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Water oxidation: High five iron

Nature Energy volume 1, Article number: 16023 (2016) Cite this article

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The oxidation of water is essential to the sustainable production of fuels using sunlight or electricity, but designing active, stable and earth-abundant catalysts for the reaction is challenging. Now, a complex containing five iron atoms is shown to efficiently oxidize water by mimicking key features of the oxygen-evolving complex in green plants.

The production of hydrogen by splitting water and the synthesis of hydrocarbons from water and carbon dioxide are likely to be important processes in the future provision of clean fuels. Whether the reactions are driven by electricity, or directly by sunlight, as in artificial photosynthesis, for the process to be sustainable molecular oxygen must be produced concurrently with the fuel through the oxidation of water. However, oxidation of the water molecule has proved to be a bottleneck for the development of artificial photosynthesis, and catalysts are needed for the reaction to proceed1. Catalysts based on earth-abundant metals such as iron are particularly desirable because of their low cost and high availability. Although well-defined iron coordination compounds are being extensively explored as potential catalysts2–5, only rarely can they operate under electrochemical conditions6,7. The few examples that can are based on mono- and dimetallic coordination complexes, and only provide modest reaction rates (measured by the turnover frequency) and stability (estimated by the turnover number). Now, writing in Nature, Shigeyuki Masaoka and colleagues in Japan describe a molecular complex containing five iron atoms that performs electrocatalytic oxidation of water with turnover frequencies and turnover numbers several orders of magnitude higher than other iron-based catalysts8.

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Figure 1: Mechanism of water oxidation catalyzed by a pentanuclear iron complex.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Julio Lloret-Fillol is at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ), the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Tarragona 43007, Spain and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), Passeig Lluïs Companys 23, 08010 Barcelona, Spain.,

    Julio Lloret-Fillol

  2. Miquel Costas is at the Institute of Computational Chemistry and Catalysis and Department of Chemistry, University of Girona, Girona 17071, Spain.,

    Miquel Costas

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  1. Julio Lloret-Fillol
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  2. Miquel Costas
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Correspondence to Miquel Costas.

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Lloret-Fillol, J., Costas, M. Water oxidation: High five iron. Nat Energy 1, 16023 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nenergy.2016.23

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