Cassie Osvatics, Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technologies Office: Hello, and welcome to this month's H2IQ Hour for an H2NEW Consortium Overview of Electrolyzer Development Capabilities and Highlights. My name is Cassie Osvatics with the Department of Energy's Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office, or HFTO, supporting stakeholder engagement and other outreach activities. Please be aware that this Webex webinar is being recorded and will be published online on our H2IQ webinar archives.
If you experience technical issues today, please check your audio settings under the Audio tab. If you continue experiencing issues, please send me a message in Webex. There will be a Q&A session at the end of today's webinar. And you will have the opportunity to ask our presenters questions.
I'd like to now turn it over to Dave Petersen. Dave is the acting hydrogen production program manager at HFTO. And he will be moderating today's webinar.
Dave Peterson, Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technologies Office: Thanks, Cassie. And welcome everyone. As Cassie mentioned, today's webinar will be an overview of the Hydrogen from Next-Generation Electrolyzers of Water, or H2NEW, National Lab-Led Consortium. You probably are aware of a notice of intent released in December for an upcoming funding opportunity announcement.
Within that NOI, there is mention of collaborating with three different HFTO National-Led Consortium in some topics. Our office has worked with this consortium model for any number of years now where we have a team of national labs bringing together their individual strengths in a common area to solve major technical challenges within that area.
We also bring in projects to then work collaboratively with those labs under the overall consortium umbrella. There are three HFTO consortia that fall under the hydrogen production program and that were mentioned in that NOI. There is electric cap consortium, which historically has focused on PDM-free catalyst development for PEM fuel cell oxygen reduction reaction.
And there's also the hydrogen advanced water-splitting materials consortium, which is focused on materials development for four different advanced water-splitting pathways. Photoelectrochemical hydrogen production, solar thermochemical hydrogen production, low-temperature electrolysis, and high-temperature electrolysis. And one thing I failed to mention about electric-led consortium, is that we have expanded that to now include PGM-free callus development for low-temperature electrolyzers.
But the subject of this webinar is H2NEW, which is the newest consortium and one that we have not had a webinar in the past. This consortium is generally focused on higher TRL and more commercially-advanced electrolyzers in both LT and HTE. It's a comprehensive, concerted effort consisting of nine national labs focused on overcoming barriers to enable affordable, reliable, and efficient electrolyzers for producing clean hydrogen.
And with that, I'll leave it to the H2NEW speaker to provide much more detail. And with the first presenter being Mukund Mukundan from Los Alamos National Lab. With that, the floor's—here's Mukund.
Mukund Mukundan, Los Alamos National Laboratory: Hi, everybody. So it's my pleasure to introduce everybody and talk about our consortium, Hydrogen from Next-Generation Electrolyzers of Water, or H2NEW. Can we go to the next slide. So in this doc, I'm Mukund. I'm from Lawrence Berkeley National lab. I'm a deputy director on the low temperature side of the electrolysis. So you'll hear from several people within the leadership of the consortium. So there are two main thrusts in this. One is the low temperature, other is the high temperature, so I'll briefly describe some details on both of this.
But on the low temperature side, you will hear from Bryan Pivovar, Debbie Myers, and Guido Bender. And from the high temperature side, you'll hear from Richard Boardman, Micah Casteel, Olga Marina, Brandon Wood, and Sarah Shulda today. On the next slide. So as David mentioned earlier, the main goal of H2NEW is to enable better electrolyzer technology to reach the DOE goal.
Our H2NEW goal is trying to get the cost of hydrogen production down to 2 kilograms per—$2 per kilogram of hydrogen by 2025. So this is, again, in line with the secretary's a hydrogen shot target of $1 per kilogram by 2031. So our initial consortia target is by 2025, get it down to $2 per kilogram.
So the way we're doing it is we have multiple approaches. So it is not just one technology, we're looking at both low temperature and high temperature electrolysis. Within low temperature, our focus was exclusively in polymer electrolyte membrane technology this year, and this year we've added the liquid alkaline work.
