Joe Gauthier has received funding from the National Science Foundation to study a key element of producing hydrogen gas and improve STEM education.

Though hydrogen is becoming increasingly recognized as a promising energy source, the U.S. Department of Energy attributes its lagging behind solar and wind to the chasm in current capabilities for production and storage and what is required for the future.

Joe Gauthier, an assistant professor of chemical engineering who has studied sustainable and renewable energy technologies since arriving at Texas Tech University in 2021, adds that hydrogen faces an uphill battle.  They’re competing against a fossil fuel industry whose distributors have had over a century to drive down prices through engineering and economic development.

“Unless we really make headway in making electricity much cheaper, it’s going to be really challenging to make these technologies economically competitive,” he says.

To that end, Gauthier has received a grant totaling over $600,000 from the National Science Foundation under the Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER). CAREER provides funds supporting five years of research, aiming to help emerging instructors and professionals in successfully combining research and education.

Gauthier’s project, titled “Engineering Earth-abundant and corrosion-resistant water oxidation electrocatalysts,” looks toward improving the process of water splitting, in which hydrogen is produced via electricity.

Motivated by long-term environmental and energy challenges, Gauthier has focused much of his work on sustainable technologies.

Since graduate school, Gauthier has specialized in catalysis, a method in which the rate of a chemical reaction is increased with the introduction of an added substance, or catalyst, that doesn’t dissolve during the process.

More specifically, Gauthier leads his own Computational Catalysis Research Lab, using computer simulations and numerous scientific processes to understand chemical reactions and design improved materials for applications as catalysts.

A key method within the lab is electrocatalysis, which focuses on electrochemistry and involves reactions on electrode surfaces. Electrodes are electric conductors that carry currents into non-metallic parts of circuits.

In water splitting, the negative electrode (anode) receives the current and releases hydrogen protons and electrons, producing oxygen gas in the process (water oxidation). At the positive electrode (cathode), the protons and electrons recombine to make hydrogen gas.

The growing interest in water splitting as a means of energy production has grown significantly in parts of Europe and other regions investing heavily in alternative energy technologies.

But what will galvanize the movement toward this approach on a larger scale is making it economically viable, beyond government subsidization. That was the mindset behind Gauthier’s proposals regarding the project.

There are several catalysts for producing hydrogen that are abundant in the Earth and last a long time. The same cannot be said for the other, laborious side of the reaction, which primarily uses iridium and other platinum-group metals.

“On the water oxidation side, the materials dissolve over time through mechanisms that are really unclear,” Gauthier says. “That leads to increased costs, because even the most expensive materials we can use still dissolve over time.”

For Gauthier, who always considers the economic aspects of sustainability, this project presents him and his team with the opportunity to preserve energy and money for more than water splitting. Other reactions, such as reducing nitrate to ammonia or carbon dioxide to valuable fuels and chemicals, all of which rely on water oxidation as a source of protons and electrons, could also stand to benefit.

Along with advancing water oxidation, Gauthier looks forward to progressing electric catalysis to having the high-quality, benchmarked data other areas of catalysis research rely on.

In thermally driven heterogeneous catalysis, where catalysts exist in a different phase than the substances consumed during or produced after a chemical reaction, density functional theory is used to simplify the calculations of a many-body equation.

The varying flavors, as he refers to them, of computer simulations used in his field come with degrees of accuracy and cost. Gauthier describes the issue in electrocatalysis as “the blind leading the blind,” when the results of a simulation cannot be predicted based on an experiment format.

“A good chunk of this proposal, in addition to water and oxygen, is related to building out those foundations so we can be more confident in what the simulations give us,” he says.

In the same vein, the level of complexity still associated with electric catalysis will pose challenges for the project.

“It’s possible that you put three Band-Aids on a wound and maybe it’s just not enough,” Gauthier says. “Maybe there’s 10 other things that also need to be solved before we can really be confident in the solutions. But every Band-Aid that you put on is a step in the right direction.” 

A factor that attracted him to Texas Tech was the school’s High Performance Computing Center, a major resource not available at many other institutions that provides consistent access to both faculty and their student researchers without marginal cost.

Gauthier also highlights the potential for sustainable energy that exists in West Texas and strong university leadership, but he has developed into an advocate and an exemplary educator in his own right. He demonstrated this growth in his CAREER proposal, including two planned education objectives intended to assist both undergraduate and middle school students.

The first is a project-based elective course that will prepare students for graduate studies in computational materials science by introducing them to topics in electrochemistry, physics and more that aren’t elaborated on in much detail in undergraduate majors.

For the latter, Gauthier will collaborate with the STEM Center for Outreach, Research & Education and the Teaching, Learning, & Professional Development Center for outreach to middle school students across the Lubbock Independent School District. These events will feature activity-based projects that expose students to alternative energy sources, such as hydrogen fuel cells, to attract more students to careers in science, technology, engineering and math.

“I want to make sure the path into computational research feels welcoming and achievable, especially for folks who might not have a centralized compute facility down the street,” Gauthier says. “The students we reach today are the ones who will push this science forward tomorrow.”