(Digital Presentation) Water Oxidation in Acid with Earth-Abundant Electrocatalysts
Authors: Kong Shuang , Li Ailong , Nakamura Ryuhei 
Published: July 2022

Green hydrogen production from renewable energy can help overcome difficult energy challenges worldwide. It can help decarbonize hard-to-abate sectors such as steel, chemicals, and ammonia fertilizer. Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) water electrolyzer serves as a promising technology when coupled with the fluctuating renewable energies for hydrogen production, with the advantages of fast response, dynamic operation, and excellent overload capacity. However, the only technically feasible anode catalysts for PEM are built on scarce iridium and require more than 40 years of annual production for 1 TW-scale. The scarce metal iridium has become a bottleneck limiting the scale development of PEM water electrolysis technology. Therefore, identifying earth-abundant catalysts with high activity and acid tolerance is essential to realizing large-scale hydrogen production via water electrolysis.

Various 3d transition metals have been investigated as potential OER catalysts. In 2019, we reported how manganese oxide shows exceptional stability among earth-abundant materials for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) in acid. At the time, non-precious metal catalysts had difficulty maintaining activity for more than a week at 10 mA cm-2. In comparison, manganese oxide (γ-MnO2) was able to electrolyze water for over 11 months at 10 mA cm-2. This was made possible by identifying a stable potential window for γ-MnO2 in which the OER can be catalyzed efficiently while simultaneously suppressing deactivation pathways.

After that, a binary spinel oxide catalyst (Co2MnO4) was synthesized by mixing stable manganese with active cobalt using a thermal decomposition method. Cobalt oxides were shown to be active for the OER but unstable in acid. By incorporating Mn into the Co3O4 spinel lattice, the lifetime was extended by two orders of magnitude while maintaining the activity. The water electrolysis with Co2MnO4 in acid can be sustained over 1500 hours at 200 mA cm-2. The activation barrier of the obtained spinel Co2MnO4 is comparable to state-of-the-art iridium oxides, which are reported to have activation energies of 25-30 kJ mol-1 in acidic conditions. The catalyst dissolution was experimentally analyzed by spectroscopy methods. It is clarified that the tetrahedral Co is the preferable dissolution site and the dissolution rate is suppressed in Co2MnO4 compared to Co3O4, resulting in outstanding stability.

The active working time of Co2MnO4 as a function of current density for the OER reaction and other earth-abundant electrocatalysts reported in the literature were summarized. The marked improvement of the activity and stability in acid makes cobalt manganese spinel materials an intriguing candidate for non-noble metal water electrolysis.

Acknowledgments:

This work was supported by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).

Figure caption: Long-term stability of Co2MnO4 during the OER in acid. a, Time dependence of the electrochemical potential necessary to perform OER at 100, 200, 500 and 1,000 mA cm-2
geo in H2SO4 (pH 1) and H3PO4 (pH 1), respectively. The stabilities of Co3O4 and γ-MnO2 in H2SO4 (pH 1) are shown for comparison. All the experiments were performed at 25 °C using an FTO substrate except for curve IX, for which a Pt/Ti mesh was used. b, A comparison of the stability of Co2MnO4 with Co3O4 and other Earth-abundant OER catalysts reported in the literature12-28 (Please refer Nat Catal 5, 109–118 (2022)) (upwards and downwards triangles represent lifetime and operation time, respectively). The measurements were performed under acidic conditions. Data points with roman numerals (I to XI) correspond to curves I to XI in a. Diagonal lines indicate the total amount of charge transferred before deactivation. Only studies that report stability at pH < 3 were included in the literature survey.

Figure 1