Advances in electrocatalysts for oxygen evolution reaction of water electrolysis-from metal oxides to carbon nanotubes

The water electrolysis for hydrogen production is constrained by the thermodynamically unfavorable oxygen evolution reaction (OER), which requires input of a large amount of energy to drive the reaction. One of the key challenges to increase the efficiency of the water electrolysis system is to develop highly effective and robust electrocatalysts for the OER. In the past 20–30 years, significant progresses have been made in the development of efficient electrocatalysts, including metal oxides, metal oxide-carbon nanotubes (CNTs) hybrid and metal-free CNTs based materials for the OER. In this critical review, the overall progress of metal oxides catalysts and the role of CNTs in the development of OER catalyst are summarized, and the latest development of new metal free CNTs-based OER catalyst is discussed.