But we've always had also a high temperature pathway in parallel that's mainly looking at oxygen ion conducting solid oxide electrolyzers. So essentially, we're looking at three different technologies to try to get this cost down for the hydrogen production. And we're mainly focused on essentially cost, durability, and performance. How to develop the science that underpins all of this in order to enable next generation electrolyzer.
So understand all the mechanisms that goes on better in order to get the cost down and have both very durable and high performance electrolyzers in the field. Can we go to the next slide? So the timeline for this consortia. This was started in October of 2010. The total funding was $10 million for the first two years.
We are at the end of the second year. And it was split of 75% on polymer electrolyte membrane on the low temperature part, and 25% for the high temperature or the oxygen conducting solid oxide electrolyte part. And this year, this consortium has been expanded to include liquid alkaline, and the funding ratio is now 45, 20, and 35 for the PEM, liquid alkaline, and SOEC work.
So this consortium, like they mentioned, is made up of nine different national labs. So those are—that is a core consortia team. In addition to that, we have NIST that's contributing their imaging, and we have three different universities that bring in some unique capabilities to the consortium that the labs do not have at this point.
So then, like they mentioned, there's going to be calls and there are going to be more projects added. So we really anticipate working with more universities and industries that come in funded through the FOA, and they can work closely with us in order to enable the DOE's very aggressive goals of $1 per kilogram hydrogen.
So in this talk, we'll just be highlighting a few things. If you want more details, you can go to our annual merit tribute presentation. So that's in the link mentioned here. So that link has a lot of information, a little bit more depth of what we do. And we also have a web page that you can look at to get a better idea of all the things that we do. So can we go to the next slide? OK.
So the way we achieve our task. In this particular case, I'm going to focus on the low temperature side but you will see the similar parallel on the high temperature side towards the latter part of this talk. So we are focused on durability, performance, and manufacturing our scale up.
So what you need to do is in order to achieve low electrolyser cost, you need to understand all the materials that go in, understand the performance, and then you need to understand the durability, how they interact over the age of the electrolyzer, and optimize all of that based upon the application that you're interested in.
So the way we do it, we have a lot of diagnostic and characterization capabilities including in-cell diagnostic, ex situ capabilities, and also operando capabilities. And in the end, we tie all of that with modeling and analysis to better understand and improve the performance, durability, and all the scale up issues associated with the electrolyzer technology.
So we take it from the materials that are developed by other people, all the way up to the scale up level trying to touch all aspects of the system. So develop the science underpinning science in order to improve the performance and durability. Go to the next slide. So the consortium structure. Like I said, we have a separate high temperature and a low temperature part. So both are running in parallel.
On the low temperature side, we were focused mainly on the PEM part like the three tasks that I just mentioned on durability, performance, and scale up. But on the—and we have recently added the liquid alkaline part. So on the high temperature, there is a similarly that are divided into multiple tests and a lot of labs are coordinating on each side of the research area.
And here, they're divided into fabrication and testing, and characterization and modeling. So all of it with the same goal of getting better solid oxide electrolysers are better PEM electrolysers. Next slide. OK. So they've already mentioned our relationship with other consortia. So we do not develop materials under this consortia.
So the materials development is done outside of the consortia, and we will also be done with the FOA projects that are going to be added in. But we essentially integrate all of that to provide better electrolyzers. And we work very closely with all the other consortia that are mentioned here. All the way from the low tempera—from the low TRL consortia hydrogen and electrical that can provide us materials.
Work closely with the Roll-to-Roll consortia which is in the process of changing. So there's a lot of overlap with that. We also work with the people on the fuel cell side, especially on the low temperature side from the Million Mile Fuel Cell Truck consortia because there a lot of material sets that are common between electrolyzer and fuel cells. A lot of degradation mechanisms are common. So we leverage those things.
And then we have a very strong advisory board, both on low temperature and high temperature side, made up of industry leading experts so that the work that we do can directly feed into the lower cost manufacturing of electrolyzer technology. And the advisory board also has leading academics in there in addition to the industries. So that help guide the focus of our consortia. Next slide, please.
