Seawater to Sustainable Fuel: Sunlight-Driven Green Hydrogen Generation with an Atomically Dispersed Photocatalyst.

Authors

Satyadeep Waiba, Manami Banerjee, Lindsey Frederiksen, Aleksander Jaworski, Susanna Monti, Giovanni Barcaro, Kaan Karaca, Xiufang He, Anna Rokicińska, Thanh Huyen Vuong, Gianvito Vilé, Piotr Kuśtrowski, Jabor Rabeah, David Reyes, Peng Ren, Sergey Bagnich, Anna Köhler, Daniel Hohenberger, Josef Breu, Paul J Dyson, Shoubhik Das

Published in

Journal of the American Chemical Society. Oct 22, 2025. Epub Oct 22, 2025.

Abstract

Green hydrogen is widely regarded as a key to a sustainable future, offering a clean and flexible fuel option for decarbonizing the energy, transport, and industrial sectors. While photocatalytic approaches are known for generating hydrogen directly from water, most existing methods require (over)stoichiometric amounts of sacrificial reagents, which is far from ideal for the production of green hydrogen. To address this challenge, we have developed an atomically dispersed Ni-based photocatalyst that achieves hydrogen evolution rates of up to 270 μmol/g/h (168 mmol/g_Ni/h). Remarkably, this photocatalyst also exhibits high photoreactivity under direct sunlight, producing up to 17 μmol/g/h (10.6 mmol/g_Ni/h) of hydrogen. Impressively, the catalyst can even generate green hydrogen directly from seawater, up to 144 μmol/g/h, demonstrating significant potential for real-world applications. The photocatalyst is exceptionally stable, remaining active even after 720 h (140 h of irradiation and 580 h resting time) of operation and retaining high performance over more than 15 cycles. Furthermore, comprehensive spectroscopic and structural analyses─including HRTEM, PXRD, ssNMR, XPS, and XAS─provide detailed structural insights and confirm the atomically dispersed nature of the Ni species. In-depth mechanistic studies have elucidated the critical role of atomic dispersion in enabling robust photocatalytic efficiency.

PMID:
41124595
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 23 Oct 2025.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.