NewHydrogen provided an update outlining corporate milestones and the next steps to establish longer-term commercial viability.
“NewHydrogen has made significant progress towards its goal of developing technologies that lower the cost of producing green hydrogen, accelerating the timeline for large-scale applications in high growth markets,” said Spencer Hall, NewHydrogen’s chief operating officer. “Our success will be measured by two key initiatives: technology development and our ability to form meaningful, mutually beneficial relationships with the right partners. We believe both objectives are on track for success, and we are excited for what we expect to be an eventful 2021.”
NewHydrogen is focused on lowering the cost of green hydrogen, which is produced using renewable energy sources like wind or solar power, by reducing or replacing rare earth materials in electrolyzers with inexpensive earth-abundant materials. As part of its “Hydrogen Earthshot,” the US Department of Energy anticipates an opportunity for at least a 5-fold increase in clean hydrogen use as well as $140 billion in revenues and 700,000 jobs by 2030. All of these opportunities accelerate with a lower cost of hydrogen.
NewHydrogen has achieved several milestones since the commencement of its green hydrogen technology program in December 2020, including, but not limited to, the following:
-Entered into a sponsored research agreement with the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) to develop efficient and stable earth-abundant material-based catalysts for hydrogen production through electrolysis.
-Increased the budget of the existing sponsored research agreement with UCLA by 13 times and expanded the scope of the research program focused on significantly reducing or replacing the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) catalyst, platinum, as well as on developing the non-precious metal-based oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalyst that replaces the existing OER catalyst, iridium.
-Created a non-precious metal-based catalyst that demonstrated significant improvement of OER in acidic conditions. The catalyst’s low cost and high durability make it a good candidate for commercial water electrolysis systems operating at high current densities.
Chief operating officer gave presentations to relevant power industry groups interested in NewHydrogen’s role in the global energy transition.
There are several key objectives that NewHydrogen seeks to achieve moving forward, including but not limited to:
-Further improve the stability of the non-precious metal-based OER catalyst at high current density in preparation for upcoming electrolyzer studies.
-Develop platinum-based HER catalysts with significantly enhanced mass activity and stability and develop non-precious metal-based HER catalysts with comparable activity to existing platinum-based catalysts.
-Incorporate HER/OER catalysts into a prototype electrolyzer that will serve as a reference prototype to demonstrate NewHydrogen’s catalyst technology to produce low-cost green hydrogen.
-Continue to foster partnerships and actively participate in green hydrogen industry consortium activities.
“While we work to achieve these milestones, we are highly optimistic about bringing NewHydrogen technologies to market in the coming years,” Hall said. “As high-growth industries continue to adopt new and improved electrolyzer technologies, the market opportunity for customer adoption and revenue generation is tremendous for a solution like ours.”
