An array of global companies, including Microsoft, United Airlines, and Australian mining giant Fortescue Metals, are pumping $380 million into a local company that’s promising a cheap way to produce hydrogen gas without emitting carbon.
Electric Hydrogen has collected a total of $600 million in investments since it was founded in 2020. The Natick company aims to disrupt the multibillion-dollar global market for hydrogen gas, which is used in many industrial processes such as fertilizer production, and might one day offer an alternative (and cleaner) fuel for cars, trucks, and airplanes.
These days, most hydrogen comes from machines called “reformers,” which use superheated steam to extract the hydrogen from coal or natural gas. “They work fine,” said Dave Eaglesham, Electric Hydrogen’s chief technology officer, “but they emit an awful, awful lot of CO2.” Indeed, he estimates that hydrogen reforming generates about 2.5 percent of the world’s carbon emissions.
Ordinary water also contains plenty of hydrogen, which can be extracted by moving the water across electrically charged metal plates, a process called electrolysis. The only waste product is pure oxygen. But up to now, this method has been too expensive for use at a large scale.
Electric Hydrogen says it’s developed a system that gets the job done at a low enough cost to compete with reformers. The process pushes a lot more water through the system than traditional electrolysis systems, enabling much higher hydrogen output.
“We are certainly offering a pathway where the economics works,” said Eaglesham.
Texas-based New Fortress Energy seems to think so. Last month, it acquired an Electric Hydrogen system that can produce 50 tons of hydrogen per day, which the company can use to manufacture ammonia. Electric Hydrogen is building a manufacturing facility in Devens to produce more of the machines, or electrolyzers, and says it’s already got a five-year backlog of orders.
The ultimate goal is to have the electrolyzers powered by solar or wind generators, rather than coal- or gas-fired generators. The result would be so-called “green” hydrogen, produced without adding any carbon to the atmosphere.
Eaglesham said the company’s electrolyzers don’t depend on any major scientific breakthroughs. Instead, the team focused on engineering the hardware to make it more cost-efficient and to ensure that it could produce hydrogen at an industrial scale. While the company has patented some of its technology, its most important innovations are held as trade secrets, like the formula for making Coca-Cola.
“We don’t patent the stuff that people aren’t going to be able to figure out,” said the company’s chief financial officer, Derek Warnick.
But Eaglesham said he doesn’t mind if other companies get into the green hydrogen game, because the market is so big. If Electric Hydrogen becomes cost-competitive with traditional hydrogen suppliers, he said, “we’ll grow to be one of the biggest energy companies on the planet.”
Jonathan Lesser, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, takes a more skeptical view.
“The entire premise of using ‘green’ hydrogen to power everything, either directly or by burning it to generate electricity, is, in my view, absurd,” said Lesser, an economist with 30 years of experience in the energy industry. “The cost to manufacture green hydrogen may fall, but it will be a long time before it is competitive with producing hydrogen by reforming natural gas. The additional cost to build all of the wind and solar generation needed to have enough surplus electricity for that electrolysis will be staggering, and will require building lots of high-voltage transmission lines.”
But Eaglesham isn’t having it. “You can judge whether we’re well-positioned by our demonstrated traction with large, serious companies at an industrial scale,” he said. “Notwithstanding that the conservative think tanks say it can’t happen, we’re making it happen.”
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at hiawatha.bray@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeTechLab.