(12b) H2NEW Lab Consortium: Increasing the Performance and Durability of Electrolysis for Clean, Competitive Production of Hydrogen

The H2NEW (Hydrogen from Next-generation Electrolyzers of Water) consortium aims to overcome technical barriers to affordable, reliable, and efficient electrolyzers of water—empowering industry with insights for achieving low-cost and large-scale clean hydrogen production. The primary focus of H2NEW is to understand and prove the long-term durability of electrolysis at target performance conditions (power to hydrogen production efficiency), thus, to enable hydrogen production from electrolysis for use as a clean, sustainable fuel or feedstock for chemicals and combustible fuels production. The overarching goal is to help industry produce hydrogen with clean energy inputs for less than $2/kg-H2 by 2026, and then reaching $1/kg-H2 by 2031. At these price points, hydrogen can be combined with a broad spectrum of recycled carbon sources to produce sustainable fuels, beginning with fungible liquid hydrogen carbon fuels, and progressing to substitute natural gas (SNG). With the buildup of zero-emissions power generation, electrolysis could legitimately replace a sizeable fraction of the conventional fuels used by industry and the transportation sectors.

H2NEW is advancing a deeper science-based understanding of liquid-alkaline (L-AE), proton-exchange membrane (PEM), and oxygen-ion conduction solid-oxide cells (O-SOEC) through integrated materials testing, characterization, and modeling and simulation. Accelerated stress testing methods and are being applied to gain an understanding of microstructure evolution. Multi-scale modeling is used to inform cell testing conditions and to gain a deeper understanding of the materials behavior as a function of cell designs and operating conditions. This work is helping industry and academic collaborators understand and mitigate cell degradation while pushing performance higher with this understanding.