H2Glas: Developing More Sustainable Approaches to Green Hydrogen Production

Ireland spends €1 million per hour importing energy that comes from fossil fuels, which are also damaging the global environment. Hydrogen offers huge potential in our future sustainable energy supply chain as a viable source of energy to power the domestic, industrial and green transport sectors, if produced by renewable resources. As part of Ireland’s energy transition, we need to produce more hydrogen, which will require an improvement in electrolyser technology cost, scale and deployment to be competitive. Current electrolyser designs and technology depend on scarce metal resources, are expensive, and do not perform as well as they could.

This project will deliver a prototype low cost electrolyser capable of producing green H2, through the use of sustainable catalysts, intelligent cell design, and inexpensive materials. This project represents a convergence of both emerging and more established concepts from the fields of synthetic chemistry, electrocatalysis, surface science and analysis, mechanical engineering, and manufacturing technology. The prototype cell will be fabricated using modern manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing, with an emphasis on the use of cost-effective and robust materials.