Iridium Wire for Green Hydrogen Electrolysis

Green hydrogen is made by splitting water using electricity — a process called electrolysis. The most efficient way to do it at scale is through proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysis. And inside every PEM electrolyser, there is one material without which the whole thing stops working: iridium. 

The problem is that iridium is extraordinarily rare, and the world needs a lot more of it if green hydrogen is ever going to reach the scale the net-zero targets require.

Science Made Simple

A PEM electrolyser is essentially a device that uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. 
The hydrogen is the useful product — it can be stored and used as a clean fuel. Inside the device, the water-splitting happens across two electrodes separated by a membrane. The electrode where oxygen is produced (the anode) has to work in extremely harsh, acidic conditions.

Iridium is the only material that can do that job reliably. Nothing else has the right combination of chemical stability and catalytic activity to survive and perform in those conditions long-term. That makes it irreplaceable — and because global production is only around 7.5 tonnes per year, it also makes it a bottleneck.

The Iridium Supply Problem

Current commercial electrolysers need roughly 400 kg of iridium to produce one gigawatt of hydrogen capacity. Global iridium production is around 8 tonnes a year. When you map that against the manufacturing volumes needed to hit 2030 climate targets, iridium supply becomes a hard constraint on how fast the green hydrogen industry can grow.

At approx. US$238 per gram — more than four times the price of platinum — it is also one of the most expensive materials in any electrolyser. The research community has set a clear target: loadings need to drop from the current 2–4 mg per square centimetre to below 0.4 mg per square centimetre. That is a tenfold reduction, without any loss of performance or durability.

New Research: Getting More from Less Iridium

A team at Technische Universität Berlin, led by Professor Peter Strasser, published research in 2025 showing one promising route to that goal. The team built iridium oxide anodes in a porous, three-dimensional structure — a design that spreads iridium across a much larger surface area so that less total material is needed to produce the same catalytic effect (DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202501261).

By testing different versions of these porous structures — varying how the iridium oxide was formed during manufacture — they found that all three types consistently outperformed a standard commercial anode catalyst. Crucially, they achieved this at just 25% of the iridium loading that the commercial benchmark required. Four times less iridium, equal or better performance.

They also ran durability tests for 100 hours at realistic operating conditions. Rather than degrading, both high-performing versions became more active over time. Post-test analysis showed the porous structure remained intact — which matters, because an electrode that collapses under operating stress is not useful regardless of its initial performance.

What This Means for Researchers Specifying Iridium Wire

Whether you are building a lab-scale electrolyser test cell, running electrochemical characterisation of new catalyst materials, or designing electrode components for a prototype system, the precision of your input materials directly affects the quality of your results.

Iridium wire is widely used in electrolyser research setups as counter electrodes and current collectors — particularly in acidic electrolyte environments where other metals corrode. Platinum/iridium alloy wire offers added mechanical hardness alongside corrosion resistance, making it suitable for components that need to hold their shape as well as their chemistry.

Advent Research Materials supplies iridium wire and platinum/iridium alloy wire to tight diameter tolerances and consistent purity for research applications. Small quantities available for lab use.

Source: Möhle, Kroschel & Strasser, Advanced Functional Materials, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.202501261