US labs team up to accelerate renewable hydrogen pathways

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) of the US Department of Energy's (DoE) will lead a new consortium to develop advanced water splitting materials for hydrogen production from renewable sources, it said on Monday.

DoE currently funds research to develop three pathways for low-carbon hydrogen production -- advanced electrolysis, photoelectrochemical hydrogen production and solar thermochemical hydrogen production. The aim of the HydroGEN Advanced Water Splitting Materials Consortium is to accelerate the development of these pathways. It will make national lab resources more accessible to external stakeholders and will create online data portals to capture and share the results of non-proprietary research.

"HydroGEN brings together capabilities that can only be found in the national lab system and makes them easily available to material developers in academia and industry," said Huyen N Dinh of NREL who will be the director for HydroGEN.

The consortium includes five other national labs -- Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Savannah River National Laboratory. It is being funded by DoE with around USD 10 million (EUR 9.2m) per year.

This is the latest consortium formed as part of the Energy Materials Network (EMN) that was announced by DoE in February to step up market roll-out of advanced materials for clean energy solutions.

(USD 1.0 = EUR 0.918)

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