“We already have the technology—it just needs to be scaled up”. Frequent attendees of hydrogen conferences will have heard this claim many times over the past two or three years as the industry grapples with the issue of high production costs.

Economies of scale are, of course, crucial to bringing down green hydrogen costs, which remain too high for many potential investors and consumers, hampering the progress of hundreds of proposed projects to FID.

The US Department of Energy acknowledged this in mid-March, when it announced $750m of government funding to support the scaling up of electrolyser production and to “dramatically” reduce the cost of clean hydrogen and “supercharge” progress.

The funding commitment, aimed at 52 projects across 24 states, is designed to deliver production of 10GW/yr of electrolysers—enough to produce an additional 1.3mt/yr  of green hydrogen—as well as 14GW/yr of fuel cells.

About half of the new funding package is aimed at scaling up “low-cost, high-throughput electrolyser manufacturing”.

Novel designs

But the DoE stresses that the cost issue is not all about scale. About $70m of funding will go to 18 projects focused on “novel materials, components, and designs for electrolysers.”

“The projects announced today will also support the long-term viability of DOE’s Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs and other emerging commercial-scale deployments, by helping to solve the underlying technical barriers to cost reduction that cannot be overcome by scale alone,” it said.

But $70m of support looks modest. Should policymakers in the US and Europe be putting more emphasis on electrolyser innovation, given that scaling of existing technologies has not so far moved the dial on costs?

Many examples of innovation in the electrolyser sector have emerged over the past couple of years, with advancements made by research institutes, startups and small developers, as well as the technology giants that have been producing electrolysers for decades.

One success story is Danish company Topsoe. It recently reported encouraging results from an industrial demonstration of its Solid Oxide Electrolyzer Cell technology, and the company has received a €94m ($101m) capital grant from the EU to support the development of a production site. “Net zero 2050 will only succeed if we have the courage to deploy new pioneering technologies,” said Kim Hedegaard, CEO of power-to-X at Topsoe.

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Author: Stuart Penson