Sustainable Hydrogen Production Using Group-10 Metal Chalcogenides as Low-Cost Effective Electrocatalysts

Clean hydrogen production is crucial to the prospects of the energy transition. Electrochemical water splitting is one of the most promising tools for the sustainable and efficient production of hydrogen. One of the main open challenges is the replacement of precious Pt for electrodes with new materials combining cheapness, robustness to CO poisoning, and fast reaction kinetics. Group-10 metal chalcogenides represent suitable candidates to address all main open challenges in the quest for alternative materials to pure Pt as electrocatalysts, with the further advantage of the ease of their synthesis as both bulk crystals and nanostructures. All compounds of this class of materials show surface stability, chemical inertness toward CO adsorption, and electrode durability in acidic and alkaline environments. Here, the physicochemical mechanisms ruling hydrogen production with group-10 metal chalcogenides are focused on by combining surface-science experiments and theory. Especially, the Tafel slope in Pt3Te4 nanocrystals and NiTe2 nanotubes is as low as 32 and 59 mV dec(-1), respectively, making them competitive with state-of-the-art reference materials Pt and Pt/C already in the first implementation. Moreover, the presence of massless Dirac-cone electrons in many group-10 metal chalcogenides, with an intrinsically large electron mobility, is naturally beneficial for fast electron transfer, and correspondingly, for fast reaction kinetics. These results pave the way for the advent of this new class of materials in electrocatalysis, and for sustainable hydrogen production through water splitting.