High-Pressure Hydrogen Generation from Methanol Reforming with In Situ Carbon Capture

Methanol is a promising liquid hydrogen carrier supporting a low-emission practical hydrogen economy. State-of-the-art methanol reformers operate near ambient pressures and produce impure H 2 contaminated with CO 2 and CO, necessitating further purification and compression for storage, transport, and end-use. Herein, we present the first example of a high-pressure H 2 generator, wherein an alkaline methanol solution rapidly generates high-purity H 2, free of CO/CO 2, using highly active molecular catalysts. At mild temperatures (100–160 °C), pressures up to 456 bar were achieved. Additionally, clean H 2 produced from an ambient pressure reformer was directly fed, without purification, into a proton exchange membrane fuel cell at ∼85 °C with stable performance, realizing an integrated reformed methanol fuel cell. A total of 140 L of H 2 was generated with catalytic efficiencies peaking at a cumulative TON > 1.12 × 10 5 and a maximum TOF > 5200 h –1 . Overall, this simple, efficient, and versatile H 2 generator provides promising system-level advances toward practical energy storage applications.