Recipient organisationCranfield UniversitySource-published name: Cranfield University
Funding£5.3M
PeriodDec 2023 — Dec 2028
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
A 34-member international team spanning 19 institutions across six countries is mapping out how to produce hydrogen at scale without generating carbon emissions. Hydrogen could replace fossil fuels in heavy industry, shipping, and power generation, but nearly all hydrogen today is made from natural gas, releasing CO₂ in the process. The center will focus on three technologies that avoid that: splitting water with renewable electricity, breaking methane into hydrogen and solid carbon, and using sunlight to drive water splitting directly. Two cross-cutting challenges—economics and water supply—will also be tackled. If the center succeeds, it could accelerate the shift from fossil-derived hydrogen to clean hydrogen at a cost competitive with current methods. That would affect energy grids, industrial supply chains, and global decarbonisation efforts—systems most people never see but that underpin modern life. The work is applied and goal-oriented: the aim is not just understanding, but deployment.
View original technical description
The Global Hydrogen Production Technologies (HyPT) Center will establish a complementary and comprehensive team with 34 leading scholars from 19 institutions in 6 countries (US, Australia, Canada, UK, Egypt and Germany) to formulate the pathway to large-scale net-zero hydrogen production from a bespoke platform of complementary technologies as an enabler of global decarbonization and with costs competitive to current methods of hydrogen production. The Center will propel three major hydrogen production technologies with strong potential to deliver breakthroughs: (i) water electrolysis including renewable energy integration and emerging electrolyzers; (ii) methane pyrolysis with solid carbon as value-added co-products; and (iii) photocatalytic solar water splitting. The Center will also tackle two major cross-cutting challenges for hydrogen: (i) the socio-economic dimensions to build a hydrogen economy spanning economics, policies and market; and (ii) the water resource/treatment dimensions for electrolysis and photocatalysis. Each funding partner country will lead one thrust area, while researchers from all the countries will be interwoven under the thrust areas to work synergistically with a common goal to accelerate technology development and deployment across the globe. The centre is led Arizona State University in the US with the participation of Cranfield, Birmingham, Cambridge, Imperial College London and Newcastle Universities from the UK.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know