From Baking Powder to Backbone Infrastructure: AKROS Energy Demonstrates a New Path for Hydrogen Storage

Rostock-Laage, Germany — Industrial-scale validation begins for a chemical hydrogen carrier that promises pressureless, non-toxic, ship-anywhere storage. Industry partners Evonik and Siemens joined the FormaPort consortium at the symbolic inauguration.

For an industry that has spent the better part of a decade weighing the trade-offs between compressed gas, liquid hydrogen and ammonia, a fourth option has just stepped from the laboratory onto industrial ground. Last week, AKROS Energy formally inaugurated its pilot plant for the chemical storage of hydrogen in salt at the H2APEX site in Laage, near the Baltic port of Rostock. The ceremony — attended by industry partners Evonik and Siemens alongside the partners of the publicly co-funded FormaPort R&D project — marks the company’s transition from technology development into the market entry phase.

The proposition is deceptively simple: instead of pumping hydrogen into pressure vessels, bind it chemically into a salt that can be transported and stored using conventional bulk logistics — and then released on demand at the point of use.

How it works: from baking soda to a hydrogen carrier

At the heart of the pilot plant is a conversion system integrated into a 40-foot container. Inside the steel reactors sit the company’s proprietary catalyst. Potassium bicarbonate (KHCO₃) — the same compound widely used in industry as baking powder — is fed through the reactor as an aqueous solution while hydrogen is introduced. A catalysed hydrogenation reaction binds the hydrogen into a new salt: potassium formate (KCOOH). The “loaded” salt is stable, non-toxic and storable indefinitely. At the destination, the same chemistry is run in reverse to release the hydrogen on demand.

Both the unloaded carrier (potassium bicarbonate) and the loaded carrier (potassium formate) are non-toxic, non-flammable and environmentally harmless. Should a transport incident occur — a bulk carrier sinking — the consequences are essentially nil. The salt simply dissolves in water, harmless to people, marine life and ecosystems;

Why salt — and why now

For readers familiar with hydrogen logistics, the strategic case writes itself. Compressed and liquefied  hydrogen face well-known density and energy-loss challenges at scale. Ammonia, the leading chemical carrier candidate, brings real handling, toxicity and infrastructure burdens; cracking it back to hydrogen at destination ports requires substantial new terminal investment, and a release at sea raises environmental concerns

The salt-based route bypasses these constraints. There is no high-pressure storage. No cryogenics. No specialised terminals. The same bulk-handling infrastructure that already moves grain, fertiliser and minerals through ports such as Rostock can move hydrogen-loaded salt — opening a credible pathway for large-scale hydrogen imports from solar- and wind-rich regions to industrial demand centers worldwide.

For AKROS CEO Johannes Emigholz, the inauguration is the moment the technology steps out of the lab. The reaction has been demonstrated repeatedly at bench scale; the pilot now validates both the technical performance and the underlying economic assumptions at industrial scale.

From pilot to deployment

The Laage facility brings an already lab-validated chemistry into industrial-scale operation. Continuous throughput, reliable conversion performance and a real-world cost base — the three things any hydrogen carrier needs to move from interesting to investable — come together here in a containerised system that can be replicated, sited and scaled.

For a hydrogen economy in which the cost of moving the molecule from production site to off-taker remains one of the principal barriers to scale, a carrier that is safe, simple to handle and economically competitive at industrial scale matches the profile the industry increasingly points to as a prerequisite for large-scale hydrogen trade.

Source:  Hydrogencentral