Sign up for our newsletter!

Subscribe form (en)

No spam. Simply good reading. Get your free subscription to Smoltek Newsletter infrequently delivered straight to your inbox.

Your data will be handled in compliance with our privacy policy.

Hydro­gen

Unleashing the scale-up of green hydrogen

Become a partner

Smol­tek Hydro­gen is invit­ing you to become a devel­op­ing part­ner for next gen­er­a­tion of PEM electrolyzers. 

A market in rapid growth

The interest in green hydro­gen is tak­ing off, but the cur­rent need for large amounts of expens­ive iridi­um as cata­lyst mater­i­al in PEM elec­tro­lyz­ers drives costs, mak­ing glob­al scale-up dif­fi­cult. With our tech­no­logy for com­pact elec­tro­lyz­ers using a min­im­um of scarce cata­lyst particles, the green hydro­gen industry can turn pro­spects into business.

The drop in demand for fossil fuels has made renew­able energy sources more com­pet­it­ive, cre­at­ing a favor­able envir­on­ment for the growth of the elec­tro­lyz­er market.

The use of green hydro­gen is expec­ted to grow by a factor of 100 by 2030. The glob­al elec­tro­lyz­er mar­ket is fore­cas­ted to grow from USD 0.4 bil­lion today to USD 3.5 bil­lion in 2026 and reach USD 65 bil­lion in 2030. A boom in terms of growth! How­ever, a lim­it­ing factor is the avail­ab­il­ity and cost of expens­ive cata­lyst mater­i­als. This is where the new solu­tions from Smol­tek are to play a vital role by rad­ic­ally redu­cing the amount of cata­lyst mater­i­al needed in man­u­fac­tur­ing elec­tro­lyz­ers and fuel cells.

Three times smaller without compromising capacity

Smoltek’s advanced car­bon nan­ofiber tech­no­logy has a unique poten­tial to enable more cost-effi­cient pro­duc­tion of fossil-free hydro­gen. PEM elec­tro­lyz­ers, spe­cific­ally designed for inter­mit­tent energy sup­ply, use a large amount of very rare and expens­ive cata­lyst particles (iridi­um) that today are used inef­fi­ciently – where­as Smoltek’s anode-side cell mater­i­al tech­no­logy makes max­im­um use of the cata­lyst particles. The res­ult is 2–3 lower invest­ment costs for elec­tro­lyz­ers in hydro­gen plants thanks to decreased elec­tro­lyz­er size.

Smoltek ECM effect comparison 02
Smol­tek Hydro­gens tech­no­logy for the anode side elec­trode – redu­cing the iridi­um load towards 0.1 mg/​cm2

Carbon nanofibers in the hydrogen industry

Our main object­ive is to devel­op robust solu­tions for indus­tri­ally rel­ev­ant cata­lyst coat­ings in the energy con­ver­sion sec­tor for the future. We build on our exper­i­ence to scale up nano­struc­tures developed for the semi­con­duct­or industry to also incor­por­ate thin films that can cata­lyze effect­ively the reac­tions needed in gas dif­fu­sion elec­trodes for water elec­tro­lys­is. The goal is to offer our cus­tom­ers super­i­or prop­er­ties in terms of sta­bil­ity and activity.

A huge green H2 (hydro­gen) mar­ket is devel­op­ing in the com­ing years. Five sec­tors will con­sume massive amounts of green hydrogen:

  • Fuel cells in elec­tric vehicles when bat­ter­ies are not suitable
  • Syn­thet­ic fuels for mar­ine applications
  • Repla­cing today’s H2 in agri­cul­ture fertilizer
  • Fossil-free steel works
  • Heat­ing in cement production

With new tech­no­logy, we intend to grow a sub­stan­tial busi­ness in the hydro­gen ecosystem

Reduce the need for expens­ive iridi­um and platinum:

  • Reduce the size of hydro­gen plants
  • Cheap­er to man­age the inter­mit­tent power from wind, water, and sol­ar plants

Skyrocketing demand for electrolyzers—“The H2 producer”

Green hydro­gen is pro­duced by elec­tro­lys­is. Simply put, that is run­ning elec­tri­city through water and gath­er­ing the released hydro­gen. The appar­at­us in which this is done is called an electrolyzer.

