “Our first study in JACS Au laid the foundation for us, and as demonstrated in our Science Advances article we now can better manipulate atoms on surface to design catalysts with the desired structure and composition.”

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If the catalyst material can be produced economically at commercial scale this could be quite an improvement in hydrogen production cost reduction. It may be such an improvement the production facilities could very well need upgrading as well.

For now, the claim of a 3 orders of magnitude better than today’s commercial catalysts is something that just begs a replication. Let’s hope that it proves up to wide acclaim and adoption!


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