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96% of the world's hydrogen still comes from fossil fuels. This is one attempt to change that

Qurexa Editorial Team27 October 20266 min read 0 0
96% of the world's hydrogen still comes from fossil fuels. This is one attempt to change that

What happened

On Monday 26 October 2026, a research team published a study on making hydrogen more cheaply. It appeared in the journal ACS Applied Nano Materials, with Manish Chauhan as lead author. One of the authors, Shiv Singh, works at CSIR-AMPRI in Bhopal, India. The problem they were trying to solve is a cost problem. You can make hydrogen by passing electricity through water. The water splits into hydrogen and oxygen. If the electricity comes from wind or solar, the hydrogen is called green hydrogen, because nothing is burned to produce it. The catch is the catalyst. A catalyst is a material that helps a chemical reaction along without being used up. The best catalysts for splitting water are platinum, ruthenium and iridium. All three are rare and expensive. So the team built something else. They grew very fine carbon fibres, thinner than a hair, and coated them with ordinary iron oxide or nickel oxide. Then they grew those fibres directly on sheets of a material called MXene, which conducts electricity well. That last step was the point. One of the authors described it this way: "Growing the fibers directly on the MXene sheets gave us a conductive backbone and a lot of accessible active sites." In other words, electricity could get in easily, and there were plenty of places for the reaction to happen.

Why this matters

Almost all hydrogen made today is not green at all. The study notes that fossil fuels supply about 96% of the world's hydrogen. Making it from natural gas, which is known as grey hydrogen, releases roughly 10 kilograms of carbon dioxide for every kilogram of hydrogen produced. Blue hydrogen, where some of that carbon dioxide is captured, still releases about 6 kilograms. Hydrogen matters because some jobs are hard to do with batteries. Making steel, making fertiliser and moving heavy freight are the usual examples. The UK government's hydrogen strategy treats it as part of the plan for exactly those industries. If green hydrogen is going to replace the grey kind at any real scale, the equipment has to be cheap enough to build in very large numbers. A catalyst that depends on platinum is a bottleneck before you even start. Iron and nickel are not rare. They are among the most common metals we use. Swapping them in, if it can be made to work well enough, changes the sums completely. That is why work like this gets published even when the results are not yet competitive. The question being tested is not "is this better than platinum?" It is "can a cheap material be made to work at all, in a way that could be scaled up?"

What the evidence actually says

The honest answer is: it works, and it is not as good as platinum. The researchers say so themselves. Catalysts are judged partly by something called overpotential. Think of it as the extra electrical push you need on top of the theoretical minimum. Lower is better, because a lower push means less electricity wasted. For producing hydrogen, the nickel version needed an extra push of 490 millivolts, and the iron version 520 millivolts. Platinum needs 70 millivolts. That is a very large gap. For producing oxygen, the other half of the reaction, the gap was much smaller. The nickel version needed 300 millivolts against 250 for the ruthenium oxide benchmark. The MXene scaffold did help. Without it, the same fibres needed 570 and 550 millivolts for hydrogen. So the design idea was sound. In a small working prototype, the iron version ran at 2.2 volts and the nickel version at 2.7 volts. Over 24 hours both drifted upwards by 0.2 to 0.3 volts, which means performance slipped slightly as they ran. That drift is the result that matters most for real use. A catalyst that is cheap but fades is not cheap for long. So this is laboratory-scale progress, measured in millivolts and hours, not a technology ready to be installed. The authors' own claim is modest: that they have shown a scalable route to low-cost metal oxide catalysts for both halves of the reaction.

Practical advice

There is nothing here to buy or do, but there is something useful to take away. When you see a headline about a clean energy breakthrough, two numbers tell you most of what you need to know. First, how does it compare with the material it is meant to replace? Second, how long did it keep working? In this case the answers are "not as well as platinum" and "it slipped a little over 24 hours". That is normal and respectable for early research. It is also a long way from a product. If you are reading about hydrogen for home heating, treat that separately. This study is about industrial-scale production, not about boilers. The UK has not decided to switch home heating to hydrogen, and the evidence for doing so is contested. If you want to follow where hydrogen is actually being used in the UK, the government's hydrogen strategy pages on GOV.UK are the primary source, rather than press coverage. And if someone offers you an investment based on a single laboratory result, the numbers above are a useful reminder of how far apart a promising material and a working plant can be.

What to know

A study published on 26 October 2026 in ACS Applied Nano Materials tested water-splitting catalysts made from iron oxide and nickel oxide on carbon nanofibres grown on conductive MXene sheets, as a cheap alternative to platinum, ruthenium and iridium. They worked. The nickel version needed an extra push of 490 millivolts to produce hydrogen, against 70 millivolts for platinum, so the gap is still wide. For oxygen production the gap was much narrower, 300 millivolts against 250 for the ruthenium benchmark. A small prototype ran at 2.2 to 2.7 volts and drifted by 0.2 to 0.3 volts over 24 hours. The wider context is that about 96% of hydrogen today is made from fossil fuels, releasing roughly 6 to 10 kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilogram of hydrogen. Cheaper catalysts are one of the things that would need to change for that to shift. This is early laboratory work, not an installed technology. Sources: Phys.org, "Water into fuel: The new nanomaterial that could upgrade green hydrogen", 26 October 2026, https://phys.org/news/2026-10-fuel-nanomaterial-green-hydrogen.html — ACS Applied Nano Materials, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1021/acsanm.6c03453 — GOV.UK, "UK hydrogen strategy", https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/uk-hydrogen-strategy This article is for general information and does not constitute financial, energy or engineering advice.

#hydrogen#clean energy#chemistry#materials science#research#net zero

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