NewHydrogen aims to lower the cost of green hydrogen

NewHydrogen, Inc. (a developer of a green hydrogen generator) today 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 COO.

The goal of NewHydrogen’s sponsored research at the University of California Los Angeles (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.

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 UCLA to develop efficient and stable earth-abundant material-based catalysts for hydrogen production through electrolysis. The scope of the research was later expanded to include hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) catalysts in addition to oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts.
• Developed an OER catalyst that does not use iridium and with significant improvement for PEM electrolyzers. In-depth analysis of the catalytic materials before and after the structural modification provided a path to further improvements in the future.
• Developed an HER catalyst that uses an order of magnitude less platinum for alkaline electrolyzers. Creating a locally low pH environment at the platinum surface resulted in significant improvement in HER kinetics.
• Developed an HER catalyst that does not use any platinum for anion exchange membrane (AEM) electrolyzers. The single-atom catalyst has consistently shown to have lower overpotential with higher mass activity when compared to commercial platinum-based HER catalysts.
• Executed a manufacturing supply agreement with Verde, LLC, a Massachusetts-based manufacturer of state-of-the-art green hydrogen generation systems that will later allow the Company to deploy green hydrogen generators to intermittent renewable power sites to demonstrate the economic viability of new technology under development.

Several key objectives that NewHydrogen seeks to achieve moving forward include the following:

• Further improve the stability of the non-precious metal-based OER catalyst at high current density.
• Further improve the stability of the HER catalyst that uses an order of magnitude less platinum.
• 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.”