Company’s electrolyzer prototype platform is also designed to incorporate additional future electrolyzer component innovations
SANTA CLARITA, Calif, Oct. 11, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NewHydrogen, Inc. (OTC:NEWH), the developer of a green hydrogen generator (electrolyzer), today reported that it has begun the prototype development of a complete electrolyzer that will showcase its novel low-cost and high-performance catalyst technology. The prototype will serve as a platform for incorporating additional electrolyzer component innovations to be developed by NewHydrogen going forward.
The goal of NewHydrogen’s sponsored research at the University of California Los Angeles (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 now entering the stage of incorporating its novel oxygen and hydrogen catalysts into a complete prototype electrolyzer. As the Company expands its technology focus beyond catalysts, this prototype will serve as a platform 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.
The researchers will first systematically conduct acidic water splitting by using the commercial platinum and iridium-based catalysts to evaluate the benchmark performance of current commercial catalysts and set up a standard testing protocol. They will then evaluate the performance of the Company’s new catalysts in the prototype electrolyzer, such as the activity transition into electrolytic cell, long term stability, hydrogen production rate, specific energy consumption and estimated overall costs of new catalysts.
“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 look forward to seeing more exciting achievements as we methodically expand our technology focus beyond catalysts in 2023.”
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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