April 5, 2022. A team of researchers led by Oregon State University (OSU) has shown that hydrogen can be cleanly produced with much greater efficiency and at 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 clean hydrogen production process, were published in Science Advances and JACS Au.
The research team used the resources of the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, to test and confirm their findings.
In facilitating reaction processes, catalysts often experience structural changes, according to Zhenzing Feng, a chemical engineering professor at OSU who led the research. Sometimes the changes are reversible, other times irreversible, and irreversible restructuring is believed to reduce a catalyst’s ability to affect chemical reactions.
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. The new catalysts based on amorphous iridium hydroxide were 150 times as efficient as the original structures they were adapted from, and close to three orders of magnitude better than the common commercial catalyst, iridium oxide.
“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.”
DOE has made hydrogen the first of its “Energy Earthshots” — an initiative that aims to accelerate breakthroughs of more abundant, affordable, and reliable clean energy solutions — setting a goal of reducing the cost of clean hydrogen by 80% to $1 per 1 kilogram in one decade (“1 1 1”). The infrastructure bill signed into law in November 2021 authorizes an $8 billion DOE program to support the development of at least four regional clean hydrogen hubs to network hydrogen producers, storage, offtakers and transport infrastructure.
Feng and his team confirmed their findings using several X-ray techniques at the APS. Work was done at beamlines 9-BM and 4-ID-C, where the research team was able to observe the electrochemical process as it happened, getting information about changes to the catalyst in real time.
Co-authors on the papers include scientists from the University of Texas, Peking University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Northwestern University, South China University of Technology, the University of Cambridge, the University of California, Berkeley and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.