Today, there are mainly two dif­fer­ent elec­tro­lys­is tech­niques for the pro­duc­tion of hydro­gen; Alkaline elec­tro­lys­is (ALK) and Pro­ton Exchange Mem­brane (PEM) elec­tro­lys­is. ALK has been around the longest but the tech­no­logy faces dif­fi­culties as it can­not be quickly adap­ted to vary­ing input from green elec­tri­city, such as wind and sol­ar. PEM on the oth­er hand is more flex­ible and can handle the vari­ations from the inter­mit­tent power sources. 

The PEM tech­no­logy’s bene­fits also include high effi­ciency, min­im­al upkeep require­ments, and rap­id star­tup times. It can also lower costs thanks to being able to pro­duce more hydro­gen when elec­tri­city is cheap­er. These are the main reas­on why PEM elec­tro­lyz­ers are anti­cip­ated to expand at the highest rate when the industry will scale up hydro­gen production.

The crit­ic­al com­pon­ent of a PEM elec­tro­lyz­er is the cell. It is the unit where the elec­tri­city in con­tact with water becomes hydro­gen and oxy­gen. Each hydro­gen pro­duc­tion unit has vast num­bers of these. Thus, the rap­id growth of the pro­duc­tion capa­city of green hydro­gen implies that the demand for elec­tro­lyz­er cells will skyrocket.

With clev­er use of car­bon nan­ofibers, we can reduce the use of rare and expens­ive noble metals by 50–70 per­cent while doub­ling or trip­ling the act­ive sur­face area of the pro­ton-exchange mem­brane (PEM) in elec­tro­lyz­ers and fuel cells.

And this will enable the green hydro­gen revolution!

Hydrogen market – market for electrolyzers

1. Fuel cells in electric vehicles when batteries are not suitable

Elec­tric heavy-duty vehicles are the key to fossil-free trans­port. When bat­ter­ies would not provide a long enough range, fuel cells are the altern­at­ive. The vehicle is loaded with hydro­gen, which the fuel cell trans­fers into elec­tri­city. This will be used for heavy-duty trucks, coaches, long-range pas­sen­ger vehicles, and trains.

Hydro­gen will power long-haul trans­ports to reduce car­bon emissions

2. Synthetic fuels for marine applications

For long dis­tances, heavy mar­ine trans­ports syn­thet­ic fuel is a con­veni­ent way to make the trans­ports green. Exist­ing com­bus­tion engines are run on syn­thet­ic fuels pro­duced from green H2. Also, bio­fuels, lith­i­um-ion bat­ter­ies, and fuel cells will be used to make the sec­tor fossil-free. Still, syn­thet­ic fuels are con­sidered most attract­ive, giv­en that the cost of pro­du­cing hydro­gen can be reduced.

3. Replacing today’s fossil hydrogen in agriculture fertilizer

Ammo­nia is the second most com­monly pro­duced chem­ic­al in the world, and it is derived from hydro­gen. More than 80 per­cent is used as feed­stock for fer­til­izer. The rest are used in mak­ing paint, plastic, tex­tiles, explos­ives, and oth­er chem­ic­als. Ammo­nia pro­duc­tion in 2018 gen­er­ated around 500 mil­lion tons of car­bon diox­ide, where a large part comes from hydro­gen pro­duced by steam meth­ane reform­ing. Mak­ing this from green hydro­gen instead implies an immense growth of the elec­tro­lyz­er market.

4. Fossil-free steel works

New steel works are being built all around Europe, some­thing that has not happened for hun­dreds of years. The new steel­works will be using green hydro­gen instead of fossil gas. Each ton of steel pro­duced today is estim­ated to emit 2.2 tons of car­bon dioxide—equating to about 11 per­cent of glob­al car­bon diox­ide emis­sions. In Sweden, two well-known examples are the HYBRIT pro­ject run by SSAB, LKAB, and Vat­ten­fall, and H2 Green Steel, a new ambi­tious com­pany build­ing new steel­works in Sweden and Iber­ia. Sim­il­ar pro­jects are seen, for instance, in Ger­many. For each new steel­works, a new large-scale hydro­gen plant is being built.