So in this dock on the low temperature side, we will just highlight a few different aspects. So Bryan Pivovar will start off with technoeconomic and systems analysis, then Debbie Myers will cover the baselining efforts and the iridium and anode auditability, and then Guido Bender will cover the forest transport layer side and the alkaline work before transferring to the high temperature site, which Richard Boardman will introduce. So I'll now give it to Bryan to take over the next section.
Bryan Pivovar, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Thanks Mukund. I'm Bryan Pivovar from National Renewable Energy Lab. I'm also the Director of this H2NEW consortium. I'm going to talk to you about our work in technoeconomic and systems analysis. And this work is really focused on understanding how electrolyzers will operate in the future and coming up with optimized operating and deployment strategies.
This is based on the fact that electrolyzers to date have really been focused on 24/7 operation. And going to the future, that doesn't allow you to chase the cheap electrons or balance the energy system, the electrical energy system in the same way. Because we've been running these systems on 24/7 operation, a lot of times you'll hear the term overengineered.
So, a lot of what we're looking at is the next generation where we're just engineered to the level that needs to be thrifting as much as possible to hit the optimum cost performance durability trade offs. And so this is all about how do we get this cost performance durability trade right to get to these hydrogen levelized cost targets? And we usually use about three base cases for this.
One is basically just a traditional 24/7 operation. The next is how do we tie these things to the grid and take advantage of balancing the grid and using the grids excess that may change a lot in future electricity structures? And then we can also look at what happens if we just take electrolyzers and directly couple them to solar and/or wind and sometimes batteries to try to make the optimum performance in off grid applications.
Each one of these different operating strategies and each one of these different electrolysis types has different types of impacts and capabilities in the energy system. A lot of what we focused on to date has been a stronger focus on PEM, but that's rolling into alkaline and solid oxide a lot more as Mukund discussed previously. Next slide.
So, I'm going to talk about systems analysis. And in the bottom left corner, we have a schematic diagram of our baseline panel electrolysis system. Putting together this baseline system and coordinating with members of our advisory board in the industrial community basically allows us to look at what the economics and the efficiency of this system are, and then it allows us to modify those economics by changing the system design.
On the right-hand side, you can see some results of these things. Things like the efficiency at the beginning and end of life. And those are plotted in the bottom right. And basically, rated power for these systems could be power densities in several amps per square centimeter, but you can see that the overall efficiency is better at less than the rated power.
Now those tradeoffs—and if you go to really low current density, then you start losing efficiency, again, because you're not operating enough to take on the parasitic losses of the system. But understanding how these devices performed at the beginning of life and end of life allows us to take these kinds of systems analysis and put it into the technoeconomic analysis, which I'll talk about in the next slide.
So, within technoeconomic analysis, we have a number of different approaches to this. We basically look at what stack costs are—and stack costs are really the area that H2NEW takes on most directly. We do look at balance of plant—we have balance supply considerations taken into account. But if you look at our stack costs, we can project what current costs might be. And with certain projections, we come up with $350 per kilowatt on a stack level.
And then we take targets in what we would do with different areas like the catalyst loading, the operating current density, and then what we could gain by different scale up aspects. And that moves us to the mid-term and eventually the ultimate targets. Each of these areas, this increased efficiency, which is really an increased current density because typically, it's more economic to increase the current density rather than to take an efficiency increase on these electrolyzers, decrease the loading and scale up.
Those represent the green bars where we're looking to take the costs out of the stack, and those are really the primary focus of what we're looking at from a scientific perspective within H2NEW. In the upper right corner, you can see some of this, which is the other analysis we do, which is as we scale up production rates, how the cost of these systems come down on a per unit basis as well?
All of this type of techno economic analysis on the stack level is necessary to get a hydrogen levelized costs. But also to get at hydrogen levelized cost we have to understand the electricity market, and I'll talk about that on the next slide. The way electricity markets have worked, work today, and will work in the future are a big way—a big lever in terms of how electrolysis fits into the system.
So we do a lot of analysis looking at past, current, and projected future wholesale electricity prices. And if you look at the left hand side, these are wholesale price rates that existed in the US at four different regions in 2017 and 2018. So this is real data from wholesale markets that existed.
