Green Hydrogen Without Platinum

What if the cost of green hydrogen came down not at the power plant, but in the catalyst?

Electrochemical water splitting is one of the most promising routes to green hydrogen, yet it remains expensive. A large part of that cost sits in the oxygen evolution reaction, the anode half of the process, which today relies on catalysts based on precious-group metals.

A new study from the laboratory of Prof. Lior Elbaz of Bar-Ilan University and the Bar-Ilan Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (BINA), with Michal Mizrahi, Rawnaq Batheesh and colleagues from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Technische Universitat Darmstadt and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, set out to remove those metals from the equation.

The team developed ternary nickel-iron-cobalt oxide aerogels, prepared by a sol-gel route, systematically introducing cobalt into established nickel-iron oxide catalysts and optimizing the ratio between the three metals.

The resulting materials are free of precious-group metals, and the study maps how the nickel-iron-cobalt composition governs their structure and their activity toward oxygen evolution.

The experimental work was paired with density functional theory calculations, which explain how the addition of cobalt changes the electronic properties of the material and why it improves oxygen-evolution catalysis, turning an empirical optimization into a design principle.

Because the anode catalyst is one of the cost drivers of water electrolysis, replacing precious metals with abundant transition metals acts directly on the economics of green hydrogen. Prof. Elbaz also heads the Israeli Fuel Cell Consortium and works with industrial partners to move chemistry of this kind from the laboratory toward deployable systems.

Congratulations to Prof. Lior Elbaz and the entire research team, together with their colleagues at the Technion, TU Darmstadt and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, on a contribution to the next generation of clean-energy technologies.

Read the full paper published in ACS Applied Energy Materials: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsaem.6c01325