Current greenhouse gas emissions suggest that keeping global temperature increase below 1.5 degrees, as espoused in the Paris Agreements will be challenging, and to do so, the achievement of carbon neutrality is of utmost importance. It is also clear that no single solution can meet the carbon neutral challenge, so it is essential for scientific research to cover a broad range of technologies and initiatives which will enable the realization of a carbon free energy system. This study details the broad, yet targeted research themes being pioneered within the International Institute for Carbon-Neutral Energy Research (I2CNER). These approaches include hydrogen materials, bio-mimetic catalysts, electrochemistry, thermal energy and absorption, carbon capture, storage and management and refrigerants. Here we outline the state of the art for this suite of technologies and detail how their deployment, alongside prudent energy policy implementation can engender a carbon neutral Japan by 2050. Recognizing that just as no single technological solution will engender carbon neutrality, no single nation can expect to achieve this goal alone. This study represents a recognition of conducive international policy agendas and is representative of interdisciplinary, international collaboration.

We investigated the competitive coadsorption of carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas on an iron surface with a 110 facet using density functional theory. Our study discusses the hydrogen dissociation reaction on a fresh iron surface and a surface with varying carbon monoxide coverage. Additionally, we investigated the carbon monoxide surface adsorption as a function of the carbon monoxide surface coverage. Our results show different trends for the carbon monoxide adsorption and hydrogen dissociation on surfaces with low and high CO coverage. Those opposite trends were related to the charge of the surface iron atoms and the available surface electron density which is necessary to facilitate the carbon monoxide adsorption and catalyze the hydrogen dissociation reaction. The subsurface diffusion of predissociated surface hydrogen atoms has been included in the model. It was found that the atomistic hydrogen diffusion into the material is also related to the carbon monoxide surface coverage. Our theoretical results confirmed that a small amount of carbon monoxide as an impurity in the hydrogen gas can mitigate the effect of hydrogen embrittlement by significantly reducing the rate of hydrogen dissociation on the iron surface and thus reduce the hydrogen uptake into the bulk of the material. To verify the theoretical results, we carried out a fracture toughness test of pure iron in a high-purity H 2 , CO and H 2 mixture, and N 2 gases. This material suffered from hydrogen embrittlement, in other words, reduction in the fracture toughness due to hydrogen. We could derive the complex dependence on the hydrogen embrittlement manifestation as a function of the H 2 /CO gas mixture ratio and gas exposure time.

The effect of oxygen contained in hydrogen gas environment as an impurity on hydrogen environment embrittlement (HEE) of A333 pipe steel was studied through the fracture toughness tests in hydrogen gases. The oxygen contents in the hydrogen gases were 100, 10, and 0.1 vppm. A significant reduction in the J‐Δa curve was observed in the hydrogen with 0.1‐vppm oxygen. Under given loading conditions, the embrittling effect of hydrogen was completely inhibited by 100 vppm of oxygen. In the case of the hydrogen with 10‐vppm oxygen, initially the embrittling effect of hydrogen was fully inhibited, and then subsequently appeared. It was confirmed that 1‐vppm oxygen reduced the embrittling effect of hydrogen. The results can be explained by the predictive model of HEE proposed by Somerday et al.

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