Company is focused on lowering the cost of green hydrogen by eliminating or drastically reducing the use of precious metals in electrolyzers
SANTA CLARITA, Calif. (June 7, 2022) — NewHydrogen, Inc. (OTC:NEWH), the developer of a green hydrogen generator, today reported on the progress of its Oxygen Evolution Reaction (OER) catalyst development for proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzers. Previously, the company also reported on the progress made with its single-atom Hydrogen Evolution Reaction (HER) catalyst that does not use platinum.
Green hydrogen is a versatile fuel and storage material with significant environmental benefits when compared to fossil fuels. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Hydrogen Shot and the European Union’s Clean Hydrogen Alliance and the REPowerEU plan are among the many initiatives around the world setting ambitious targets for green hydrogen as a sustainable transportation fuel, to produce electricity, and to create heat for homes.
The goal of NewHydrogen’s sponsored research at UCLA is to lower the cost of green hydrogen by eliminating or drastically reducing the use of precious metals in electrolyzers. Electrolyzers currently rely on rare materials such as iridium and platinum. These materials often account for a substantial portion of the cost of electrolyzers.
In 2021, the UCLA researchers developed a non-precious metal-based catalyst with significant improvement of OER in acidic conditions for PEM electrolyzers. The catalytic performance was then further improved by modifying the material structure of the catalyst. The ongoing research is designed to identify optimal modification methods and to understand specific causes of the improvements. In-depth analysis of the catalytic materials before and after the structural modification provides a path to further improvements in the future.
Recently, catalyst samples before and after structure modification were subjected to synchrotron tests at a national laboratory. The XANES analysis provided plausible explanations for the significant catalytic performance improvement observed. In one important aspect under observation, the doped elements were positioned within the modified structure of the catalyst in a specific manner associated with the enhanced material characteristics, thus deemed to be the most likely origin of the superior OER performance.
“We are very pleased to see the exciting progress being made in our green hydrogen program at UCLA,” said Dr. David Lee, CEO of NewHydrogen. “We have great confidence in Dr. Huang and her team. We look forward to seeing these achievements to drastically reduce the cost of producing green hydrogen.”
NewHydrogen is developing ThermoLoop™ – a breakthrough technology that uses water and heat rather than electricity to produce the world’s lowest cost green hydrogen. Hydrogen is the cleanest and most abundant element in the universe, and we can’t live without it. Hydrogen is the key ingredient in making fertilizers needed to grow food for the world. It is also used for transportation, refining oil and making steel, glass, pharmaceuticals and more. Nearly all the hydrogen today is made from hydrocarbons like coal, oil, and natural gas, which are dirty and limited resources. Water, on the other hand, is an infinite and renewable worldwide resource.
Currently, the most common method of making green hydrogen is to split water into oxygen and hydrogen with an electrolyzer using green electricity produced from solar or wind. However, green electricity is and always will be very expensive. It currently accounts for 73% of the cost of green hydrogen. By using heat directly, we can skip the expensive process of making electricity, and fundamentally lower the cost of green hydrogen. Inexpensive heat can be obtained from concentrated solar, geothermal, nuclear reactors and industrial waste heat for use in our novel low-cost thermochemical water splitting process. Working with a world class research team at UC Santa Barbara, our goal is to help usher in the green hydrogen economy that Goldman Sachs estimated to have a future market value of $12 trillion.
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