Issues and opportunities facing hydrolytic hydrogen production materials

Hydrogen energy is regarded as an important part of low carbon energy, which has broad application prospects in the fields of fuel cell, metallurgy, fuel gas and chemical industry. The upstream of hydrogen industry chain is hydrogen production. In the long-term planning, large-scale hydrogen will be obtained by water electrolysis with renewable energy. Since the infrastructure construction of hydrogen is inadequate nowadays, the safe and stable acquirement of hydrogen (especially in some temporary or portable hydrogen usage scenario) is still one of the problems that need to be solved urgently. Hydrogen production technology by reaction of inorganic materials with water is efficient, safety and environmentally friendly. Obviously, the material is the core of the hydrogen production by hydrolysis. Although researchers have done a lot of studies on hydrolytic hydrogen production materials, comprehensive reviews on all these materials are rare. In this paper, the research progress of hydrolytic hydrogen production materials in recent 15 years is investigated systematically and all materials were reclassified into four system (active metals, metal hydrides, borohydrides, silicon and its composites) according to the characteristics of hydrolysis. The dis-/advantages on hydrogen production performances and technical bottlenecks of different materials are all-sided analyzed. Moreover, several promising candidates are singled out based on the in-depth discussion about industrialization feasibility combined with the cost of raw materials and hydrogen production performances. In general, the hydrolytic hydrogen production materials have the characteristic of “on-demand” and “integrated hydrogen storage and transportation”, which would be an indispensable part of the field of hydrogen production in the coming future.