Hydrogen can be cleanly produced with much greater efficiency and at a lower cost than is possible with current commercially available catalysts according to researchers at Oregon State University.
OSU College of Engineering’s Researcher Zhenxing Feng led the research.
“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.
A catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change. Generally the catalyst used is similar to a chunk of metal.
This announcement comes after the Oregon State Legislature announced plans to direct the State Department of Energy to conduct studies of the benefits of, and barriers to, renewable hydrogen production and use in Oregon.
According to Feng, 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. It’s also used in the refining of metals, for producing man-made materials such as plastics and for a range of other purposes.”
Feng notes 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 new findings were published in Science Advances and JACS Au.
By Jennifer Williams
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