Lattice oxygen mechanism enhanced alkaline oxygen evolution and water splitting

Abstract Activating the lattice oxygen mechanism (LOM) is an effective strategy to enhance the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) activity of catalysts, thereby further promoting overall water splitting for hydrogen production. In this work, a dual modulation electrocatalyst (donated as S, Mo–RuCoO x ) was prepared by ion‐exchange and sulfurization methods. The optimized S, Mo–RuCoO x catalyst demonstrated exceptional OER activity in the alkaline environment with an overpotential of only 222 mV to reach 10 mA cm −2 , as well as an electrolytic cell voltage of 1.62 V at 100 mA cm −2 . The experimental results and theoretical calculations proved that the dual modulation enables the d ‐band center of the RuCo composite to be close to the Fermi energy level ( E F ), which activated the LOM pathway and lowers the reaction energy barrier, thereby enhancing the OER performance. This work presents a facile approach to activate LOM and achieve efficient hydrogen production from water electrolysis.