Getting Hydrogen From Water On The Cheap

Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) is showing how a hydrogen fuel economy could finally become a reality with their recent discovery of a cheap, stable and efficient means of getting hydrogen from water. If the research is repeatable and can scale a hydrogen fuel economy could finally become a reality with their discovery of a cheap, stable and efficient means of getting hydrogen from water.

The KTH scientists are now reporting that they have unlocked one major barrier to exploiting this renewable energy source. Because the best performing catalysts for electrochemical oxidation, or “water splitting,” are expensive precious metals, the research team led by KTH Professor Licheng Sun is one of many worldwide searching for cheaper alternatives. Sun had earlier developed molecular catalysts for water oxidation (Nature Chem. 2012, 4, 418) with an efficiency approaching that of natural photosynthesis.

Now his team has reported with their paper published in Nature Communications that they have discovered that a new material composed of common earth-abundant elements that could be used as a catalyst for water splitting, which could help change the economics of large scale hydrogen fuel production.

Researcher Ke Fan said that the new material is a monolayered double hydroxide involving nickel and vanadium, which offers a state-of-art electrocatalyst for water oxidation. The low-cost, highly efficient nickel-vanadium monolayer outperforms other electrocatalysts that are composed of non-precious materials, Fan said. And it offers a competitive, cheap alternative to catalysts that rely on more expensive, precious materials, such as iridium oxide (IrO2) or ruthenium oxide (RuO2).

Fan noted, “This is the first time that the metal, vanadium, has been used to dope nickel hydroxide to form a water oxidation catalyst, and it works very well – even beyond our expectations. No doubt this material can greatly expand the scope of non-precious metal elements of electrocatalysts, and it opens new areas for water splitting.”

Researcher Hong Chen explained the material possesses a layered structure with monolayer nickel-vanadium oxygen polyhedron connected together with a thickness below 1 nanometer. “This monolayer feature not only increases the active surface area, but also enhances the electron transfer within the material,” he said.

Professor Sun expects the research to “open a new area of low-cost water oxidation catalysts, featuring stability and efficiencies that equal or even surpass some of today’s best catalysts including RuO2 and IrO2.”

One intriguing possibility the discovery raises is large-scale production of hydrogen fuel using Sun’s catalyst. If it works and scales we’ll be back to coming up with the electricity and that storage problem.