Plate Nº 65 · recorded October 10, 2026
Chemistry & MaterialsReported finding
Sulfur-Powered Material Splits Water Into Hydrogen Using Sunlight
Oregon State chemists built a MOF photocatalyst whose sulfur bonds capture sunlight and split water into hydrogen, with no added costly metal catalyst.
By Marcus Bennett3 min read677 words
In brief
- Green hydrogen costs about $5 per kilogram versus $1.50 for hydrogen from natural gas.
- The material BVR-19 produces hydrogen from water using light, without an added expensive metal catalyst.
- The study was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 2026.
- Almost 100,000 MOFs have been synthesized and another half-million predicted.
- BVR-19 forms spontaneously in water at room temperature, giving it an energy advantage.
Green hydrogen currently costs about $5 per kilogram, roughly three times the $1.50 price of hydrogen made from natural gas. Chemists at Oregon State University have now created a family of light-driven materials that could help close that gap by producing hydrogen from water using nothing but sunlight.
The research, led by Kyriakos Stylianou of the OSU College of Science and published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 2026, centers on a photocatalyst — a substance that absorbs light, reaches a higher energy level, and uses that energy to speed up a chemical reaction. A catalyst, as Stylianou explains, increases the rate of a reaction without itself undergoing any permanent change. In this case, the reaction splits water into hydrogen.
Hydrogen matters well beyond fuel cells for cars. Industry uses it to make ammonia and many other chemicals, to refine metals, and to produce plastics. Nearly all of it today comes from methane-steam reforming, a process that extracts hydrogen from natural gas while releasing carbon dioxide.
What makes this material different?
The OSU team works with metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs — crystalline, porous solids built from positively charged metal ions surrounded by organic "linker" molecules. Their nanosized pores and tunable structures make them remarkably designable. Stylianou notes that millions of possible MOFs exist: chemists have synthesized almost 100,000 of them, and researchers have predicted the properties of another half-million.
The specific framework in this study, called BVR-19, carries a distinctive structural feature: a sulfide-to-sulfide bond that transiently breaks apart when exposed to light, creating reactive sulfur species.
That bond is the heart of the discovery. "The organic component does the important work," Stylianou said. "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."
Because the organic building blocks shoulder the work, the material requires no additional expensive metal catalyst. That could simplify the design of future light-driven hydrogen-production systems. BVR-19 has a practical edge as well: it forms spontaneously in water at room temperature, which gives it a strong energy advantage over materials that need energy-intensive synthesis.
Why does the cost gap matter?
Splitting water catalytically is cleaner than methane-steam reforming, but today's catalytic routes rely on electrocatalysis — running electricity through a catalyst. The sustainability of that approach depends on the electricity itself being renewable, and for the resulting hydrogen to compete in the market, that renewable energy has to be cheap.
Photocatalysis offers a different path: sunlight supplies the energy directly. If such materials become efficient and durable enough, they could bypass the electricity cost that keeps green hydrogen at about $5 per kilogram.
The findings, Stylianou said, introduce a potential new tool against greenhouse gas emissions and climate change — though the work remains at the laboratory stage, and translating a promising photocatalyst into a competitive industrial process will take considerably more research.
What did the study learn about design?
Beyond the material itself, the researchers uncovered rules for building better ones. "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, known as the MaD Lab.
"By changing the metal while keeping the rest of the material essentially the same, we discovered why some versions of the MOF work much better than others. These findings provide new design rules for creating more effective materials for solar fuel production."
That metal-swap insight matters because it turns one material's success into a general strategy. With nearly 100,000 MOFs already made and hundreds of thousands more predicted, chemists now have a clearer idea of which structural features to pursue for solar fuel production.
The paper, by Emmanuel Nyela Musa and colleagues, appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (2026), DOI: 10.1021/jacs.6c13238.
via Phys.org Chemistry (Source)
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