Most of the research regarding hydrogen production by water electrolysis deals with improving catalysts for HER and OER. There are many papers claiming the production of low cost, yet Pt like catalytically active materials. Then why these works don't reflect in the real world yet? Are there more issues to solve? If yes, why most of the research still focuses on overcoming the overpotential (which is just in the order of mV)? I
The basic logic of academy and industry is different.
Considering the rising prices of Ir, commercial application of PEMWS is under high risk. The technique of alkaline electrolyzed water is fully developed, while it cannot be used on distributed energy. As for publications, researchers focus on the problems they can solve with available resources.
There are some complexities that don't have solved yet:
1. cost of catalyst and process
2. catalyst's long term stability
3. catalyst's efficiency
4. catalyst recycling
5. Hydrogen storage issues
6. industries that use fossil fuels don't want to pay more price for green fuels
7. governments and countries that sell oil prevent globalization of this fuels
and so on
Dear Nabeel Na
Scientists are trying to reduce over potential to prevent loss of energy. In articles over potentials look tiny but in industrial process it becomes huge and cause loss of huge amount of energy that affect the cost of hydrogen fuel.
Industry is mainly focused on catalyst durability in real conditions, while academia prefers single-crystal or well-ordered systems that are about anything but durability. A 'golden unit' between two RDE systems is difficult enough! I do wish industrial electrode suppliers would supply and educate academia more broadly w.r.t. system requirements as well as minor things like maximum allowable impurity concentrations in systems that flow electrolyte.
AEM-WE is where the future is for the reasons you identified - NREL and a handful of others are working on it diligently but there should be many, many more. Our electrolysis white-paper includes a look at electrocatalysis and the impact of PGMs in an integrated, component-by-component analysis using the NREL open model (too-high BOP estimates but a good and common baseline for everyone). https://ionomr.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/FM-7024-A-Hydrogen-Production-Cost-by-AEM-White-Paper-copy.pdf
Dear Nabeel,
In industry, stability is usually much more important than activity, which is the direct opposite of most academic papers. The vast majority of catalysts reported in academia either have no proper stability assessment at all, or limit themselves to 2-24 hours of stability at 10 mA/cm2, which holds extremely little value.
Additionally, many of the purpoted 'facile' catalyst syntheses in papers are too complex (several lengthy steps), require exceedingly expensive start materials, or are simply unsuitable - the result is a powder, which is not easily applied to a support.
The gap between academia and industry is larger than ever nowadays. There are some exceptions though: an example of a good paper which, in my opinion, seems well-rooted in industry, can be found here: doi.org/10.3390/ma12081336.
Best regards,
Jan
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