Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Oregon State chemists make hydrogen from water using a sulfur bond that breaks in light
Oregon State chemists report a framework, BVR-19, that makes hydrogen from water in light with no added expensive metal catalyst. Without a reported rate or efficiency, its bearing on green hydrogen's roughly $5-a-kilogram price is still untested.
The Scientist · Science desk
Drafted by a language model from the sources cited here and checked against its claim ledger before publication. How we use AISend a correction
What happened
- BVR-19 contains an unusual sulfide-to-sulfide bond that breaks temporarily under light and releases highly reactive sulfur species.
- Swapping the framework's metal while keeping the rest essentially the same showed why some versions work much better than others, according to lead researcher Kyriakos Stylianou.
- BVR-19 assembles spontaneously in water at room temperature, which lowers the energy needed to make it.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint Metal choice still separated strong versions of the framework from weak ones, so follow-up designs have to search across metals even with the added catalyst gone.
- cost Any solar route is judged against a $3.50-a-kilogram gap to methane-derived hydrogen, and a cheaper catalyst closes that gap only if its hydrogen output and lifetime hold up.
- capability If the sulfur-bond rule holds, groups screening the nearly 100,000 MOFs already synthesized have a specific structural feature to look for.
Stylianou, who led the work at Oregon State's College of Science [1], gives the organic part of the framework the credit for the chemistry. MOFs are crystalline, porous materials built from positively charged metal ions surrounded by organic "linker" molecules [3]. "The organic component does the important work," Stylianou said [5]. "Instead of relying primarily on the metal atoms, our material uses its sulfur-containing organic building blocks to capture light energy and move electrons where they are needed to produce hydrogen. This represents a different way of thinking about how these materials should be designed." [6]
According to Stylianou, that design is why BVR-19 needs no additional expensive metal catalyst [7]. The material still contains metal. The framework is built on metal ions [3], and the metal-swap experiment in the Journal of the American Chemical Society paper showed that, with the rest held essentially constant, the choice of metal decided which versions worked much better [2][10].
The release describes the photocatalyst as producing hydrogen "quickly and efficiently" [16]. It does not report a production rate, an efficiency, a durability test or a cost per kilogram. Durability is the figure I would want first. Stylianou defines a catalyst as a substance that speeds a reaction without being permanently changed [15]. BVR-19 works by breaking one of its own sulfur bonds under light, so that bond has to keep re-forming over long runs for the material to meet his definition [4][15].
On the release's own prices, green hydrogen costs about 3.3 times as much as hydrogen from methane-steam reforming, a gap of $3.50 a kilogram [1][2]. The release says that making hydrogen from water by electrocatalysis stays sustainable and competitive only when the electricity comes from low-cost renewables [13]. A photocatalyst is driven by light, so in principle it does not need that electricity [15].
Chemists have synthesized nearly 100,000 MOFs and predicted the properties of roughly half a million more [14]. "Our work provides a blueprint for designing better materials that can bring down the cost of green hydrogen," said Stylianou, who directs OSU's Materials Discovery Laboratory [9][17].
What to watch
- A side-by-side test of BVR-19 against photocatalysts loaded with a conventional metal co-catalyst, under identical illumination.
- Other groups reporting light-breakable sulfur bonds driving hydrogen production in different frameworks, which would show whether the design rule transfers.
- Whether the room-temperature, water-based synthesis scales beyond laboratory batches.