Coupling Hydrazine Oxidation with Seawater Electrolysis for Energy-Saving Hydrogen Production over Bifunctional CoNC Nanoarray Electrocatalysts

Seawater electrolysis is a promising method to produce H-2 without relying on scarce freshwater resource, but its high energy consumption and inevitable accompany of competitive chlorine oxidation reaction (ClOR) are still great technological challenges. Herein, a metal-organic framework (MOF)-templated pyrolysis strategy to prepare uniform cobalt/nitrogen-codoped carbon nanosheet arrays on carbon cloth (CC@CoNC) as highly-efficient but low-cost bifunctional electrocatalysts for hydrazine-assisted seawater electrolysis is explored. The optimized CoNC nanosheet arrays can be used as an efficient bifunctional electrocatalyst to catalyze hydrazine oxidation reaction and hydrogen evolution reaction, remarkably reducing the energy consumption and nicely overcome the undesired anodic corrosion problems caused by ClOR. Impressively, a hydrazine-assisted water electrolysis system is successfully assembled by using the optimized CC@CoNC as both cathode and anode, which only needs an ultra-low cell voltage of 0.557 V and an electricity consumption of 1.22 kW h per cubic meter of H-2 to achieve 200 mA cm(-2). Furthermore, the optimized CC@CoNC can also show greatly improved stability in the hydrazine-assisted seawater electrolysis system for H-2 production, which can work steadily for above 40 h at approximate to 10 mA cm(-2). This study may offer great opportunities for obtaining hydrogen energy from infinite ocean resource by an eco-friendly method.