Abstract
The oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is critical in electrochemical water splitting and requires an efficient, sustainable, and cheap catalyst for successful practical applications. To fulfill these requirements, a simple approach is adopted by developing a nanostructured active material directly on a conducting backbone. The self-grown nanorod template on a conducting backbone of Cu is used as a sacrificial template and to convert this nanorod template into Cu
2
S nanorods, a simple ion-exchange method is adopted for the first time. When used as an electrocatalyst for the OER Cu
2
S nanorods required an overpotential of 270 mV to achieve a current density 10 mA cm
−2
and exhibited an excellent stability.