Hydrogen has lots of uses in the world.

Scientists have created a catalyst they believe can radically reduce the price needed to create hydrogen.

After testing the catalyst for over 10 weeks, they think it can withstand the public's scrutiny.

Scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have, for the first time, proven that an inexpensive catalyst can generate hydrogen gas in a commercial environment. Known as an electrolyzer, the team hopes the catalyst has potential for large-scale hydrogen production powered by renewable energy.

While scientists have proven such technology in the past, the price point has always been a sticking point. Precious metals like platinum and iridium were needed to boost efficiency, making a cheaper catalyst crucial. And while more inexpensive catalysts have been shown to work in a lab setting, these researchers found it can work in the rough and tumble of the public sphere as well.

"Hydrogen gas is a massively important industrial chemical for making fuel and fertilizer, among other things," says lead researcher Thomas Jaramillo, director of the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis, in a press statement. "It's also a clean, high-energy-content molecule that can be used in fuel cells or to store energy generated by variable power sources like solar and wind. But most of the hydrogen produced today is made with fossil fuels, adding to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. We need a cost-effective way to produce it with clean energy."

The goal of electrolysis is to split up water into its two elements, hydrogen and oxygen. Rather than use platinum, the team used a catalyst of cobalt phosphide nanoparticles placed on carbon to form a fine black powder.

The cobalt phosphide catalyst, which encouraged the chemicals to interact and react, operated for 1,700 hours, or a little over 10 weeks. The scientists believe the consistency shown over that time period is proof that the catalyst could work for commercial purposes in a variety of conditions, from elevated temperatures to the heavily acidic.

"Our group has been studying this catalyst and related materials for a while," says McKenzie Hubert, a graduate student in Jaramillo's group, in the statement. "We took it from a fundamental lab-scale, experimental stage through testing it under industrial operating conditions, where you need to cover a much larger surface area with the catalyst and it has to function under much more challenging conditions."

Scaling up anything, be it a business or a catalyst, can be a challenge. For the researchers, they needed to show they could increase production while keeping the catalyst's structure uniform. According to the team, it required "synthesizing the starting material at the lab bench, grinding with a mortar and pestle, baking in a furnace and finally turning the fine black powder into an ink that could be sprayed onto sheets of porous carbon paper." Sprayed onto carbon paper, the team had large-format electrodes ready for testing.

While there's some work to be done, the team is encouraged by the results. So are the scientists at Nel Hydrogen in Connecticut, the world's oldest and biggest manufacturer of electrolyzer equipment, which provided the electrolyzer for the catalyst.

"The performance of the cobalt phosphide catalyst needs to get a little bit better, and its synthesis would need to be scaled up," says study coauthor Katherine Ayers, vice president for research and development at Nel, in the statement. "But I was quite surprised at how stable these materials were. Even though their efficiency in generating hydrogen was lower than platinum's, it was constant. A lot of things would degrade in that environment."

Hydrogen prices keep infrastructure for the gas down to a minimum, meaning that users are prone to shortages. Cheaper hydrogen could radically increase its use in the public.

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