Oxygen desorption – Critical step for the oxygen evolution reaction

The oxygen evolution reaction (OER) has been widely investigated in computational electrocatalysis. Recent studies suggest that the final oxygen desorption step could be rate-limiting, or even inhibiting, for the classical OER mechanism on the benchmark IrO2 electrocatalyst, and a novel reaction mechanism has been proposed circumventing this bottleneck. In this review, we provide an overview of recent progress in OER electrocatalysis with a concise focus on computational studies that explicitly accounted for the elementary step of O2 desorption. We highlight the computational and methodological intricacies that led to not considering this step as crucial by earlier OER studies. Key suggestions are provided for future studies to open new directions in OER electrocatalysis.