Monash breakthrough offers new hope for scaling up green hydrogen via PEM electrolysers

Monash breakthrough offers new hope for scaling up green hydrogen via PEM electrolysers


Monash University-led research has produced new understanding about how cobalt catalysts degrade, and might offer hope for green hydrogen production in multi-gigawatt applications.

According to a statement from the university on Thursday, green hydrogen made through proton-exchange membrane water electrolysers has been held back by both the scarcity of iridium and the limited stability of cobalt catalysts. 

While iridium catalysts work “extremely well”, the material’s availability is “an order of magnitude too low”. And while cobalt catalysts are much cheaper, “their limited stability has been a roadblock”.

Contributor to the paper in Nature Energy Dr Darcy Simondson explained: “the challenge has always been making cobalt-based catalysts stable enough to survive the harsh conditions inside these electrolysers”.

The research – which had input from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion, Swinburne University of Technology, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin for Materials and Energy, Cambridge University, and synchrotron facilities in Australia and Germany – “could revolutionise how catalysts are designed”, according to the team. 

“This was more than three years of research using some of the world’s most advanced spectroscopic, electrochemical, and computational techniques,” said Dr Marc Tesch of the Max Planck Institute.

“We discovered that the major catalytic function of these cobalt-based anodes, and their degradation, actually occur independently of each other. That wasn’t what was expected from the previous research.”

Decoupling the two issues would allow scientists to separately focus on better performance and stability issues for such catalysts.

Swinburne’s Associate Professor Rosalie Hocking added: “That gives us a clear pathway to making cobalt-based anodes robust and economically viable for green hydrogen production. 

“There is also a potential to apply the same synchrotron methods to other catalysts providing critical insights across a range of systems.” 

The paper can be accessed here.

Picture: Credit Dr Marc Tesch, Max-Planck-Institut für Chemische Energiekonversion

Further reading

What’s happened to Australia’s green hydrogen dream? Here are 5 reasons the industry has floundered

First-of-its-kind green hydrogen facility begins construction in South Australia

Greener hydrogen is good



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