In a development that could significantly reduce the cost of green hydrogen production, researchers at South Korea’s Hanyang University have created a new, low-cost catalyst that delivers high performance while avoiding the use of expensive rare-earth metals.

Green hydrogen, produced by splitting water using renewable electricity, is central to the global push toward cleaner energy systems. However, the widespread adoption of this fuel has been hampered by the high cost of the electrolysis process — particularly the catalysts required to drive the chemical reactions.

The team at Hanyang University’s ERICA campus in South Korea led by Professor Seunghyun Lee, has developed a boron-doped cobalt phosphide catalyst that performs efficiently in both the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) — the two critical processes in water electrolysis. Unlike conventional catalysts made from costly metals like platinum or iridium, the new material uses relatively abundant elements such as cobalt, boron, and phosphorus.

To create the catalyst, the team used cobalt-based metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) grown on nickel foam. They introduced boron using a chxemical treatment, followed by a phosphorization process that resulted in nanosheet structures with a large surface area — a key factor in enhancing catalytic performance.

One version of the material, created with a precise balance of boron and phosphorus, delivered particularly strong results: low overpotentials of 95 mV (HER) and 248 mV (OER), outperforming several commercial benchmarks. In real-world tests, an electrolyzer built using this material required only 1.59 volts to achieve 10 mA/cm² current density and showed stable performance for over 100 hours. At high current densities, it even surpassed state-of-the-art systems using ruthenium oxide and platinum catalysts.

The researchers backed their findings with density functional theory (DFT) simulations, which showed that boron doping and phosphorus adjustment improved the material’s interaction with key reaction intermediates — boosting efficiency.

This innovation could play a pivotal role in lowering the overall cost of green hydrogen production, making the technology more competitive for industrial applications in sectors such as transportation, power generation and steelmaking.

With growing global investment in hydrogen infrastructure, including government-backed projects and private sector initiatives, the development of affordable and durable catalysts like this one could be crucial to meeting decarbonization goals at scale.

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Hanyang University researchers discovered new breakthrough catalyst for cheaper green hydrogen production