Energy Production and Storage Promoted by Organometallic Complexes

Organometallic complexes have intrinsically excellent characteristics as a new class of electrocatalyst for clean energy production in fuel cells and electrolyzers. The state-of-the-art materials for these devices are based on precious metal nanoparticles dispersed on conductive carbon-based supports. Although such materials have reached very high performance levels in terms of activity and stability, they suffer from some intrinsic limitations that contribute to hinder the commercial development of fuel cells and electrolyzers on a large scale. Organometallic-based electrocatalysts may help to overcome such limitations. For example, they exhibit high selectivity in alcohol and sugar electrooxidation. Additionally, precious metal loadings can be reduced significantly using single site organometallic catalysts where each metal atom is potentially active. In this review, we will discuss various literature examples of organometallic electrocatalysts employed as anodes for fuel cells and electrolyzers and as cathodes for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). We will focus our attention on the few examples of electrocatalysts that have been successfully used in complete cells.