A giant market for new Swedish technology

In Sweden, there is a lot of talk about the Swedish steel industry’s invest­ments in green hydro­gen, but not much about the fact that the same is also hap­pen­ing on a large scale in China, the USA and the rest of Europe, or that the steel industry is just one of all future areas of use for green hydrogen.

Elec­tri­fic­a­tion of heavy trans­port is one such area, where today’s dies­el-powered ships, trucks and trains can run on syn­thet­ic fuels made from green hydro­gen – and where newly man­u­fac­tured vehicles have fuel cells and can be refueled dir­ectly with hydro­gen. Anoth­er large area of indus­tri­al use is to replace today’s fossil hydro­gen gas (pro­duced from nat­ur­al gas) with green hydro­gen gas in the pro­duc­tion of arti­fi­cial fertiliser.

Today, large quant­it­ies of the oil we use are pro­duced in desert areas. In order to switch to fossil-free energy, gigant­ic sol­ar parks are now being built to pro­duce green hydro­gen which is then shipped around the world. Pipelines and tankers already exist, and examples of coun­tries with high ambi­tions for this are the United Arab Emir­ates, China and the USA.

The devel­op­ment in Europe has been accel­er­ated by the fact that the EU alloc­ated large funds this spring to invest­ments in green hydro­gen, which to some extent can dir­ectly replace the nat­ur­al gas that is cur­rently in short sup­ply. Oth­er areas are that hydro­gen plants linked to sol­ar and wind power plants can store the excess pro­duc­tion and have the oppor­tun­ity to use it as reg­u­lat­ing power on days when the sun does not pen­et­rate the clouds and the wind tur­bines are dormant.

Super­i­or per­form­ance – an attract­ive invest­ment
To pro­duce green hydro­gen, elec­tro­lyz­ers are used, which split water into hydro­gen and oxy­gen. In order for it to be pos­sible to scale up the pro­duc­tion of elec­tro­lyz­ers, the industry sees it as neces­sary to reduce the con­sump­tion of the extremely expens­ive noble met­al iridi­um by 95% – oth­er­wise the price will skyrock­et to levels that make the tech­no­logy unusable. 

“No one has yet suc­ceeded in this, but we at Smol­tek expect to be able to solve this with a new cell mater­i­al based on car­bon nanofibers.”

Ellinor Ehrn­berg, Pres­id­ent of Smol­tek Hydrogen

The Smol­tek pro­pri­et­ary cell mater­i­al (ECM) is inten­ded for the anode side of the cell in PEM elec­tro­lyz­ers. The mater­i­al’s unique three-dimen­sion­al struc­ture allows the amount of very expens­ive iridi­um particles to be reduced by up to 95%. By pack­ing the cata­lyst particles more tightly, a con­sid­er­able reduc­tion in the size of the elec­tro­lyz­er is also made possible.

A smal­ler and thus cheap­er elec­tro­lyz­er reduces the cost of build­ing a new hydro­gen plant by up to half, and also means reduced oper­at­ing and main­ten­ance costs.

Giant mar­ket for green hydro­gen and elec­tro­lyz­ers
Hydro­gen as a fossil-free raw mater­i­al cre­ates a poten­tially huge mar­ket for elec­tro­lyz­er man­u­fac­tur­ers, and also for Smoltek.

All over the world, a huge amount is inves­ted in this area, not least in Europe. Already today, large amounts of hydro­gen are pro­duced for sev­er­al energy-intens­ive indus­tri­al sec­tors that need to switch to fossil-free energy. 

So far, how­ever, it is only just under 5 per­cent of all hydro­gen that is fossil-free. This means that there is a great demand for new tech­no­logy to obtain more cost-effect­ive meth­ods for the pro­duc­tion of green hydrogen.