For all its promise as a climate-friendly fuel, hydrogen hasn’t had much luck. It lost the battle over personal transportation to battery electric vehicles, and for industrial users, it remains far more expensive than natural gas.
That’s in part because natural gas can flow through sprawling networks of pipelines. Hydrogen doesn’t, which means buyers either have to rely on fossil-derived hydrogen (and its associated pollution) or truck it in at great expense.
Like many hydrogen entrepreneurs, Gabriel Rodriguez-Calero figures the best way to rein in costs is to bring production closer to where it’s being used. His startup, Ecolectro, is making hydrogen-producing electrolyzers that fit inside a shipping container.
“We are very interested in figuring out who’s trucking in hydrogen today,” he told TechCrunch. By making the gas on site, “you’re mitigating a lot of risk around logistics of transportation, logistics of storage at the site.”
But storage is just one problem that green hydrogen is facing. Simply making the stuff isn’t cheap, either. Some electrolyzers are made with expensive materials, while others using century-old technology aren’t very efficient. More recently, though, scientists have been exploring ways of making cheaper electrolyzers more efficient.
Rodriguez-Calero was one of them. After studying battery-related technologies while getting his doctorate from Cornell University, he and Kristina Hugar co-founded Ecolectro. Typically, electrolyzers follow one of two approaches: proton-exchange membrane (PEM) or alkaline electrolysis. The former tends to be pricier but more efficient, while the latter is less efficient but cheaper. Ecolectro adopts features of each by building a membrane that can withstand the harsher conditions of alkaline electrolysis.
Most membranes used in PEM electrolysis consist of PFAS compounds, which have come under scrutiny for their persistence in the environment. Ecolectro’s found a way to skip the PFAS. It also uses nickel as a catalyst instead of iridium or platinum, which are often used in PEM electrolyzers. “You can use 1,000 times the nickel per amount of iridium you might use and still not change the cost,” Rodriguez-Calero said.
The startup has built a small 10-kilowatt electrolyzer capable of producing 5 kilograms of hydrogen per day. It’s currently being tested by Liberty Utilities in Upstate New York, where the utility is blending hydrogen into the natural gas it distributes. Ecolectro is in the process of building its first commercial scale electrolyzer, a 250-kilowatt model that can pump out 125 kg per day. Rodriguez-Calero said the bigger version will be available in the first quarter of next year.
That’s smaller than many electrolyzer projects, which tend to be measured in megawatts. But Rodriguez-Calero thinks Ecolectro’s smaller, modular electrolyzes will help wary customers jump aboard. “That size is very attractive for the people who order one truck of hydrogen per week,” he said.
Lisa Coca, partner at Toyota Ventures, thinks that Ecolectro has a shot at producing hydrogen for $1.35 per kilogram by the end of the decade. That’s close to the Department of Energy’s goal of $1 per kilogram.
To help hit its targets, Ecolectro raised a $10.5 million Series A led by the Toyota Ventures climate fund with participation from Cornell University, New Climate Ventures, Starshot Capital, and Techstars.