And you can see that there are some trends in these cases that are consistent. Which are on the left hand side, there's a few hours of the year at least in every place that have what are relatively expensive hours, and then there's a plateau region where a lot of the electricity is about the same price.
And then at the far right, there's some hours during the year that we have really cheap electricity or where the market would have paid you to take electricity. Every one of these regions has some hours of the year. And in the case of SPS, there was over 1,000 hours that year that the market would have paid you to take electricity.
So understanding how expensive electricity is and how these price duration curves are going to change over time is a really important part to understand how we want to understand how electrolysers can be best deployed to fit the grid. On the middle charts, we have these locational marginal pricing heat maps. And so they have all of the months of the year and every hour of the day on the x and y-axis respectively.
At the top, we look at where the cheapest half of the electricity comes from. And if we only wanted to run these electrolyzers 50% of the time, what hours would you run? This data was taken from the Palo Verde region in 2017, and that region had about 10% solar and 10% wind penetration.
So from a national perspective, that's a pretty high renewable penetration rate for that time frame. But looking at the future, it's still a low renewable penetration rate for what we're expecting. And you can already see some of the key features of what renewable energy penetration into grids does.
If you look at where the daytime hours are, you can see that typically, we generate more solar capacity than we need at those times except for when summer hits. And if you look in the lower plot, you can also see that basically, every day When people come home from work and the sun goes down, there's the most expensive electricity. This tells us about different operating strategies for electrolyzers and how we'd want to use them.
But really, these electricity prices are most critical for determining the hydrogen levelized costs, which are the ultimate goal of this work. And if you look there we have another cost analysis on hydrogen levelized cost where we look at how in the beginning, lowering the capital cost of the electrolysis systems, which I showed on the previous page and highlights, basically decreases the cost to the mid-term target. And then in the outgoing years and the ultimate target, most of those improvements are really based on chasing cheaper electrons.
So in order to get to these hydrogen shot targets, we basically both have to make the systems much cheaper and be much more effective at chasing the cheap electricity. And by doing these types of analyzes, we can help understand what the right way is to design systems and deploy systems are. And with that, I will hand this off to Debbie who is going to talk about some of our baselining efforts.
Debbie Myers, Argonne National Laboratory: Thank you so much, Bryan. I'm Debbie Myers from Argonne National Lab. I'm a Deputy Director on the low temperature side of H2NEW. And first, I'll talk about baselining efforts, and then I'll talk about some of our detailed scientific studies of degradation mechanisms of the low temperature PEM electrolyzers.
So as Bryan just mentioned, in order to enable future systems, we want to chase the cheap electrons. And what that means is shifting from an operating mode that's static to a dynamic intermittent operation, and also going from overengineered systems where, for example, we have high loadings of precious metals on the anode and cathode to more cost competitive systems, reducing the cost by reducing the precious metal loading, and decreasing the thickness of the membrane, for example.
And so part of this activity then is baselining the performance and performance durability of cells that have components and loadings of precious metals, for example, that will allow us to meet these cost targets for the system. So hand in hand with the baselining effort of looking at realistic systems and under intermittent operation is also a benchmarking activity which allows us to obtain approximately the same performance and performance durability when the same cells and same materials are tested at multiple laboratories.
So this benchmarking marketing activity will instill trust within the community, and allow us to compare results from lab to lab. And you'll see in the upper right some of the literature results where there's wide scatter for different components of the electrolyzer. This benchmarking marketing activity is also part of an International Energy Agency activity where H2NEW partners are part of that activity.
So also part of this benchmarking activity is—or baselining and benchmarking activity is what's called a standardized voltage loss breakdown analysis, which will allow us to identify where the areas of loss in the cell are and where we need more R&D effort. Next slide. So first, I'll discuss a little bit the benchmarking activity.
As I said, it's part of that International Energy Agency in x30 which now is in phase two. This started before the inception of H2NEW, and this was an activity between five labs within the IEA. And the purpose of this activity was to establish the basis for accurate data comparison across these five labs.