5. Heating in cement production

Green hydro­gen can be used for high-grade indus­tri­al heat­ing in, for example, the cement industry, which accounts for 8 per­cent of glob­al car­bon diox­ide emis­sions. Emis­sions can be reduced by a third by using green hydro­gen to heat the cement kilns. (The remain­ing two-thirds come from the chem­ic­al reac­tion that pro­duces cement and must be cap­tured and stored or reduced by oth­er means.)

Rapid increase in demand for green hydrogen

Green hydro­gen means that elec­tri­city from renew­able sources is used, like wind, water, and sol­ar energy. The wind and sol­ar power capa­city are planned to be built up at a large scale glob­ally to match the demand. The large volume pro­duc­tion com­bined with the tech­no­logy run­ning down the exper­i­ence curve indic­ates an attract­ive cost per kilo­watt from green elec­tri­city. For example, wind power is increas­ingly being pro­duced in large off­shore wind farms in the com­ing dec­ade. Wind power already reaches a lower cost per kilo­watt than new nuc­le­ar power.

Green Hydrogen Energy Storage

Accord­ing to the report Hydro­gen for Net-Zero by Hydro­gen Coun­cil and McKin­sey & Com­pany (2021), green and low-car­bon hydro­gen can be used to avoid 80 bil­lion tons (80 GT) of cumu­lat­ive car­bon emis­sions from now through 2050. With an annu­al abate­ment poten­tial of sev­en bil­lion tons (7 GT) in 2050, hydro­gen can con­trib­ute 20 per­cent of the total reduc­tion needed in 2050.

Glob­al hydro­gen demand by seg­ment until 2050 (Source: Hydro­gen for Net-Zero by Hydro­gen Coun­cil and McKin­sey & Com­pany 2021)

Rapid growth of production capacity of green hydrogen

Pro­duc­tion capa­city needs to be expan­ded rap­idly to meet the strong demand for hydro­gen. And indeed, we see a rap­id growth in announced or star­ted pro­jects to build hydro­gen pro­duc­tion facil­it­ies. In fact, the growth is so fast that the Hydro­gen Council’s growth fore­casts have had to be bumped up every year in recent years.

In the report, Hydro­gen for Net-Zero, Hydro­gen Coun­cil, and McKin­sey & Com­pany writes that play­ers have announced more than 18 mil­lion tons of green and low-car­bon hydro­gen pro­duc­tion through 2030. (See fig­ure below.) Addi­tion­al announce­ments include nearly 13 mil­lion tons of green and low-car­bon hydro­gen pro­duc­tion capa­city with deploy­ment bey­ond 2030. The green and low-car­bon hydro­gen pro­duc­tion volume announced in 2021 exceeds 30 mil­lion tons, more than 30 per­cent of the glob­al hydro­gen demand.

Announced green or low-car­bon hydro­gen pro­duc­tion volume in a mil­lion tons (Source: Hydro­gen for Net-Zero by Hydro­gen Coun­cil and McKin­sey & Com­pany 2021)

Carbon nanofibers in hydrogen

With our car­bon nan­ofibers (CNFs) fab­ric­a­tion tech­no­logy, we devel­op mater­i­al solu­tions that enable more effi­cient solu­tions in the hydro­gen industry.

Cur­rently, we focus on improv­ing the elec­tro­chem­ic­al cell in PEM elec­tro­lyz­ers and fuel cells. The cell enables the con­ver­sion of elec­tri­city into hydro­gen and vice versa. Thus, it’s a key com­pon­ent in stor­ing and trans­mit­ting renew­able energy and decar­bon­iz­ing industry, trans­port­a­tion, and heating.

Hydrogen News

News from Smol­tek Hydrogen 

Read more

Hydrogen News (Swedish)

Press releases in Swedish 

Read more