The CREATE project, part of the Horizon 2020 framework, has reached the two-year milestone. The 11 partnering organisations celebrated a meeting on Montpellier last January where they prepared the roadmap for the projects’ next steps.
The CREATE consortium aims at improving the production of renewable energy by providing more sustainable alternatives than some of the technologies used in solar cells, metal-air batteries, electrolysers and fuel cells. CREATE is now focusing its efforts on electrolysers and fuel cells, with the goal of drastically reducing or eliminating the use of precious and rare metals in their catalysts. As part of the CREATE consortium, ICIQ’s Galan-Mascarós group is contributing their knowledge to the project in designing and creating materials catalyse the water-splitting reaction.
In the two years since its creation, two different classes of catalysts free of critical raw materials with high performance have been designed and successfully tested for oxygen evolution and oxygen reduction reactions, while high-throughput methods are being applied to identify promising catalysts totally free of Critical Raw Materials for hydrogen evolution and oxidation reactions.
Warmer, brighter, faster
Humanity is hungry for energy: since the industrial revolution, our energetic consumption has increased exponentially, spurring the creation of new devices and materials to allow us storing and transforming energy more efficiently. These novel technologies however, require significant quantities of a broad range of materials and chemical elements to be built, some of them belonging to the list of of Critical Raw Materials – materials that aren’t available in the European Union, that require intensive extraction, or that are the object of geopolitical conflicts.
Spurred by a European Commission directive to eliminate Critical Raw Materials (CRM) from industrial processes, the consortium’s goal is to create innovative catalysts and membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) that could become a sustainable and cost-effective alternative to the energetic landscape.
CREATE will organise the 2nd international conference on Electrolysis and Fuel Cell Discussions – Towards Catalysts Free of Critical Raw Materials for Fuel Cells and Electrolysers (EFCD2019) form the 15th to the 18th September 2019, jointly organised with the European project, CRESCENDO.