Electrocatalytic seawater splitting for hydrogen production: Recent progress and future prospects

Earth-abundant seawater resource has become an attractive candidate to produce hydrogen from electrolysis, which is of great significance to realize hydrogen economy and carbon neutrality. Nonetheless, developing highly active and stable electrocatalysts to meet the needs of highly effective seawater splitting is still challenging for the sluggish oxygen evolution dynamics and the existed competitive reaction of chlorine evolution reaction (CER). To this end, some newly-developed electrocatalysts with superior performance, such as noble metals, alloy, transition metals, oxides, carbides, nitrides, phosphides, and so on, have been synthesized for the seawater splitting in recent years. This review starts from the historical background and fundamental mechanisms, and summarizes the most recent progress in the development of seawater electrolysis technologies. Some existing issues in the process of seawater electrolysis are enumerated and the corresponded solutions are presented. The future of hydrogen production from seawater electrolysis, especially the design and synthesis of novel catalysts for seawater electrolysis, is prospected.