They established test conditions, defined hardware in order to compare the performances. And you'll see in the lower left side of this slide that within this first framework, they achieved comparable performance within 27 millivolts at 60 degrees C, 20 millivolts at 80 degrees C.
This activity then transitioned into a phase 2 where they tightened the standard deviation of those polarization curves by looking more carefully at the test conditions and developing reference hardware and components, and then further reviewing and refining the procedures where now the difference between the different labs, testing the same exact MEAs is less than 20 millivolts. Next slide, please.
So as I mentioned, also a big part of H2NEW is to determine where the voltage losses in the cells are and to address those issues with developing various components and operating conditions. And so early on in H2NEW, we developed a harmonized procedure for doing voltage breakdown analysis.
This was established on a spreadsheet platform where it's very easy to use the polarization curve as input into this spreadsheet, and then results in a plot or the metrics for the cell showing the losses in terms of mass transport, high frequency resistance, and the kinetic losses in the cell. So this is currently in preparation for the publication, and these results and a video of how to implement this voltage loss breakdown will be posted on the H2NEW website. Next slide.
Also, a big part of H2NEW is developing realistic test conditions and developing test protocols and operating systems that will allow us to test the performance of the cells under differential pressure, for example, at different temperatures, and also developing diagnostics, for example, to be able to measure the hydrogen crossover from the anode—from the cathode to the anode as a function of operating conditions at relevant pressures, for example, going up to 30 bar on the cathode.
And also determined current state of the art of performance for existing material sets, compare commercial catalysts and performances, and ultimately to understand the material property performance relationships, the impact of the interfaces between the components and the cell processes. Next slide, please.
So next, I'll transition into our ASP development and in our understanding of iridium degradation. So little is really known about the degradation in electrolyzers, particularly under these dynamic conditions where there's intermittent operation, and also under relevant conditions of, for example, iridium loading on the anode.
Systems to date, as we mentioned, are overengineered and run continuously. And so the systems currently, as shown in the spider chart in the lower left, can meet the stacked efficiency targets or approach the static efficiency targets, approach the targets for hydrogen permeability, but because they are overengineered, there's ways to go in terms of decreasing the membrane resistance also in decreasing the catalyst loading to meet those 111 targets set forth in the hydrogen chart.
Also. there's ways to go in terms of meeting the degradation rate targets, especially under intermittent operation. Next slide, please. So one of the early activities within H2NEW was to determine the effect of various operating conditions and to develop accelerated stress tests, both under intermittent operation and under start-stop.
And what I mean by start-stop is going from very high voltages to complete loss of voltage on the cell, and comparing that to degradation rates that we see for intermittent operation, which is going from near open circuit up to high current densities. And so this study compared a variety of catalysts and a variety of operating conditions to look at the effect of start-stop and intermittent cycling.
And I want to highlight the plot on the upper right where we looked at this start-stop cycling and intermittent cycling as a function of cycle number, and performed this voltage loss breakdown where we can see that most of the losses are due to kinetic losses on the anode, and that the kinetic losses are higher under the start-stop conditions, and especially when stopping the water or periodic shutdown of the water on the anode.
We also looked at some of the mechanisms behind this degradation in terms of dissolution of iridium using aqueous systems. And as shown here if you go to a more metallic system, you see higher dissolution rates and also higher degradation rates of the cell as a function of cycle number.
And we then also do post-test analysis of some of these cells after this start-stop cycling. And we see using electron microscopy that some of the degradation mechanisms are increasing the particle size of the iridium catalyst, agglomeration, and also tearing of the anode away from the membrane.
We also complement this with X-ray absorption spectroscopy and X-ray scattering measurements to determine, first of all, the beginning conditions for the materials of these variety of anode catalysts, whether they're oxides or mixed oxides and metallic particles, and then also the change in those chemical composition as a function of AST cycling. Next slide, please.
So to dig more into the degradation mechanisms of the anode, we developed a system, which is called on-line ICP mass spec, where we deposit the iridium oxide catalyst on a glassy carbon electrode, pass an aqueous electrolyte over that iridium oxide catalyst, and feed that effluent into an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer to look at the concentration of iridium that's dissolved from the catalyst as a function of potential profile.
