POMHYDCAT · Coupled Polyoxometalate – Hydrogenase Catalysts for Photocatalytic Water Splitting

Alternatives to fossil fuels are of rapidly increasing importance, driven by concerns over energy security, cost, and global warming. In response to these concerns, the EU has set the target of obtaining 20% of all energy from renewable sources by 2020. A key challenge in renewable energy is finding an efficient way to convert plentiful solar energy into a source of chemical energy which can be stored, used for applications such as transportation, and consumed without releasing carbon dioxide – that is, a means of using solar energy to split water into molecular hydrogen and oxygen. This fellowship aims to develop a novel approach to complete water splitting, taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines recent breakthroughs in polyoxometalate-based water oxidation catalysts and enzymatic hydrogen evolution catalysts. The proposed hybrid systems will be among the first complementary polyoxometalate-enzyme catalysts; they also promise to become the first molecular catalytic systems to efficiently split water under visible light irradiation in mild conditions.