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Abstract
[...]use of a single nuclear [RuHCl(CO)(HN(C2H4PiPr2)2)] homogenous catalyst14 enabled hydrogen to form at an unprecedented rate of4,700 mol hydrogen per mol ruthenium per hour in the presence of concentrated potassium hydroxide solution and neat methanol at around 368 K. One main advantage of such homogeneous catalysts14,15, and of metalloenzymes16, is that each metal site in the catalyst contributes directly to the reaction-a fact that has stimulated much work on dispersing catalytically active noble metals as isolated metal atoms on support materials, to improve the efficiency of heterogeneous catalysts while minimizing the amount of noble metal used17-19. Because the electronic structure of metal catalysts can be tuned by their supports or promoters20,21, and because electron-deficient platinum nanoparticles have been proposed to be responsible for the high activity of the low-temperature water-gas shift reaction18,20, careful choice of the support material for platinum should in principle make it possible to obtain bifunctional constructs with atomically dispersed noble-metal sites that catalyse low-temperature APRM.