Scientists discover breakthrough method to make fuel cheaper and easier to produce — and it could drastically change the future of global energy

Researchers at Anemel, a European research organization, have just made a clean energy breakthrough. According to a new study published in the Energy & Environmental Science journal, Anemel’s research team has discovered a stable method for splitting water molecules efficiently and with materials that are cheap and easy to come by.

The process is crucial for the production of hydrogen, and the sooner we can replace fossil fuels with hydrogen as an energy source, the better.

Hydrogen has long been seen as a potentially game changing fuel source as it burns with no harmful carbon emissions, is energy-rich, easy to store, and is the most abundant element in the universe.

But producing hydrogen by splitting water through the process of electrolysis, which is how hydrogen is typically produced, has previously required the use of rare platinum group metals (PGM) as a catalyst in the process.

Because those metals are so scarce, it’s incredibly expensive to make catalysts at a pace fast enough to supply significant demand without it costing a fortune.

What the researchers at Anemel did was develop a catalyst that doesn’t need PGMs to split water. Instead, their catalyst relies on metals more easily obtained like nickel and molybdenum. What’s more, the researchers showed their new catalyst is robust and stable. According to the study, it performed at a high level in tests specifically designed to determine the catalyst’s robustness.

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That robustness and reliability in turn has the potential to make clean hydrogen production more scalable and far less expensive than it is currently. Removing those two hurdles would go a long way to smoothing the road for hydrogen as a widely adopted clean-energy source in the future. Once you don’t need scarce metals like PGMs to produce hydrogen, it throws open the door for expanding hydrogen production at scale, cheaply.

If the energy sector manages to scale up the production of green hydrogen while keeping costs under control, it would be a huge step on the road toward a future of clean, abundant, and affordable energy.

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