Working with a team of world-class chemical and materials engineers at UC Santa Barbara, the Company is developing a better way to efficiently split water into cheap green hydrogen with a thermochemical approach, using heat instead of electricity
SANTA CLARITA, Calif. (August 22, 2023) — NewHydrogen, Inc. (OTC:NEWH), the developer of a breakthrough technology that uses water and heat instead of electricity to produce the world’s cheapest green hydrogen, today announced that the Company recently entered into a research agreement with UC Santa Barbara to work with a team of world-class chemical and materials engineers to develop a better way to efficiently split water into cheap green hydrogen with a thermochemical approach, using heat instead of electricity.
“Hydrogen is the cleanest and most abundant element in the universe, and we can’t live without it,” said NewHydrogen CEO Steve Hill. “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. The world needs lots of hydrogen, and it must be cheap and green.”
Mr. Hill continued, “The gold standard for producing green hydrogen today is through electrolysis by using electrolyzers with solar or wind electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Unfortunately, electricity, especially green electricity, is very expensive and will continue to be expensive. In fact, electricity currently accounts for 73% of the cost of green hydrogen production. On the other hand, renewable heat from sources such as concentrated solar and geothermal can be very low cost. Often it’s even free in the form of waste heat from sources such as nuclear power plants, and industrial processes for making steel, glass, ceramics, and many things we use in our everyday lives.”
“The UC Santa Barbara technology team, led by Dr. Philip Christopher, plans to exploit the features of molten liquids to directly split water continuously in a single redox chemical loop, to produce hydrogen and oxygen in separate chambers,” Mr. Hill disclosed. “We are developing a novel Molten Catalytic Liquid that can be reduced in one chamber, oxidized in another chamber, and is continuously recycled and reused. The only inputs are heat and water. We call this technology, NewHydrogen ThermoLoop™, and it will be a novel, first of its kind, high efficiency thermochemical water-splitter that uses low-cost common materials and common industrial temperatures of less than 1,000°C, to potentially produce the world’s cheapest green hydrogen.”
Green hydrogen is crucial in meeting the greenhouse gas emission goals described in the United Nations Paris Agreement. Solar, wind and batteries alone simply cannot be relied upon to decarbonize industries, such as aviation, maritime, steel, cement, fertilizers, oil refining and pharmaceuticals. The expected global drive towards “net-zero emission” by 2050 will create tremendous demand for green hydrogen for decades to come. Goldman Sachs estimates a future market value of $12 trillion.
“NewHydrogen now has two promising green hydrogen technology projects under way,” Mr. Hill reported. “In addition to our heat-based ThermoLoop™ project at UC Santa Barbara, our UCLA technology team, led by Dr. Yu Huang, has made considerable progress in our quest to replace and reduce expensive rare earth materials used as catalysts in conventional electrolyzers. Until there is a new technology that does not rely on electricity as the input energy to make hydrogen, electrolyzers will continue to serve as an important bridge to the green hydrogen economy.”
Mr. Hill concluded, “NewHydrogen has the potential to disrupt the entire hydrogen industry by dramatically lowering the cost of green hydrogen by using cheap heat and any source of cheap water. Depending on relative world costs and availability of hydrocarbon feedstocks, our disruptive technology has the potential to produce green hydrogen at a lower cost than grey hydrogen made from natural gas, or blue hydrogen made from natural gas with carbon capture. In other word, the world’s cheapest 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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