Jun 13, 2022
Updated: Feb 2, 2023
Green hydrogen is a powerful vision, a global necessity to beat back climate change, and currently costs a hefty premium to produce.
Hydrogen is a critical feedstock for heavy industries such as ammonia, chemicals, and steel. These industries produce products that we interact with every day from the walls around us, to food on our table, to the chair you sit in. To be decarbonize these sectors, hydrogen must also be, without the associated premium of being green.
At Advanced Ionics, we’ve created a green hydrogen platform that allows industrial hydrogen producers and users to achieve sustainability, without sacrificing profit. We combine our breakthrough SymbioticTM electrolyzer technology with onsite process and waste heat from industrial sites to produce green hydrogen for less than a $1/kg. Yes, that’s less than fossil-fuel based methods, and possible in many places where hydrogen is produced today or wants to be produced tomorrow.
Electrolyzers in the market today fall into two categories – hot and cold. Cold electrolyzers—like alkaline, AEM, PEM, and others—work with liquid water. They always require large amounts of electricity to coax a liquid into electrolysis, at least 40 kWh to make a kilogram of hydrogen, and often more than 50 kWh is needed. Worse yet, many of these systems require expensive platinum and iridium metals and exotic, delicate polymers. Meanwhile, hot electrolyzers such as solid oxide electrolyzers work with 800 °C superheated steam. By working with steam, the electricity requirements are significantly lower. But, making steam that hot requires extra energy to ‘step-up’ industrial steam to the required temperature. And what’s more, hot electrolyzers use delicate and expensive ceramics that drive up capital costs and reduce reliability.
Our magic is in the middle. Our Symbiotic™ Electrolyzers use process or waste heat across a wide temperature range—from 100 °C up to as hot as you can get it. By operating with steam, our electrolyzers tap into excess heat that is already available in industrial settings, lowering electricity use in tandem, usually below 35 kWh/kg, with 30 kWh/kg possible. And what’s more, our technology uses abundant and widely available components to keep capital costs low – no expensive platinum-group metals, no iridium, no fluoropolymer membranes.
Our technology is able to create the lowest-cost green hydrogen by tapping into existing process and waste heat sources at industrial facilities. This symbiotic relationship allows existing heat sources to help drive electrolysis. Built by a team that’s spent decades studying lithium-ion, sodium-ion and lead-acid batteries, fuel cells, electrolyzers, superconductors, and textiles, our platform’s innovation is in our patented electrode architecture. These electrodes, built from common materials in unique configurations, allow our electrolyzer to work without polymer membranes and most importantly, function using process heat across a wide range of temperatures.
“From a young age, I worked with materials that contained hydrogen on my family’s farm and recognized the impact it could have on transforming rural sustainability. Hydrogen will be a critical stepping stone for decarbonizing industry and agriculture in often-overlooked regions in the U.S. and the world as we build the new clean energy economy,” said Chad Mason, Founder and CEO of Advanced Ionics. “Our team has done an amazing job building this technology from the ground-up, and we look forward to deploying it to enable massive impact on the energy economy.”
Advanced Ionics will be developing a series of demonstration projects during the next year with partners before expanding to deploy larger scale projects and a large-scale electrolyzer manufacturing facility to serve key markets such as Europe and North America.
About Advanced Ionics
Advanced Ionics has created a green hydrogen platform that allows industrial hydrogen producers and users to achieve sustainability, without sacrificing profit. The company’s SymbioticTM Electrolyzer Technology leverages process and waste heat to produce green hydrogen for less than a dollar per kilogram. Advanced Ionics is proudly headquartered in Milwaukee, WI.
ARTICLE WRITTEN BY: CHAD MASON
Chad Mason is the CEO of Advanced Ionics.
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