Making hydrogen fuel cells 'less precious'

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://source.washu.edu/2026/02/making-hydrogen-fuel-cells-less-precious/

WashU chemical engineers work to bring stability to iron components in fuel-cell technologies

By Leah Shaffer February 6, 2026

…

In research published in Nature Catalysis, Wu and his team outlined how they stabilize iron catalysts for use in the fuel cell, which would lower costs for fuel-cell vehicles and other niche applications such as low-altitude aviation and artificial intelligence data centers.

…

Unlike electric battery-run cars, people can’t recharge fuel-cell vehicles using their home electricity sources. So there needs to be affordable and easily accessible hydrogen refueling infrastructure for this clean tech to take off. Making use of plentiful and affordable iron catalysts would go a long way to lowering those costs. But first, researchers needed to make iron more stable to handle the fuel-cell chemistry involved.

Wu and his team did so by creating a chemical vapor of gases that can stabilize the iron catalysts during thermal activation, an innovative approach to significantly improve catalyst stability while maintaining adequate activity in proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). The result vastly improved iron catalysts’ durability along with increased energy density and life span. The team chose PEMFCs among different fuel types because they best serve heavy-duty vehicles, things like transport trucks, buses and construction equipment — vehicles that already go to centralized fueling centers. It’s most affordable and efficient for the technology to be first adopted by heavy-duty vehicle fleets, which would further lower costs as it becomes widespread and further efficiencies of scale come on board.

“After suffering from the poor stability for decades, now we were able to address the critical problem,” said Wu, who explained that next steps will include further refining their processes to make iron catalysts even better than precious metals for the fuel cells of tomorrow.

…

Zeng, Y., Qi, M., Liang, J. et al. Regulating in situ gaseous deposition to construct highly durable Fe–N–C oxygen-reduction fuel cell catalysts. Nat Catal (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-026-01482-2

[NNadir]

1. Changing the catalyst - there's generally a few hundred papers of this type per year - will not make hydrogen...

...sustainable.

If one searches Google scholar, with the search terms, hydrogen, electrocatalyst, "platinum free" one will come up with close to 4000 hits, 484 of which have been published since the beginning of 2025, 62 in 2026.

There are no papers published anywhere, however, that can overturn the laws of thermodynamics - one of which, the 2nd, means that storing energy wastes energy.

The "energy storage is green crap" is handed out by people who haven't noticed that the trillions of dollars squandered on so called "renewable energy" has had no environmental benefit, that the the only result of tearing the shit out of the planet for mines, destroying pristine wilderness for solar and wind industrial parks has had no other effect than making the collapse of the planetary atmosphere occur accelerate faster. Both the second derivative and even the third derivative of the experimentally determined rate of accumulation of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide are positive.

It's an ignorant affectation to hype energy storage, particularly as an industrially problematic gas, hydrogen, which has the 3rd lowest critical temperature of all known gases, the others being ⁴He and the decay product of tritium, ³He.

The real purpose of hydrogen hype is to greenwash dangerous fossil fuels.

The Journal of Hydrogen Energy published its first issue in 1976:

International Journal of Hydrogen Energy

Hydrogen was a bad idea in 1976, 1986, 1996, 2006, 2016, and remains one in 2026.

Have a nice day tomorrow.

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. Thank you for your opinion

More affordable catalysts will make “green hydrogen" more affordable. Among other things, “green hydrogen” can be used to make “green ammonia” for fertilizer (rather than producing it using the Haber-Bosch process.)

At this point roughly half of the world’s population depends on food grown using fertilizer produced using the Haber-Bosch process.;

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/11/green-ammonia-climate-change-energy-transition/

[NNadir]

3. All the bullshit handed out over the decades has not made "green hydrogen" anything more than an affectation.

The assholes in Germany, had to close their hydrogen plants because they could no longer buy dangerous natural gas from that bastard Putin whose war they financed.

I wrote not so long ago, with something called "references" about what hydrogen hype is all about:

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

I certainly am well aware that antinukes run around all the time advocating for tearing the shit out of the planet, digging up the last best ores, converting huge stretches of land for industrial parks for wind and solar crap that will be lucky to last 25 years before becoming landfill. I attribute the rising rates of the collapse of the planetary atmosphere to this affectation.

Very clearly the people calling for this hold all future generations in extreme contempt.

They show up here often, although we haven't seen the fossil fuel marketeer with all the slick videos rebranding his, her or their product as "hydrogen," much recently.

It doesn't matter.

The hype for making this crap even worse by claiming that wasting energy to make hydrogen makes it all that much more obscene.

