Rethinking Electrolysis By Thinking Small, Then Big

Back in the 1800s, shortly after the renowned Italian physicist Alessandro Volta invented the first electric battery, the chemists William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle found out that sticking the device in water could produce oxygen and hydrogen. Electrolysis, the process they discovered, remains conceptually the same two centuries later: Apply enough force to break up the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a water molecule, and you can separate the elements.

Historically, generating hydrogen this way has not been efficient. It requires enormous amounts of energy to fracture the molecular bonds. But today, the energy transition has focused attention on revisiting and improving the process. As renewable power sources become more abundant, many organizations are looking into the potential to generate green hydrogen at scale as a key component of reducing carbon emissions.

As world and industry leaders recently explored in Egypt at COP27, the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, the production of green hydrogen also has to be cost-effective to make a meaningful difference in the energy transition. Achieving both criteria requires more sophistication than just building a bigger electrolyzer. That’s what led Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) to invest in Electric Hydrogen (EH2), a startup in Natick, Massachusetts innovating efficiencies in this centuries-old process.

“Technology like Electric Hydrogen’s is what the industry will need to bring hydrogen prices to parity with fossil fuels.”

Green hydrogen’s role

Wind, solar and battery power have emerged as the primary technologies capable of taking carbon emissions out of power production. They’re the stars of the energy transition so far because they’re renewable, their underlying technologies have advanced at a rapid pace and their costs have dropped precipitously. But they can’t power decarbonization on their own. Jesse Jenkins, assistant professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University and a leading expert on the energy transition, likes to say that decarbonizing with just wind, solar and batteries is like trying to win the NCAA basketball tournament with a team of point guards.

Last year, when MHI committed to net zero by 2040, it charged its investment and business development team with finding innovative technologies that could accelerate key areas of decarbonization like hydrogen.

“We already have in-house technology that can use utility-scale hydrogen,” says Ricky Sakai, Vice President of New Business Development at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America (MHIA). “On the upstream side, we have been looking for disruptive technologies that can produce large volumes of hydrogen in a sustainable way.”

EH2’s approach to low-cost utility-scale hydrogen caught the team’s eye. “One of the most intriguing parts of their technology is they’re attacking the entire value chain,” says Sakai.

That is, from the electrolytic cell to the whole system.

Small changes, big impact

Raffi Garabedian, cofounder and CEO of Electric Hydrogen, is no stranger to scaling renewable energy equipment. He spent years as the CTO of First Solar, figuring out how to develop products that could compete with ultra-low-cost technologies manufactured in China. At Electric Hydrogen, Garabedian and his team aim to produce electrolyzer systems capable of generating green hydrogen at 100 megawatt-scale – five times more capacity than the largest system built to date.

“Think of it as advanced electrolysis that's far more productive.”

In a broad sense, there are two paths to utility-scale production. The first involves brute force: Take a standard electrolyzer and make it much, much bigger. Economies of scale would have to come from purchasing stainless steel and other materials in huge quantities.

Instead, Electric Hydrogen opted to start small. “To make green hydrogen work at scale, you need more than just cheap and plentiful electrons from renewable sources,” says Garabedian. “You also have to be able to convert those extremely cheap electrons into hydrogen cost-effectively.”

The company set out to bring electrolysis’ efficiency and capital costs into the 21^st century. That effort includes making electrolyzers flexible enough to turn on and off without wasting energy, to accommodate the intermittent nature of solar and wind power.

“We asked, ‘For a given size electrolyzer, how can you get the most hydrogen out of it while putting the least amount of power into it?’” Garabedian says. The EH2 team took the question down to the level of a single electrolytic cell, addressing all the limits to throughput and every way it might waste energy.

Many small but fundamental changes added up, to the point that the company reached throughput roughly five times the industry norm without sacrificing efficiency. At that point, Electric Hydrogen was ready to scale its approach.

“Think of it as advanced electrolysis that's far more productive,” says Garabedian, “and those improvements ripple through the entire architecture of the plant.”

Reaping small gains on a big scale

For a strategic investor like MHI, the efficiency gains represent a tangible foundation on which to build a viable hydrogen value chain. The next step is testing the technology at scale. Electric Hydrogen is beginning with a 1-megawatt electrolyzer test bed, while it works on its upcoming 10 megawatt-scale pilot plant.

The relationship between MHI and EH2 runs deeper than funding. MHI has engaged with Electric Hydrogen over time to understand how the team intends to continue developing and applying its technology. For EH2, an added benefit is having a partner that’s a leader in large-scale hydrogen projects, including the world’s largest hydrogen production, storage and usage project under construction, located in Delta, Utah.

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“Technology like Electric Hydrogen’s is what the industry will need to bring hydrogen prices to parity with fossil fuels,” says MHIA’s Sakai. “That’s an important inflection point for the momentum we’re currently seeing in the green hydrogen marketplace to continue to grow.”

As industries and governments across the globe grapple with the realities of meeting carbon emission goals, the need for an additional decarbonization path becomes more urgent. That need is particularly acute in industries like heavy transport, steel and concrete production. Green hydrogen has emerged as a potential solution – if we can produce enough of it economically. Innovations like Electric Hydrogen’s will be instrumental in making that happen.

“This,” says Garabedian, “is the moment for hydrogen.”