Due to global electricity demand and ecological issues, eco-friendly and sustainable energy resource is becoming a hot topic in energy production and future economic development. On this point, efficient catalytic materials for electrochemical hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) are crucial in the research area. HER in alkaline medium has several advantages, including its lower vapor pressure, which helps produce pure hydrogen gas and provides better stability than acidic medium to metal contents by reducing catalyst’s corrosion. Primarily, carbon-based electrocatalytic materials such as hetero-atomic-doped carbon, transition metal-doped carbon, and co-doped carbon show off an effective HER performance. Because it has a large surface area, good chemical stability, it is inexpensive and earth-abundant.

Additionally, spent coffee grounds (SCG) contain a high amount of carbohydrates, melanoidins, and lipids that are given a possibility to be suitable carbon precursors for carbon catalyst synthesis. Moreover, SCG is becoming an environmental issue that produces many tons of waste worldwide each year due to the proliferation of global coffee consumption.

Here, we present cobalt nanoparticles embedded on nitrogen (N)-doped carbon catalyst, synthesized from SCG. Initially, SCG-derived nanoporous carbon was obtained by pyrolysis under high temperatures with KOH and urea. After that, carbon materials were functionalized with cobalt and nitrogen with the simple method.

Cobalt-embedded N-doped carbon catalyst has a high surface area and highly distributed nano-sized pores. Polarization measurement, Tafel plot, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, chronopotentiometry, and cyclovoltammetry have tested the electrochemical performance. Even though the catalyst contained a negligible amount of cobalt (0.56 at. %), HER catalytic activity in alkaline medium has better resulted than non-functionalized carbon catalysts and was comparable to higher activity benchmark electrocatalysts such as RuO₂ and 20% Pt/C. Also, experimental results demonstrate that excellent long-term stability for the alkaline hydrogen evolution. So, synergistic effects of cobalt nanoparticles content and N-doping on the SCG-derived carbon were indicated for efficient catalyst in the alkaline hydrogen evolution application.