It is true that the world food supply depends on the Haber Bosch process. Since almost no hydrogen is made on a meaningful scale by electrolysis, and where it is, the electricity largely comes, as it does all over the world, from the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels (about which antinukes couldn't give a rat's ass), the Haber Bosch process is overwhelming dependent on dangerous fossil fuels. Fertilizer use for agriculture in one of many issues that drive the collapse of the planetary atmosphere.

There are many known thermochemical hydrogen cycles, accessible regrettably, only by using high temperatures. Their development has been problematic and challenging which is not a reason to stop working on them. As reported by Vaclav Smil in his still worthy to read book, Enriching the Earth (2000), the development of the Haber Bosch process was essentially a problem in materials science engineering, the role the chemical engineer Bosch played in industrializing Haber's lab based science. (The Haber Bosch process requires heat to run.)

Thermochemical hydrogen cycles are also materials science problems; the chemistry is well known. In fact, high temperature nuclear reactors, which are the only sustainable means of producing industrial heat, are materials science problems as well. I am proud to say, my son is involved in working to solve these problems, rather than piddling around with people who like to gloat about how their ignorance prevented nuclear energy from doing what it might have done, happily chanting that it is too late for nuclear to save what might have been saved and restore what is subject to restoration.

This insipid gloating disgusts me.

As for now, it is a profound thermodynamic issue that makes electrolysis to produce hydrogen a terrible idea, a frankly appalling idea, not that this reality, remaining intractable for many decades since the first industrialization of the Haber Bosch process more than 110 years ago, is likely to make people stop carrying on with "green hydrogen" bullshit. Electricity by its very nature is a thermodynamically degraded form of energy, and other than in lightening, is not a primary energy source on this planet.

Hydrogen, whether produced directly from fossil fuels, or indirectly by combusting fossil fuels to generate electricity, is a dirty commodity, since it requires largely dirty energy to make it. Half a century of "green hydrogen" bullshit handed out to the contrary has not changed this reality.

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. Thank you once again for your opinions

Production of “low-emissions hydrogen" is increasing, albeit slowly:


IEA (2025), Global Hydrogen Review 2025, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/global-hydrogen-review-2025, Licence: CC BY 4.0



Nuclear power, while (relatively) clean (compared to fossil fuels) cannot do all things. It can be used to produce hydrogen, which has many uses.

https://www.iaea.org/topics/non-electric-applications/nuclear-hydrogen-production

Nuclear hydrogen production

The hydrogen economy is getting higher visibility and stronger political support in several parts of the world. In recent years the scope of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) program on non-electric applications of nuclear energy has been widened to include other more promising applications such as nuclear hydrogen production and high temperature process heat applications. Nuclear hydrogen production technologies have great potential and advantages over other sources that might be considered for a growing the hydrogen share in a future world energy economy. The selection of hydrogen technologies (to be coupled to nuclear power reactors) greatly depends on the type of the nuclear power plant itself. Some hydrogen production technologies, such as conventional electrolysis, require only electric power. Whereas others, such as thermochemical cycles, may require only process heat (which may be delivered at elevated temperature values) or hybrid technologies such as the high temperature steam electrolysis (HTSE) and hybrid thermochemical cycles, which require both heat and electricity.

…

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. The key to producing "green hydrogen" is electrolyser capacity, which more than doubled from 2024 to 2025

IEA (2025), Global Hydrogen Review 2025, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/global-hydrogen-review-2025, Licence: CC BY 4.0

[NNadir]

6. Really? 100%!!!!!!! WOW, WOW! WOW!

Antinukes just love "percent talk."

They always have and always will, all the while not noticing that the world is burning.

If I have two dollars and I increase my holdings by 100%, I still will not be Jeff Bezos with tons of money to destroy once prominent newspapers.

Speaking of "percent talk" when did the people selling electrolyser "green hydrogen" find out that electricity is 100% produced without fossil fuel combustion?

They didn't find out?

Why is that?

Could it be that it's because electricity is overwhelmingly produced by combustion of dangerous fossil fuels with exergy destruction?

If anyone wants to really understand anything at all about hydrogen in order to have an intelligent opinion about the subject, as opposed to a hand waving wishful thinking nonsense opinion of the subject, one can find the relative exergy destruction comparing the SMR process with electrolysis.

I personally spent time doing this and have wrote about it, supplying a selection of references on the topic, in this space.

On this planet as of 2026, steam reforming of methane is actually cleaner than electrolysis as a means to make hydrogen, which is still a dirty process. This is a function of the laws of chemical physics which are not determined by opinion but rather are obtained by the analysis of experiment.

In "percent talk," hydrogen production is responsible for roughly 3% of carbon dioxide emissions.

One doesn't need access to the scientific literature to find this "percent talk" figure although one can find it there, It's available at the MIT climate portal.

Despite all the prattling about "green hydrogen" over the last half of a century, hydrogen remains what it always has been, a dirty, if essential, industrial product.

Have a nice day.