Oregon State Material Uses Light to Make Hydrogen Without an Extra Metal Catalyst
Oregon State University chemists report a light-driven material that produces hydrogen from water using sulfur-containing organic parts instead of an added expensive metal catalyst, a design they say could help lower the cost of green hydrogen.
Researchers at Oregon State University have developed a material that uses light to produce hydrogen from water without needing an additional expensive metal catalyst, the university announced. The findings were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Sulfur-containing building blocks do work usually left to metals
The material, called BVR-19, belongs to a family of crystalline, porous compounds known as metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. They are built from positively charged metal ions held together by organic “linker” molecules, and their pores and properties can be tuned. Chemists have made almost 100,000 MOFs so far.
BVR-19 contains a sulfur-to-sulfur bond that briefly breaks when light hits it, creating reactive sulfur species. That lets the organic part of the framework capture light energy and send electrons to where hydrogen forms.
“The organic component does the important work. Instead of relying primarily on the metal atoms, our material uses its sulfur-containing organic building blocks to capture light energy and move electrons where they are needed to produce hydrogen.” — Kyriakos Stylianou, Director, Materials Discovery Laboratory, Oregon State University
Because no extra metal catalyst is needed, future light-driven hydrogen systems could be simpler to design, Stylianou said. BVR-19 also forms spontaneously in water at room temperature, which the team says gives it an energy advantage in production.
Green hydrogen still costs more than three times as much as hydrogen from gas
Most hydrogen today is made from natural gas through steam-methane reforming, a process that releases carbon dioxide, as the U.S. Department of Energy explains. Oregon State puts the cost of that hydrogen at about $1.50 per kilogram, against about $5 for green hydrogen made from water.
Hydrogen powers fuel cells and is used to make ammonia, refine metals and produce plastics. Current water-splitting methods mostly run on electricity, so they are only as clean and cheap as the power supply. Photocatalysts such as BVR-19 aim to use sunlight directly.
The study offers design rules, not a finished system
By swapping the metal in the framework while keeping the rest of the structure the same, the team worked out why some versions perform much better than others. Stylianou called the work “a blueprint for designing better materials that can bring down the cost of green hydrogen.”
The university describes the production as high-speed and high-efficiency but does not give production rates or efficiency figures, and the work is still at the laboratory stage. The Murdock Charitable Trust, the National Science Foundation and Oregon State’s College of Science funded the study.
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