Aurora Hydrogen receives funding from Alberta Innovates Hydrogen Centre of Excellence
Acceleware Ltd. and Aurora Hydrogen, today announced the successful award to Aurora Hydrogen Inc. of $2 million from the Alberta Innovates Hydrogen Centre of Excellence as part of their ‘Advancing Hydrogen – Competition 1’ program.
The funding is to be shared equally between Aurora and Acceleware to support a joint development project involving methane pyrolysis using radio frequency (“RF”) energy, subject to the execution of definitive agreements which are currently in progress.
In the $5.5 million project, Aurora and Acceleware will collaborate to develop what could become the most efficient, clean, and scalable hydrogen (“H2”) production process designed to-date, while supporting a transformative opportunity for Canada’s energy sector. As a complement to Aurora’s existing focus on the use of microwave energy in methane pyrolysis, this project will involve a novel approach – utilizing RF energy from Acceleware’s Clean Tech Inverter (“CTI”) to heat Aurora’s unique pyrolysis reactor. The intent of the project is to uncover even greater efficiency that might be realized over Aurora’s proven microwave-based reactor due to the extremely high energy conversion efficiency of the CTI and its ability to quickly and cost effectively scale up to 10 MW power levels.
“We are excited to begin working with Aurora on this application – we believe that our RF innovation could play a key role in a low cost, distributed, and scalable zero emissions hydrogen production process,” said Geoff Clark, Chief Executive Officer of Acceleware. “Adding to our current RF XL heavy oil pilot, this project will further develop our core area of expertise – decarbonizing industrial heating applications by replacing combustion with clean electricity-powered RF energy.”
Said Andrew Gillis, Chief Executive Officer of Aurora, “We are looking forward to expanding our current field of development to include RF as a complement to the microwave work that is already underway. We are keen to begin working with the Acceleware team and their CTI platform. If the project is successful, we see that the CTI can help us rapidly advance industrial-scale H2 production volumes while also driving down energy intensity.”
