Shafiq Kabir appointed head of volume processes within the hydrogen business area

Shafiq Kabir found­ed Smoltek in Decem­ber 2005, out of sci­en­tif­ic curios­i­ty and with the ambi­tion to devel­op tech­ni­cal solu­tions based on nanos­truc­tures that can be use­ful in many fields. Since the start, he has method­i­cal­ly devel­oped the com­pa­ny’s tech­nol­o­gy plat­form based on cat­alyt­ic growth of con­duc­tive nanos­truc­tures, and where much of the appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment has been focused on car­bon nanofibers.

“I start­ed Smoltek because of my ambi­tion to dri­ve my research results in nan­otech­nol­o­gy towards indus­tri­al use. By switch­ing to devel­op­ment on a com­mer­cial basis, we want­ed to make the pos­si­bil­i­ties of nan­otech­nol­o­gy avail­able on a much larg­er scale.”

Shafiq Kabir

Smoltek’s big break­through came around 2017, when the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try showed a sig­nif­i­cant inter­est in the com­pa­ny’s capac­i­tor tech­nol­o­gy (CNF-MIM) – a tech­nol­o­gy based on cre­at­ing ener­gy-effi­cient com­po­nents with small­er form fac­tors and with main­tained elec­tri­cal per­for­mance. The com­pa­ny’s capac­i­tor tech­nol­o­gy has now devel­oped into its own busi­ness area, where the group com­pa­ny Smoltek Semi is today in the process of devel­op­ing and com­mer­cial­iz­ing ultra-thin capac­i­tors togeth­er with YAGEO, one of the world’s largest man­u­fac­tur­ers of pas­sive elec­tron­ic components.

In 2020, Smoltek began to eval­u­ate oth­er areas for the com­pa­ny’s nan­otech­nol­o­gy plat­form, and the fol­low­ing year this effort start­ed to focus on using the tech­nol­o­gy for the huge growth of the fos­sil-free hydro­gen mar­ket. Today, the hydro­gen busi­ness is run by the group com­pa­ny Smoltek Hydro­gen, which plans for a large scale-up of the com­pa­ny’s tech­nol­o­gy solu­tions to elec­trolyz­ers – a mar­ket seg­ment with­in the green hydro­gen econ­o­my that is esti­mat­ed to increase from today’s SEK 30 bil­lion to SEK 650 bil­lion in 2030,¹ of which around 10 % is address­able to Smoltek’s cell mate­r­i­al.²

Shafiq is back in Smoltek – with a focus on scal­ing up vol­ume process­es
As the founder of Smoltek, Shafiq Kabir has been the dri­ving force behind the devel­op­ment of Smoltek’s tech­nol­o­gy and he served as the Chief Inno­va­tion Offi­cer of the com­pa­ny until Jan­u­ary 2021, when he took a break from the nan­otech­nol­o­gy indus­try to com­plete an Exec­u­tive MBA program.

“I am pas­sion­ate about green tech­nol­o­gy. And now that Smoltek is invest­ing in fos­sil-free hydro­gen, it’s the per­fect match for me. It is about how to cre­ate the right inno­va­tion cul­ture and part­ner­ships to devel­op tech­nol­o­gy for fos­sil-free raw mate­ri­als and ener­gy types in order to reach the goal of car­bon diox­ide-neu­tral emis­sions, or towards “net-zero”.

Shafiq Kabir, Head of Vol­ume Process­es at Smoltek Hydrogen

In his new role, Shafiq will be head of vol­ume process­es in the group com­pa­ny Smoltek Hydro­gen, where he will devel­op and eval­u­ate con­cepts for vol­ume man­u­fac­tur­ing of Smotek’s cell mate­r­i­al to elec­trolyz­ers (ECM) which is now being devel­oped. The focus will be on the actu­al process­es used to pro­duce nanos­truc­tures and coat­ings in order to suc­cess­ful­ly scale them up to indus­tri­al man­u­fac­tur­ing. The over­all goal is to deliv­er the desired prod­uct char­ac­ter­is­tics even in mass pro­duc­tion. Work­ing close­ly with the entire Smoltek Hydro­gen team, Shafiq will be involved in all ongo­ing projects around man­u­fac­tur­ing process­es, cor­ro­sion pro­tec­tion, irid­i­um depo­si­tion and whole cell eval­u­a­tions for the cell mate­r­i­al that are done in day-to-day operations.

“The mar­ket for green hydro­gen pro­duc­tion is grow­ing rapid­ly, and and Smoltek Hydro­gen’s mate­ri­als tech­nol­o­gy for irid­i­um coat­ing (ECM) to elec­trolyz­ers allows the com­pa­ny to low­er the cost of new elec­trolyz­ers as the indus­try scales up and irid­i­um prices soar. The mate­r­i­al tech­nol­o­gy also offers great oppor­tu­ni­ties to reduce the size of new hydro­gen plants”.

Elli­nor Ehrn­berg, Pres­i­dent of Smoltek Hydrogen

1. Source: Glob­al Mar­ket Insights ↩︎
2. Source: Fraun­hofer ↩︎