And I'm just illustrating here a staircase potential profile where we see as we change the potential, there is a spike in the iridium dissolution that then decays to a steady state dissolution as a function of potential. And what was notable about these results is that we see the highest dissolution rates at intermediate potentials of that iridium oxide catalyst of approximately 1.55 volts. At the higher potentials, we're actually seeing mitigation of that iridium dissolution mechanism.
These experimental data were then fed into a dissolution model, which is based on two oxidation states of uranium oxide—iridium 4 plus and iridium 5 plus. And the evolution of that oxidation state as a function of potential where the 4 plus species has a lower dissolution rate and the 5 plus species is actually fascinating.
And this is then coupled with in situ X-ray absorption spectroscopy experiments where we can understand this change in the oxidation state by the change in the edge energy of the iridium X-ray data. And we then see that that correlates very nicely to where we see this decrease in the dissolution rates as we get more of this 5 plus iridium oxide species. Next slide, please. With that, I'll turn it over to Guido Bender who will talk about course transport layers for LTE.
Guido Bender, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Yeah, thank you very much, Debbie. Debbie showed us some very nice examples here on material work that we do, material diagnostics that we do, and I will go and show you some examples on our PTL work. The PTL is—we consider it a very critical component in these electrolysis cells as they enable high efficiency, the utilization of thin membranes, low catalyst loadings, differential pressure operation, and long term operation. So they seem to be involved in pretty much everything.
In addition, the PTL and the electrode layer have some sort of a trade off where particular functionalities are passed on from one device to another or from one layer to another as you're changing the layer. So as you're reducing or thrifting catalyst loading, you may affect the functionality of the PTL, and need to make sure that they still are able to provide all the functionalities needed for high efficiency and good performance.
On the right side, you see here a study that was conducted with some partners from the Forschungszentrum Jülich where we are looking at protective coatings of the PTL with PGM layers, and there's a significant impact if you choose to thin layers or the wrong layer material over the course of extended operation.
So, this is our motivation to go look into PTLs, and I talk about various aspects that highlight how we utilize the capabilities that we have available at the various national labs and within H2NEW. Next slide, please. So here is an example where we have casted PTL materials, casted [INAUDIBLE] PTL materials to systematically look at the structure property relationships that we have within an MPL.
We made essentially PTLs by tuning the pore size and structure. On the left side, you see some SEM images that we conducted on these materials that were created. In the middle, you see the associated cell performances of these. And you see already that some of these materials seem to be winding up showing mass transport effects.
However, as a very useful tool, I want to highlight the voltage breakdown analysis again, which is shown a little bit smaller on the right side, that actually, again, differentiates between kinetic effects, ohmic effects, and actual mass transport effects in this case, which is on the very lower right side.
So, this is the type of study that we are conducting within the consortium. We tackle one particular question, and then use the capabilities that we have throughout the laboratories to answer that question in a comprehensive way. Next slide, please. Another example here is with regard to the coatings of PTL materials.
We were interested in understanding how the PTL, when it gets integrated into a cell, interacts with its neighboring layers, and which area of the PTL creates the highest loss. In this particular case, this is shown by the difference on the upper left side between the green curve and the orange curve. That voltage change, again, was achieved by coating the PTL catalyst layer interface on the PT: with a platinum coating.
So, by understanding where these important layers are, we can essentially mitigate loss factors that occur on those. And we can also think about where we can thrift platinum loadings or PGM loadings on these coatings that are required for long term operation, but also for functionality and performance.
We associate these changes with a, the titanium oxide layer or passivation of the titanium—of the bulk PTL, but this may also be associated or related to an ionomer that is covering the iridium oxide that is in contact with the titanium oxide. These are still ongoing pieces of work, but we have identified that there are significant voltage losses coming from this layer when the player isn't significantly protected. Next slide, please.
We also look at degradation effects within this layer. And here, you see various aspects that I like to point out. On the upper left side, you see a topography image that shows fiber PTL pressed into an electrode after operation. You see that there are significant gaps between this which start to create a problem when you want to go to differential pressure, or when you start drifting the electrode loading.
