Enabling the Green Hydrogen Revolution

Hydro­gen is the foun­da­tion of mod­ern indus­try, with glob­al demand at 100 mil­lion tons per year – expect­ed to dou­ble by 2030 and reach 550 mil­lion tons by 2050. Today, it’s essen­tial for fer­til­iz­er pro­duc­tion, chem­i­cal man­u­fac­tur­ing and oil refin­ing. Tomor­row, it will be the cor­ner­stone of glob­al decar­boniza­tion efforts, trans­form­ing heavy indus­try, trans­porta­tion and ener­gy sys­tems worldwide.

But here’s the stark real­i­ty: 96% of all hydro­gen today comes from fos­sil fuels, releas­ing a stag­ger­ing 10 kg of CO₂ for every kilo­gram of hydro­gen produced.

There is wide­spread agree­ment that the solu­tion lies in PEM elec­trolyz­ers, which con­vert elec­tric­i­ty from inter­mit­tent fos­sil-free sources (hydro, wind, solar) into hydro­gen. But this crit­i­cal tran­si­tion is not hap­pen­ing fast enough because glob­al enter­pris­es build­ing large-scale PEM elec­trolyz­er facil­i­ties are con­strained by the lim­it­ed sup­ply of iridium.

The glob­al pro­duc­tion of irid­i­um is only 7–9 tons per year, pri­mar­i­ly as a by-prod­uct of plat­inum and nick­el min­ing in South Africa and Zim­bab­we. This severe sup­ply con­straint cre­ates a fun­da­men­tal phys­i­cal bar­ri­er pre­vent­ing elec­trolyz­er man­u­fac­tur­ers from scal­ing pro­duc­tion to meet the rapid­ly grow­ing demand for green hydro­gen. While renew­able elec­tric­i­ty costs rep­re­sent the largest part of green hydro­gen pro­duc­tion expens­es, this irid­i­um lim­i­ta­tion is the crit­i­cal bot­tle­neck that must be solved to enable the mas­sive scale-up need­ed for emerg­ing fos­sil-free appli­ca­tions across for instance steel pro­duc­tion, trans­porta­tion, and ener­gy storage.

This cre­ates an urgent need for a rad­i­cal solu­tion: the amount of irid­i­um required in PEM elec­trolyz­ers must be dras­ti­cal­ly reduced while main­tain­ing or improv­ing performance.

Smoltek Hydro­gen has risen to the chal­lenge: to reduce the need for pre­cious met­al cat­a­lysts in PEM elec­trolyz­ers while main­tain­ing per­for­mance and mak­ing them even more effi­cient and cost effective.

This allows man­u­fac­tur­ers to over­come the irid­i­um sup­ply con­straint and scale up the pro­duc­tion of PEM elec­trolyz­ers, mak­ing clean hydro­gen eco­nom­i­cal­ly com­pet­i­tive with fos­sil-based alter­na­tives. For investors, this rep­re­sents an extra­or­di­nary oppor­tu­ni­ty across the hydro­gen ecosystem.