[ad_1]
Gerry Swiegers, CTO of Hysata, poses with one of the high-efficiency electrolysis cell. Paul Barrett, CEO, stands to the right.Hysata
This story was originally published in the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Australian researchers claim to have made a “giant leap” in lifting the efficiency of electrolyzers, bringing forward the time when green hydrogen will be competitive with fossil fuels as an energy source.
Hysata, a company that uses technology developed at the University of Wollongong said that its patented capillary fed electrolysis cells achieve 95 per cent efficiency. This is a significant improvement on current technology.
The peer-reviewed journal published the achievement on Wednesday Nature Communications could see the Morrison government’s so-called hydrogen stretch goalPaul Barrett, Hysata chief executives, stated that the fuel would be competitively priced at $2 per kilogram by 2025. “We’ve gone from 75 percent [efficiency] to 95 percent—it’s really a giant leap for the electrolysis industry,” Barrett said.
Renewable energy from sources like wind and solar is making huge inroads into power sector, supplying more than a third of eastern Australia’s electricity in the final three months of 2021. However, it will be more difficult to decarbonize the transport industry and trucking if fuels like hydrogen become cheaper.
Gerry Swiegers, Hysata’s chief technology officer and a UoW professor, said electrolysis—which uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen—had been around for two centuries with mostly only incremental improvements in processing.
The central challenge was to lower the electrical resistance of the electrolysis cell. As a smart phone’s battery warms up, resistance can also waste energy and cause the cell to heat up. “What we did differently was just to start completely over and to think about it from a very high level,” Swiegers said. “Everyone else was looking at improving materials or an existing design.”
With the help of two PhD researchers—Aaron Hodges and Anh Linh Hoang—the small team used readily available materials to develop a thin sponge-like membrane to suck the water up between two electrodes. It was important to avoid creating bubbles. “So a combination of that wicking membrane and that bubble-free operation resulted in inherently low resistance,” Barrett said.
Hydrogen could be made using 41.5 kilowatt hours of electricity per kilogram. “For hydrogen producers, this will significantly reduce both the capital and operational costs to produce green hydrogen,” he said, adding the efficiency levels achieved were “the best in the world.”
The research has progressed quickly from an initial concept in 2019 With $4.25 million from UK-based IP Group and $750,000 from Australia’s Clean Energy Finance Corp, Hysata is now looking to begin a pilot manufacturing site of electrolysis plates—each 250mm in diameter—by the end of 2023.
“We want to help Australia build core electrolyzer technology,” Barrett said, adding the plan would be to build a plant capable of producing one gigawatt of electrolyzers a year. As production techniques are perfected more plants of similar size would be built in other parts of the country and elsewhere. Barrett stated that Hysata is looking to hire more staff to augment its 20-strong workforce. He also said that there are plans to announce a fundraising campaign in the second half 2022.
A potential industry worth trillions of US dollars is at risk. According to the government’s National hydrogen strategy released in 2019, a “cautiously optimistic scenario” could see an Australian hydrogen industry generate about 7,600 jobs and add about $11 billion a year in additional GDP by 2050” or another 10,000 jobs and $26 billion annually if markets develop faster.
“I’m very excited about this project,” Swiegers said. “I think this really gives us a chance to get to net zero [carbon emissions] potentially earlier than expected.”
