NewHydrogen, the developer of a disruptive technology that uses clean energy and water to produce the world’s cheapest green H₂, announced that the company recently entered into a research agreement with UC Santa Barbara to work with a team of world-class chemical and materials engineers to develop a better way to efficiently split water into cheap green H₂ with a thermochemical approach, using heat instead of electricity.

“H₂ is the cleanest and most abundant element in the universe, and we can’t live without it,” said NewHydrogen CEO Steve Hill. “H₂ 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. The world needs lots of H₂, and it must be cheap and green.”

Hill continued, “The gold standard for producing green H₂ today is through electrolysis by using electrolyzers with solar or wind electricity to split water into H₂ and oxygen. Unfortunately, electricity, especially green electricity, is very expensive and will continue to be expensive. In fact, electricity currently accounts for 73% of the cost of green H₂ production. On the other hand, renewable heat from sources such as concentrated solar and geothermal can be very low cost. Often it’s even free in the form of waste heat from sources such as nuclear power plants, and industrial processes for making steel, glass, ceramics, and many things we use in our everyday lives.”

“The UC Santa Barbara technology team, led by Dr. Philip Christopher, plans to exploit the features of molten liquids to directly split water continuously in a single redox chemical loop, to produce H₂ and oxygen in separate chambers,” Hill disclosed. “We are developing a novel Molten Catalytic Liquid that can be reduced in one chamber, oxidized in another chamber, and is continuously recycled and reused. The only inputs are heat and water. We call this technology, NewHydrogen ThermoLoop, and it will be a novel, first of its kind, high efficiency thermochemical water-splitter that uses low-cost common materials and common industrial temperatures of less than 1,000°C, to potentially produce the world’s cheapest green H₂.”

Green H₂ is crucial in meeting the greenhouse gas emission goals described in the United Nations Paris Agreement. Solar, wind and batteries alone simply cannot be relied upon to decarbonize industries, such as aviation, maritime, steel, cement, fertilizers, oil refining and pharmaceuticals. The expected global drive towards net-zero emission by 2050 will create tremendous demand for green H₂ for decades to come. Goldman Sachs estimates a future market value of $12 T.

“NewHydrogen now has two promising green H₂ technology projects under way,” Hill said. “In addition to our heat-based ThermoLoop project at UC Santa Barbara, our UCLA technology team, led by Dr. Yu Huang, has made considerable progress in our quest to replace and reduce expensive rare earth materials used as catalysts in conventional electrolyzers. Until there is a new technology that does not rely on electricity as the input energy to make H₂, electrolyzers will continue to serve as an important bridge to the green H₂ economy.”

Hill concluded, “NewHydrogen has the potential to disrupt the entire H₂ industry by dramatically lowering the cost of green H₂ by using cheap heat and any source of cheap water. Depending on relative world costs and availability of hydrocarbon feedstocks, our disruptive technology has the potential to produce green H₂ at a lower cost than grey H₂ made from natural gas, or blue H₂ made from natural gas with carbon capture. In other word, the world’s cheapest H₂.”