UH Researchers Report New, More Efficient Catalyst for Water Splitting
Some background and context from someone tangentially related to the field:<p>1. The overall idea here is to take an intermittent energy source (e.g. solar power) and &quot;store&quot; it as chemical fuel, in this case hydrogen and oxygen. This is what plants do, and we can also view fossil fuels as resulting from the &quot;storage&quot; of millions of years of solar energy. Note also that you get the water back when you burn the hydrogen, so there is no net consumption of water, it&#x27;s just a carrier.<p>2. While you can split water without a catalyst, most of the energy gets wasted as heat, so this is not a great way to go if you&#x27;re trying to do energy storage.<p>3. Efficient catalysts exist for this reaction, but they are based on rare and expensive metals, typically Pd, Pt, and Ir. As a result, there has been a search for catalysts involving &quot;first-row&quot; metals such as Fe, Co, Ni, etc.<p>4. There are variety of metrics for an electrocatalyst (efficiency, stability, cost, etc), but it&#x27;s a fair bet that if this were significantly better than state-of-the-art, it would be in Science or Nature rather than PNAS.