Scientists Just Found a New Way to Make Hydrogen from Water

Summary: A new light-activated material can efficiently produce hydrogen from water without requiring an additional expensive metal catalyst. Researchers say its unusual sulfur-based chemistry could point toward cheaper and more practical ways to turn sunlight into clean fuel.

Researchers at Oregon State University have created a new class of materials that can use light to produce hydrogen from water, offering a potentially cleaner way to convert solar energy into fuel.

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The work was led by Kyriakos Stylianou of the OSU College of Science. His team developed a photocatalyst capable of producing hydrogen quickly and efficiently. Hydrogen is widely used in fuel cells for vehicles, as well as in the production of ammonia, metal refining, and plastics manufacturing.

Using Light to Speed Up Chemical Reactions

A catalyst is a substance that accelerates a chemical reaction without being permanently changed in the process, Stylianou said. A photocatalyst works in a similar way but is activated by light. After absorbing light, the material reaches a higher energy state and can use that energy to drive chemical reactions more rapidly.

The findings, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, could provide researchers with another tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and addressing climate change, Stylianou said.

His research centers on metal organic frameworks, or MOFs, which are crystalline, porous materials with structures that can be carefully customized.

MOFs are built from positively charged metal ions surrounded by organic "linker" molecules. Their tiny pores and adjustable structures allow scientists to fine tune their properties for different applications.

Millions of different MOF structures are theoretically possible, Stylianou said. Chemistry researchers have already synthesized nearly 100,000 of them, while the properties of roughly another half-million have been predicted.

An Unusual Sulfur Bond Drives the Reaction

For this study, the researchers focused on a MOF called BVR-19. The material contains an unusual sulfide-to-sulfide bond that temporarily breaks when exposed to light, producing highly reactive sulfur species.

"The organic component does the important work," Stylianou said. "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. This represents a different way of thinking about how these materials should be designed."

That approach means BVR-19 does not require an additional expensive metal catalyst, Stylianou added. This could make future light-driven hydrogen-production systems simpler to design.

The material also has another potential advantage. BVR-19 forms spontaneously in aqueous solutions at room temperature, which lowers the amount of energy required to make it.

A Cleaner Alternative to Conventional Hydrogen

Producing hydrogen by splitting water with a catalyst can be cleaner than the dominant industrial method, which relies on natural gas.

That conventional process, known as methane-steam reforming, releases carbon dioxide while producing hydrogen.

Existing methods for making hydrogen from water often rely on electrocatalysis, which uses electricity to drive the catalytic reaction. The environmental benefits of that approach depend heavily on where the electricity comes from. To remain both sustainable and economically competitive, the power must come from low-cost renewable sources.

At present, hydrogen produced through methane-steam reforming costs about $1.50 per kilogram, while green hydrogen costs roughly $5 per kilogram.

New Design Rules for Cheaper Green Hydrogen

"Our work provides a blueprint for designing better materials that can bring down the cost of green hydrogen," said Kyriakos Stylianou, who directs OSU's Materials Discovery Laboratory, known as the MaD Lab. "By changing the metal while keeping the rest of the material essentially the same, we discovered why some versions of the MOF work much better than others. These findings provide new design rules for creating more effective materials for solar fuel production."

MaD Lab members Emmanuel Musa, Dylan Pyle, Jacob Lessard, Andrzej Gladysiak, Ankit Yadav, Silas Blessed and Prayash Mohanty were joined in the research by Oregon State's Logan Lancaster, Taylor Krueger, Min Soo Jung, Galen Fritz, Jacob Hirschi, Hongliang Huang, William Stickle, Xiulei "David" Ji, Chong Fang and Tim Zuehlsdorff.

The Murdock Charitable Trust, the National Science Foundation and the OSU College of Science supported the study.