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An almost perfectly efficient light-activated catalyst for producing hydrogen from water

Efforts to make hydrogen from water directly using sunlight have been hampered by the inefficiency of the catalysts that promote the process. A model system demonstrates that almost perfectly efficient catalysts can be made.
  1. Simone Pokrant

    1. Simone Pokrant is in the Department of Chemistry and Physics of Materials, University of Salzburg, Salzburg A-5020, Austria.

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Since the emergence of Greta Thunberg’s ‘Fridays For Future’ movement in August 2018, the need to prevent climate change and to find ‘green’ alternatives to fossil fuels have become topics of broad public interest. But although public awareness has advanced rapidly, progress in the search for cost-effective technological solutions has not. One promising sustainable energy carrier is hydrogen, if it can be produced using renewable energy sources — hydrogen is a green fuel, because its combustion produces only pure water. Writing in Nature, Takata et al.1 report a breakthrough in catalyst design that might accelerate the development of large-scale processes for making hydrogen from water using sunlight.

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Nature 581, 386-388 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01455-w

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