Scientists at Yale and the University of Missouri have cracked a problem that's been slowing down clean energy: they've built a catalyst from manganese—a metal that's abundant and costs almost nothing—that efficiently converts carbon dioxide into formate, a compound that can store and release hydrogen for fuel cells.
The breakthrough matters because formate is already made at industrial scale. It's used as a food preservative, an antibacterial agent, and in leather tanning. But here's the catch: today it's made from fossil fuels, which defeats the purpose of using it as a clean energy carrier. If you could make formate directly from CO2 in the air, you'd solve two problems at once—pull greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere and create a useful fuel.
The real obstacle has been the catalyst itself. Catalysts are like molecular matchmakers; they speed up chemical reactions without getting used up. The best ones developed so far rely on precious metals like platinum or palladium. They work well, but they're expensive, rare, and often toxic. Cheaper metals like manganese have always fallen apart too quickly to be practical.
We're a new kind of news feed.
Regular news is designed to drain you. We're a non-profit built to restore you. Every story we publish is scored for impact, progress, and hope.
Start Your News DetoxThe Yale and Missouri team found a way around this by redesigning the catalyst's structure. They added an extra donor atom to the ligand—the part of the catalyst that holds everything together. This small change did something unexpected: it stabilized the manganese catalyst and made it last much longer. The result outperformed most precious metal alternatives, according to Justin Wedal, a postdoctoral researcher on the team.
"I'm excited to see the ligand design pay off in such a meaningful way," Wedal said in the research announcement.
What makes this interesting beyond the immediate application is the design principle itself. If you can stabilize manganese this way, you might be able to apply the same thinking to other chemical reactions that currently depend on expensive metals. That could open doors across clean chemistry—making everything from ammonia production to plastic recycling more economical and sustainable.
The work appears in Chem, the journal of the American Chemical Society, and it's one of those incremental advances that doesn't make headlines but quietly shifts what's possible. Fuel cells powered by formate made from atmospheric CO2 aren't here tomorrow, but the path just got cheaper and more practical.
