A UK company is testing whether its solid-state hydrogen storage tanks can handle the slightly impure hydrogen produced by a new generation of electrolysers. HydroStar’s metal hydride technology stores hydrogen in a solid alloy, but the company has only ever tested it with very pure gas. Many potential customers now use membraneless electrolysers, which are cheaper but produce hydrogen contaminated with small amounts of oxygen. If that oxygen degrades the storage alloy, the technology will not work for them. HydroStar has brought in ASTUTE, a measurement lab, to use scanning electron microscopes and X-ray spectroscopy to see exactly how the oxygen affects the metal over time. If the tests show the system can tolerate the impurity, HydroStar can certify its storage for use with membraneless electrolysers. That would open up a market of more than 20 companies planning to adopt green hydrogen from these cheaper electrolysers within five years. The result would be a more flexible, lower-cost hydrogen storage chain—critical for scaling up clean energy infrastructure without requiring ultra-pure gas at every step.
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HydroStar Europe (HydroStar) is a technology development company that designs and manufactures innovative hardware. Our current product range includes hardware that spans the entire hydrogen value chain including production, storage, purification, and compression. HydroStar has recently developed a disruptive product that utilises Metal Hydride technology to act as a solid-state storage option for hydrogen. This technology was developed and commercialised throughout three separate Innovate UK projects 1x Innovate UK Smart Grant, 1x Innovate UK Hydrogen Value Chain Tech Development, and 1x CMDC4 project. These projects culminated in a market-ready product that has multiple applications, specifically hydrogen storage and compression that is ripe for exploitation in various market verticals. This has attracted several large customers. However, these companies are using membraneless electrolysers that produce lower purity hydrogen that usually contains small percentages of oxygen. HydroStar have thus far only tested our storage solution very high purity hydrogen. Therefore, HydroStar's problem is that it requires an elite measurement organisation such as ASTUTE to help us determine whether higher concentrations of oxygen within our hydrogen storage system will impact its short-term and/or long-term performance. ASTUTE will help to solve this measurement problem by utilising equipment that otherwise HydroStar would not have access to such as Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Energy-Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDS) for extremely high-resolution analysis of impurity effects of the metal alloys. By measuring this impact ASTUTE will be helping HydroStar to make our technology more flexible by certifying that further hydrogen production technologies can be coupled with our system. This augments our established capability, which involves pairing with SOEC, PEM and Alkaline electrolysers with our metal hydride. This has the potential to revolutionise HydroStar's commercial offering as we have a rolodex of 20+ companies based that are all looking to adopt green hydrogen specifically produced via membraneless electrolysis within the next 0-5years.
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