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Activity of solar-driven polymer catalysts unleashed to produce a potential green fuel
Filip Podjaski is in the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory, Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QZ, UK.
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Since the 2015 Paris climate agreement, increasing efforts have been made to minimize greenhouse-gas emissions and to conduct research into ways to provide green energy reliably. Wind and solar energy could power the world electrically, but the intermittency of these sources remains a challenge, and existing energy infrastructure would need to be electrified to replace fossil fuels. Another solution is to use hydrogen as a fuel, producing it directly from water in a catalytic process driven by sunlight. Polymer catalysts hold great promise for this, but their efficiency at harnessing sunlight has lagged behind that of inorganic materials. Writing in Nature, Zhuzhang et al.1 report how high efficiency can be achieved and sustained using polymer catalysts.
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Hisatomi, T., Yamada, T., Nishiyama, H., Takata, T. & Domen, K. Nature Rev. Mater. 10, 769–782 (2025).
Savateev, O., Antonietti, M. & Wang, X. (eds) Carbon Nitrides: Structure, Properties and Applications in Science and Technology (Walter DeGruyter, 2023).
Read the paper: Photocatalytic water splitting by 2D polymer with out-of-plane carrier flow
Light-activated catalysts point the way to sustainable chemistry