green hydrogen

Energase project kick-off

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From left to right: Moritz Kühnel, Hajo Kries, Michael Stier, Fabrizio Casilli, Ewan McQueen, Johannes Kästner

We kicked off our ENERGASE project with a workshop at the University of Stuttgart’s Institut of Technical Biochemistry with our collaborators from the Kries and Kästner groups. In this project, we aim to jointly develop a de novo enzyme to produce green hydrogen through a non-natural mechanism. To do that, we are combining theory, synthetic biologyand nanotechnology. This blue-sky project is funded by the Carl Zeiss Stiftung and their CZS Wildcard programme for high-risk-high-reward ideas.

Paper in ACS Sustainable Resource Management

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Astha’s article about a waste-derived photocatalyst for hydrogen evolution was published in ACS Sustainable Resource Management (read her paper here) and is featuerd on the supplementary cover. This paper demonstrates how a nanocomposite from waste coffee grounds (an abundant resource in the Kühnel Lab) and an anthraquinone-base covalent organic framework acts as an active catalyst for solar-driven hydrogen evolution from pure water. This COFfee catalyst forms a Z-scheme type heterojunction with improved charge separation and much improved performance compared to the pure COF that requires 75% less photocatalyst to produce the same amount of hydrogen.