Abstract
Traditionally, methanol reforming at a very high temperature (>200 °C) has been explored for hydrogen production. Here, we show that
in situ
generated ruthenium nanoparticles (
ca.
1.5 nm) from an organometallic precursor promote hydrogen production from methanol in water at low temperature (90–130 °C), which leads to a practical and efficient approach for low-temperature hydrogen production from methanol in water. The reactivity of ruthenium nanoparticles is tuned to achieve a high rate of hydrogen gas production from methanol. Notably, the use of a pyridine-2-ol ligand significantly accelerated the hydrogen production rate by 80% to 49 mol H
2
per mol Ru per hour at 130 °C. Moreover, the studied ruthenium catalyst exhibits appreciably long-term stability to achieve a turnover number of 762 mol H
2
per mol Ru generating 186 L of H
2
per gram of Ru.