HGenium, Inc., a 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 in Orlando, Florida.

HGenium’s technology enables green hydrogen to be produced using readily available materials and processing equipment with a wide variety of heat energy sources. The process operates at a moderate temperature of ~850°C and requires no toxic or corrosive compounds.

Dr. Brady gave his AIChE presentation on 5 November 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 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

Founded by Professor Mark E. Davis and Idealab in 2022, HGenium is a startup company based on science and technology invented in the Davis research program at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). HGenium owns the exclusive, world-wide license from Caltech to the patented technology (three issued US Patents, and numerous international filings).

HGenium is scaling up a continuous, thermochemical water splitting process to create green hydrogen from water using heat energy at temperatures below 1000ºC. This “first of its kind” technology has the potential to produce green hydrogen at significantly lower costs to expedite growth in several large markets. The company plans to be operating at the pilot plant scale in 2024.

HGenium maintains offices and a laboratory in Monrovia, CA. The company enjoys support from Caltech, Idealab Studio and Oakcrest Institute of Science’s MOST-IP startup incubator.

Source:Hydrogentcchworld