Company expands the existing research program to develop a hydrogen generator that fully takes advantage of its catalyst technology
SANTA CLARITA, Calif., Nov. 01, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NewHydrogen, Inc. (OTC: NEWH), the developer of a breakthrough technology to produce low-cost green hydrogen, today announced that it has executed an agreement to further expand the existing sponsored research agreement with the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) to develop technology to reduce the cost of green hydrogen production. The new agreement expands the scope of the program to include the development of efficient and stable hydrogen production using PEM electrolyzers.
The goal of NewHydrogen’s sponsored research at UCLA is to lower the cost of green hydrogen by systematically reducing the cost and increasing the performance of critical components of hydrogen generators. These electrolyzers split water into oxygen and hydrogen and currently rely on rare materials such as iridium and platinum, which account for a substantial portion of the cost.
In 2021, researchers at UCLA funded by NewHydrogen developed a low-cost oxygen catalyst that does not use expensive iridium and significantly improved the performance of PEM electrolyzers. Also developed were hydrogen catalysts that use an order of magnitude less platinum or no platinum at all.
The Company is currently in the stage of incorporating its novel oxygen and hydrogen catalysts into a complete prototype electrolyzer. The agreement expands its technology focus to include additional component innovations related to gas diffusion layer, ion exchange membrane, and catalyst layer. The Company’s ultimate goal is to develop a low-cost and high-performance electrolyzer consisting of multiple breakthrough components.
“We are very pleased to broaden our green hydrogen research program at UCLA with Dr. Huang and her team, in whom we have a high level of confidence,” said Dr. David Lee, CEO of NewHydrogen. “We look forward to seeing more achievements to drastically reduce the cost of producing green hydrogen as a result of expanding the sponsored research program.”
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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