NewHydrogen has joined forces with UC Santa Barbara to develop a disruptive technology that they claim will produce the “world’s cheapest green hydrogen”.
Entering into a research agreement with the university, NewHydrogen will work with chemical and materials engineers in an effort to develop a better way of splitting water into green hydrogen. This will see them explore a thermochemical approach, where instead of electricity, heat is used to make green hydrogen.
Explaining the rationale, NewHydrogen CEO, Steve Hill pointed out how electricity accounts for 73% of the cost of green hydrogen production. In stark contrast, renewable heat from sources such as concentrated solar and geothermal can be very low cost or even free when in the form of waste heat, coming from nuclear plants and industrial processes.
The team at UC Santa Barbara will be looking to exploit the features of molten liquids to directly split water continuously in a single redox chemical loop. Through this, they will look to produce hydrogen and oxygen in separate chambers. The ambition is that they will be able to develop a novel Molten Catalytic Liquid that can be reduced in one chamber, oxidised in another, and then continuously recycled and reused, with the only inputs all the while being heat and water.
Hill described it as a “novel, first of its kind, high efficiency thermochemical water-splitter” that can use low cost common materials, as well as common industrial temperatures of less than 1,000°C, and then potentially produce “the world’s cheapest green hydrogen”.
