Chemical looping is a novel process in clean energy conversion with inherent CO2 sequestration. For successfully operating the chemical looping, the cyclic material must meet a variety of criteria, such as high dispersion of the cyclic phase on the support, large external surface area, and small crystallite size, etc. in attempt to better activity and stability. In this paper, we applied a colloidal crystal templated sol-gel synthesis route to produce materials for chemical looping with hydrogen storage. To understand the role of template in the sol-gel process, two samples prepared with or without template were investigated by various characterization techniques. The results showed the template could not only promote the homogeneity of the metallic precursors, but also efficiently control the material morphology. The resulting high dispersion and confinement effects endowed this material better activity and stability in chemical looping multicycles. Our current experiments demonstrated this strategy can be used as a platform for convenient incorporation of a variety of structural features, and we anticipated it can be extended to synthesis more chemical looping materials. (C) 2016 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.