PASADENA, Calif.– HGenium, Inc., an exciting new technology entrant in the rapidly growing green hydrogen industry, today announced that Dr. Casper Brady, HGenium Senior Scientist, presented insights on the company’s breakthrough thermochemical water splitting process at the 2023 AIChE conference (American Institute of Chemical Engineers) in Orlando, Florida.
HGenium’s unique technology enables green hydrogen to be produced using readily available materials and processing equipment with a wide variety of heat energy sources. Dr. Brady gave his AIChE presentation on November 5, 2023.
In addition to the technical summary of HGenium’s production process, Dr. Brady also summarized comparisons and benefits of using heat, rather than electricity, as an energy source for water splitting. Key benefits of a thermochemical approach include:
- a wide array of heat sources can be used, such as concentrated solar, nuclear, and industrial production process heat, widening the potential commercial cases for using a thermochemical process versus electrolysis;
- the almost 70% lower cost of heat over thermal based electricity opens the possibility of improved overall economics for many use cases; and
- storing heat has inherent safety and cost benefits over electricity storage.
Dr. Brady’s presentation also revealed the company’s current scale-up plan to optimize effective commercialization. A pilot plant project is underway, with operations targeted for the second half of 2024 to be followed with construction of a commercial scale demonstration unit in 2025-26. These steps will position the company and its partners to most efficiently launch commercial units at substantial capacities in the future.
“HGenium is driven to provide major contributions to the world’s decarbonization goals,” said Dr. Brady. “With that mission, we are working rapidly to scale up our industry changing process breakthroughs in a way that maximizes the valuable learning to be had through sound engineering scale-up discipline.”
HGenium’s technology alternative to electrolysis overcomes current challenges of thermochemical water splitting
HGenium’s process operates at a moderate temperature of ~850°C and requires no toxic or corrosive compounds. It relies on inexpensive materials; and can be executed with commercially mature equipment. The net reaction of the cycle is the stoichiometric splitting of H2O to H2 and ½ O2 with no byproducts via shuttling Na+ in and out of manganese oxides within a manganese reduction and oxidation cycle.
About HGenium
HGenium is a new technology entrant in the rapidly growing green hydrogen industry based upon the patented breakthrough work of its founder, Professor Mark E. Davis, conducted at the Davis research group at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and is the exclusive licensee of all relevant patents from Caltech.
The company maintains offices and a laboratory in Monrovia, California and an office in Pasadena, California at Idealab, one of HGenium’s founders.
For more information about HGenium, please visit hgenium.com.
Contacts
Read the most up to date Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Industry news at FuelCellsWorks
