It is of paramount importance to design highly active and durable cost effective catalysts that can be employed in energy conversion and storage systems in order to enable broad deployment of electrochemical technologies such as fuel cells, electrolyzers, ultra-capacitors and batteries. This report will provide an in-depth overview of recent activities aimed towards understanding of critical parameters that are behind catalytically active systems based on different forms of carbon. The main focus has been on necessity to resolve the reaction mechanism at atomic/molecular scale, which can ultimately lead towards design of materials with advanced properties.

Current state-of-the-art suffers from insufficient activity and poor durability, especially on cathode side in case of fuel cells. These obstacles place priority in research on the design of catalyst, which should not involve just catalyst itself, but rather the entire electrochemical interfaces. Parameters such as specific surface area, active sites, morphology, pH and nature of electrolyte are directly associated with adsorption properties of an electrocatalysts and will be thoroughly discussed in correlation with its performance.