Grant: Alliance Grants

The Global Hydrogen Production Technologies (HyPT) Center will establish a complementary and comprehensive team with leading scholars from six countries (US, Australia, Canada, UK, Egypt and Germany) to formulate a pathway to large-scale net-zero hydrogen production as an enabler of global decarbonization and with costs competitive to current methods of hydrogen production. The Centre will drive a range of hydrogen production technologies including: (i) water electrolysis involving renewable energy integration and emerging electrolyzers; (ii) methane pyrolysis with solid carbon as value-adding co-products; and (iii) water splitting using direct solar radiation known as photocatalysis. The Center will also tackle two major cross-cutting issues for hydrogen: (i) the social dimensions to build a hydrogen economy such as economics, policies and markets; and (ii) the water resource/treatment dimensions for electrolysis and photocatalysis. Each funding partner country will lead one thrust area, and researchers from all the countries will be interwoven under the thrust areas to work synergistically with a common goal to accelerate technology development and deployment across the globe. Structurally the HyPT Center is framed to provide broad coverage of all major technologies for net-zero hydrogen production to de-risk the global challenge of cost reduction. The different technologies also provide alternative options suited to different regions of the globe for adoption at different timeframes - 2027 for electrolysis, 2030 for methane pyrolysis and 2035 for photocatalysis. The efforts on each hydrogen production technology under the Center are vertically integrated spanning from materials and devices to systems and applications. The common underlying scientific challenge for the three hydrogen production technologies is reaction kinetics. At the materials level, it requires breakthroughs in catalysts, where material cost, performance and criticality are the primary concerns. At the device level, reaction kinetics can be accelerated with improved mass and heat transport.