Will this NZ tech help make climate-friendly green hydrogen a global reality?

Green hydrogen has become a growing focus of New Zealand's "just transition" away from oil and gas because it can be created sustainably, using renewable energy or biomass. Photo / 123rf

It’s been touted as a climate-friendly way to generate electricity, power engines and make fertilisers – and now, a newly launched Kiwi spin-out company is taking its green hydrogen tech to the world.

The clean energy source has become a growing focus of New Zealand’s “just transition” away from oil and gas because it can be created sustainably, using renewable energy or biomass.

While hydrogen is produced around the world, nearly all of it is “brown” hydrogen - or that made from coal and natural gas, which is the source of hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO₂ emissions each year.

But green hydrogen can be made by using electrolysis from renewable energy sources, leaving a small carbon footprint.

With that promise, however, comes problems: namely supply chain issues, rising costs and shortages of raw minerals that hamper its affordability and availability.

Those are challenges that New Zealand’s first hydrogen deep tech start-up ever – and Crown-owned GNS Science’s first spin-out company – aimed to tackle.

GNS commercial and business partnerships manager Sheena Thomas said that, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), green hydrogen demand was projected to almost double to 180 megatonnes (Mt) by 2030.

“Right now, there’s almost 100Mt of hydrogen being used every year that is made from fossil fuels, so it’s an urgent issue to address.”

At the heart of the new company, dubbed Bspkl and backed by incubator WNT Ventures, was locally developed tech that enabled enough electrolysers to be produced to meet demand.

“This opens up enormous possibilities to decarbonise key industries like aviation, shipping and steel that are extremely hard to electrify.”

So, how did the new tech work?

Bspkl chief technical officer Dr Jerome Leveneur explained that nearly all of the world’s hydrogen was produced through a process called methane cracking – itself responsible for about 2 per cent of global carbon emissions.

“When you combine intense need, large market opportunity and Government support, you drive innovation," says Dr Jerome Leveneur (right), pictured with GNS scientists Dr John Kennedy and Dr Michelle Cook. Image / GNS Science

“Hydrogen plays a really important role in supporting our day-to-day lives, but we need to find a way to make it clean and sustainable,” said Leveneur, a GNS ion beams materials scientist.

Using electrolysis, hydrogen could be made from water using electricity – and the process could be completely renewable when connected to energy sources like solar, wind and geothermal.

We could think of electrolysers themselves like an onion, with many layers of parts stacked together.

One well-established approach called proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysis drew on a membrane, an anode, and a cathode.

“At the anode, the water molecules are split into positively charged hydrogen ions and oxygen atoms are recombined into an O₂ molecule, the oxygen we breathe,” Leveneur said.

“The hydrogen ions pass through the membrane and combine with electrons at the cathode, forming hydrogen gas.”

While PEM electrolysers were widely acknowledged as the most efficient way of manufacturing sustainable hydrogen, their reliance on rare and finite elements remained a big drawback for scaling the technology.

To help overcome that hurdle, Bspkl offered an innovation invented by Leveneur – an improved type of a component critical to PEM electrolysers called a catalyst-coated membrane (CCM).

“A membrane is coated on both sides with a thin layer of catalyst particles, typically platinum and iridium,” he explained.

“The catalyst particles need to be evenly dispersed and bonded to the surface of the proton exchange membrane, which allows for efficient and rapid electrochemical reactions.

“Without a catalyst, the electrolyser would need a lot more electricity to produce hydrogen.”

And to produce CCM for electrolysers, he said, a lot of catalyst material like platinum and iridium was required.

“While platinum is expensive, the problem with PEM electrolysers lies with iridium,” he said.

“Iridium is not readily available as it is produced as a byproduct of refining other metals.”

GNS’ first spin-out company – Bspkl – launches today! It's an exciting step towards a zero-carbon future, meaningfully powered by green hydrogen 💚🎉 and a brilliant example of the impact that GNS’ green hydrogen programme is generating. Find out more: https://t.co/sMNHCIeJXH

— Te Pū Ao - GNS Science (@gnsscience) April 2, 2023

Globally, only seven tonnes were estimated to be produced each year.

“To produce sufficient clean hydrogen to not only replace our current hydrogen use, but also prepare for the emerging uses of hydrogen such as in transport and industrial heat, we need to be able to manufacture about 26 gigawatts of PEM electrolysers per year,” Leveneur said.

“To put that into perspective, since electrolysers were first invented in the early 1900s, globally, only around eight gigawatts have been manufactured.”

Reaching that 26-gigawatt target would likely require about 30 to 40 tonnes of iridium each year.

“With current approaches to producing CCM, that volume is just not sustainable.”

Bspkl’s manufacturing tech happened to produce a CCM with the lowest known iridium loadings, while maintaining its performance efficiency.

“The reduction in iridium and platinum ‘loadings’ that Bspkl achieves is through ion implantation,” he said.

“In a nutshell, this means that the catalyst is ‘speckled’ onto the membrane material, hence the name Bspkl – pronounced ‘bespeckle’.”

Before 2020, the production of hydrogen using electrolysis wasn’t seen as commercially viable because it was much cheaper to produce hydrogen using natural gas.

But, with the announcement of the European Green Deal, the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States and the Russia-Ukraine war, the necessity of clean hydrogen as a sustainable fuel source had “exploded”.

Green hydrogen was used to fuel New Zealand's first hydrogen fuel cell bus, unveiled in 2021 by Auckland Transport. Image / Auckland Transport

“The impact of this rapid rise for clean hydrogen for electrolyser manufacturers has been significant.”

In what was once essentially a cottage industry, “gigafactories” for manufacturing electrolysers were now being built around the world.

“This means there is an intense need for automation and large manufacturing scale which didn’t exist three years ago,” Leveneur said.

“When you combine intense need, large market opportunity and Government support, you drive innovation.”

Bspkl’s own manufacturing approach had been designed for scale, with the capability to produce large volumes of CCM.

“Innovations like Bspkl are important to creating a new clean energy future,” Thomas said.

“The GNS Science materials science team, which included Jerome, has been, and continues to be, engaged in a multi-year programme to make green hydrogen production, storage and transportation cheaper and more efficient.”

The company’s launch follows Halcyon Power opening New Zealand’s first green hydrogen plant near Taupō in late 2021, with an ultimate aim to complete a supply chain including transportation, site storage and refuelling infrastructure.

2019′s horizon-scanning H2 Taranaki Roadmap had already forecast that hydrogen will be increasingly produced using electricity to split water, with the only emission being oxygen.

The report found hydrogen could be utilised as a fuel, particularly for heavy vehicles, as a feedstock for products such as urea or methanol, or to store electrical energy for long periods of time, from weeks to years.

A new network could include storage of hydrogen or synthetic natural gas in depleted gas fields, it said, and electricity generation using green hydrogen in Taranaki’s gas-fired peaker plants.