The project that saw involvement from the DOE’s Sandia National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as well as Giner Inc. sought to develop a catalyst using materials significantly lower in cost than those such as iridium, currently used in PEM electrolysers.

Giner evaluated the new catalyst using its PEM electrolyser test stations under industrial operating conditions. According to the research and development company the performance and durability of the cobalt catalyst “far exceed that of competitors’ catalyst.”

Di-Jia Liu, Senior Chemist at Argonne National Laboratory, said the team was focused on developing a low-cost anode catalyst that could generate hydrogen at high throughput while consuming minimal energy.

Liu added, “By using the cobalt-based catalyst prepared by our method, one could remove the main bottleneck of cost to producing clean hydrogen in an electrolyser.”

According to Johnson Matthey’s PGM management table, iridium today (May 31) costs $4,600/troy oz., while Statista states that in 2022 US cobalt costs were just $31/lb or $496/oz.

“Our results establish a promising path forward in replacing catalysts made from expensive precious metals with elements that are much less expensive and more abundant,” Liu said.

It is hoped the team’s development will support the US DOE’s Hydrogen Energy Earthshot initiative, which aims to lower the cost of green hydrogen production to one dollar per kilogramme in a decade.

Cobalt’s demand has been rising in recent years due to increasing demand in critical components such as batteries for electric vehicles and electronic devices.

Another key challenge facing the market is that the mining of cobalt has also recently come under the spotlight in the wider media, with alleged human rights abuses having been reported, including the exposure of miners to unsafe worksites and reliance on child labour.