Water splitting driven by sunlight or renewable resource-derived electricity has attracted great attention for sustainable production of hydrogen from water. Current research interest in this field is focused on the development of earth-abundant photo- or electrocatalytic materials with high activity and long-term stability for hydrogen and/or oxygen evolution reactions. Due to their unique properties and characteristics, carbon and related carbon-based materials show great potential to replace some of the existing precious metal catalysts in water splitting technology. This tutorial review summarizes the recent significant progress in the fabrication and application of metal-free carbonaceous materials as photo- or electrocatalysts for water splitting. Synthetic strategies and applications of various carbonaceous materials, including graphitic carbon nitride (g-C₃N₄), graphene, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as well as other forms of carbon-containing materials, for electrochemical or photochemical water splitting are presented, accompanied by a discussion of the key scientific issues and prospects for the future development of metal-free photo- and electrocatalysts.

Vacancy engineering, that is, self-doping of vacancy in semiconductors, has become a commonly used strategy to tune the photocatalytic performances. However, there still lacks fundamental understanding of the role of the vacancies in semiconductor materials. Herein, the g-C₃N₄ nanosheets with tunable nitrogen vacancies are prepared as the photocatalysts for H₂ evolution and CO₂ reduction to CO. On the basis of both experimental investigation and DFT calculations, nitrogen vacancies in g-C₃N₄ induce the formation of midgap states under the conduction band edge. The position of midgap states becomes deeper with the increasing of nitrogen vacancies. The g-C₃N₄ nanosheets with the optimized density of nitrogen vacancies display about 18 times and 4 times enhancement for H₂ evolution and of CO₂ reduction to CO, respectively, as compared to the bulk g-C₃N₄. This is attributed to the synergistic effects of several factors including (1) nitrogen vacancies cause the excitation of electrons to midgap states below the conduction band edge, which results in extension of the visible light absorption to photons of longer wavelengths (up to 598 nm); (2) the suitable midgap states could trap photogenerated electrons to minimize the recombination loss of photogenerated electron–hole pairs; and (3) nitrogen vacancies lead to uniformly anchored small Pt nanoparticles (1–2 nm) on g-C₃N₄, and facilitate the electron transfer to Pt. However, the overintroduction of nitrogen vacancies generates deeper midgap states as the recombination centers, which results in deterioration of photocatalytic activities. Our work is expected to provide new insights for fabrication of nanomaterials with suitable vacancies for solar fuel generation.