Catalysts don't make energy prohibitive chemical reactions happen. What they do is make chemical reactions which have favorable energies but bad reaction kinetics happen more quickly. In English: certain reactions release energy, but they don't happen (or don't happen quickly enough) because they're so complicated. Complicated organic molecules need to be aligned by catalysts so the reacting sites "line-up". Some other chemical reactions require three or more molecules to collide simultaneously; that's unlikely, but a catalyst might capture some of the molecules long enough to reduce the complicated reaction to a two-body collision, which is much more likely. The catalysts don't change the energy part of the equation.
My high school chemistry teacher explained catalysis thus: "two shy people in the presence of alcohol will simply do what comes naturally. " This was 35 years ago. Today she would probably be thrown out of the place, but, uh, she was a nun so she had a lifetime appointment.
We already do have "free" energy. It comes in the form of uranium. We simply don't have the political will to burn it.