Hydrogen has long been touted as a cornerstone of the low-carbon economy, with the potential to power everything from heavy industry to transport without producing carbon emissions at the point of use. Yet the modern hydrogen industry still faces a major contradiction: despite its clean image, around 95% of the world’s hydrogen is currently produced using fossil fuels through energy-intensive processes that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide.
Now, researchers at University of Birmingham say they have developed a new low-temperature method for producing hydrogen that could make the fuel cheaper, cleaner, and easier to generate close to where it is actually needed, with their findings highlighted in a SciTechDaily article.
The new technique uses a perovskite catalyst to split water into hydrogen and oxygen at significantly lower temperatures than conventional thermochemical methods. Researchers say this could allow industrial waste heat from sectors such as steel, cement, glass, and chemicals to be repurposed for local hydrogen production.
The project was carried out in collaboration with University of Science and Technology Beijing and is now being commercialized across the UK and Europe through the University of Birmingham.
Thermochemical water splitting has increasingly been viewed as a promising alternative to conventional hydrogen production because it avoids direct dependence on fossil fuels. In these systems, catalysts repeatedly absorb and release oxygen while separating water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Although hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it is rarely found on Earth in its pure gaseous form. Instead, it is typically bound within other compounds, particularly water and hydrocarbons such as natural gas, coal, and oil. Producing usable hydrogen therefore requires breaking apart those molecules.
At present, the dominant production method is steam methane reforming, which extracts hydrogen from methane. While highly widespread, the process produces substantial CO2 emissions, undermining hydrogen’s role as a truly clean fuel unless paired with carbon capture technology.
Existing thermochemical systems also require extremely high temperatures — typically between 700 and 1000 °C for water splitting and up to 1500 °C for catalyst regeneration — making them expensive and energy-intensive.
But a research team led by Professor Yulong Ding from the university’s School of Chemical Engineering says the new perovskite catalyst can reduce those temperature requirements by roughly 500 °C.
According to findings published in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, the catalyst can generate significant hydrogen yields at temperatures between 150 and 500 °C, while regeneration can occur at 700 to 1000 °C.
Professor Ding said: “The lower overall temperature of the process could enable hydrogen to be produced nearby renewable energy generation plants, and foundation industry sectors such as steel, cement, glass and chemicals have an abundance of waste heat, which could be harnessed as the heat input for low-temperature hydrogen production. If the hydrogen is used locally, this would overcome the obstacles presented by storage and transport, so enabling the uptake of hydrogen fuel without the need for costly infrastructure.”
Preliminary cost analyses suggest the process could eventually produce hydrogen more cheaply than both green hydrogen — made through electrolysis powered by renewable electricity, a source that Azerbaijan is increasingly expanding— and blue hydrogen, which relies on methane combined with carbon capture and storage.
By Nazrin Sadigova
