Hydrofuel Canada, a company engaged in the production and delivery of green ammonia and H₂ entered a $1-MM, 2-yr opto-chemical engineering of high-efficiency and low-cost photocatalysts and photoreactors for photoreforming H₂ carriers licensing and cooperation agreement with the University of Toronto's Solar Fuels Group (SFG).

The only clean burning non-toxic fuel for a sustainable future is H₂ as the only product is water. It has myriad uses for powering transportation, electricity production, running a range of industrial processes and keeping our businesses and industries warm, with a net zero carbon footprint. Inconveniently, the transportation and storage of H₂ in gaseous or liquid form pose technological, economical and safety challenges. This difficulty in principle can be circumvented with the use of abundant small molecule H₂ carriers, exemplified but not limited to methane, ammonia and water as the source of H₂.

The prior art in this emerging field shows that the conversion of these molecules to H₂ requires some form of energy to drive the conversion process currently enabled mostly by fossil fuel powered heat or electricity, making this kind of H₂ far from being green.

The partnership between the Solar Fuels Group and Hydrofuel brings a paradigm shift to the science and technology of generating H₂ from H₂ carriers. Instead of using non-renewable heat or electricity the team utilizes light as the sole energy source thereby making the H₂ the greenest form possible, called golden H₂. The central objective of the partnership is to engineer optically and chemically, photocatalysts and photoreactors with the highest efficiency and lowest cost, scalability and durability, for photoreforming H₂ carriers into golden H₂.