Research and strategies for efficient electrocatalysts towards anodic oxygen evolution reaction in seawater electrolysis system

• Seawater electrolysis is a promising development direction for hydrogen energy. • Complex seawater brings out big challenges to seawater electrolysis. • Sluggish OER , fast ClOR , and chlorine corrosion impede seawater electrolysis. • Four advanced strategies to promote OER for seawater electrolysis are summarized. • Problem and outlook are proposed for future research to boost seawater oxidation. Seawater electrolysis is one most promising development directions for future hydrogen energy. However, big challenges of active site poisoning, chloride oxidation (ClOR), and chloride corrosion on anode electrocatalysts, seriously impede seawater electrolysis development. Therefore, developing efficient anodic oxygen evolution reaction (OER) electrocatalysts is an urgent task for seawater electrolysis. The advanced strategies of improving OER kinetics, lowering ClOR kinetics, strengthening corrosion resistance, and recombining multifunction are summarized and analyzed to help researchers quickly grasp the recent progress on seawater oxidation. The outlooks for future research are put forward. The future research directions are proposed as internal and external cultivation, giving full play to the physicochemical properties of electrocatalysts, making sense of structure evolution and OER mechanism, and elucidating the electrical double layer of electrocatalysts. A lot of room for scalable application of seawater electrolysis calls for persistent effort and devotion of related researchers to boost seawater electrolysis development and universal hydrogen energy application.