So those really become important with regards to utilizing the entire electrode or catalyst active surface area that you have in the cell. There are also—these pressure points have also been discovered to be higher points of degradation within the cell that you see on the upper right side, for example, pointed out in a cross cut of the MEA.
And then we use our characterization abilities that we have within H2NEW to understand how a beginning of life distribution of material versus end of test or end of life distribution of material occur. What materials are moving? How is our cell changing? Can we identify the degradation mechanisms in the system to be able to a, prevent it, and b, move towards lower loading? Next slide, please.
With this, I want to change gears here and move towards the liquid alkaline space, which we very recently have started to look into. You might say, hey, this is a mature technology. Why do we need to perform work in the liquid alkaline space? This is actually because we specifically at H2NEW interested in the production of green hydrogen when the power sources are essentially coupled to renewable energy.
So, this is all about integration of renewable resources to the grid. And that means that we now don't have a steady state operation anymore, but we have to move towards dynamic operation. And it is not well known how the liquid alkaline water electrolysis space behaves when we are going—when we're operating dynamically.
When we need to ramp the system up and down, we have to, as came out of the comments that Bryan made earlier, we have to operate these systems to a certain turndown ratio that allows us to gain the electrons at a price when it's available at the net. So we need to investigate here with these liquid alkaline systems as well, what is our turn down capability?
And then obviously, this will create degradation or trigger degradation mechanisms that may not occur in the same way in the hundred’s years of liquid alkaline water electrolysis operation that has been around. The research needs of therefore plentifully available. We're going to start out with doing some reproducibility assessment and benchmarking.
There's a study out from the Forschungszentrum Jülich that you see highlighted here on the right side where they have seen error bars of about 200 million volts plus or minus. And that is really a large amount to align—build trust between institutions, have comparable results so that we can accelerate research and collaboration between institutions. So that's the first step that we are taking. And with this, I leave it at that and will pass the baton on to the high temperature electrolysis guys and Richard.
Richard Boardman, Idaho National Laboratory: Thank you. Thank you, Guido, and we'll take it here. So yes, we'll talk now about high temperature electrolysis. That is steam electrolysis, is what it generally is. And our focus has been on specifically the oxygen ion conducting electrolyte, SOEC. So we'll annotate that O-SOEC.
And as many of you are aware—and we do welcome many of our stakeholders here in this meeting and utilities who are interested in this flavor of electrolysis. Then a few decades of research and it has so far overcome many of the challenges associated with what was early on the lamination of the electrolytes and the electrodes and among the barrier layers and interfaces.
And throughout these years, the materials coatings have been developed to prevent contamination and decontamination of the catalysis. And there has been work to then gradually bring down these operating temperatures from what was started off up at around 900 degrees C where degradation and microstructure has severe microstructure evolution to lower temperatures in around 800 degrees Celsius and below.
So our work really applies to accelerated stress testing of standard O-SOEC materials and we're working on deep characterization of these phenomena to understand the governing phenomenon to help understand that and how it affects the performance and the longevity of these cells. So where SOEC becomes relevant in many cases is where there is thermal energy available.
Featured in the lower picture here is the Palo Verde nuclear power plant outside of Phoenix, Arizona. 4,000 megawatts. You can see a lot of thermal energy being released from the evaporation towers there. And this is in a region in particular where solar energy has been built up.
And so that has an impact on sometimes the baseload operating plants that would ask them to flexibly turn down their capacity. We want to utilize that capacity 24/7, and high temperature electrolysis is a good way to take advantage of both the electricity and the thermal energy. Next slide, please.
And so one of the important aspects here is that this program in H2NEW is striving towards higher performance and longevity of those cells. That is a direct function of the cost of electrolysis by temperature electrolysis. And so our goal is to bring down the operating costs, the overall cost, to that green diagonal line by 2026.
You can see this plot is a plot to the price of hydrogen as a function of the cost of electricity. It includes the thermal energy costs in these lines that we're showing. And our goal is, through this research, to drive it down to the light blue line you see. And then in coordination with other DOE programs, like the Light Water Reactor Sustainability program, a key for us is helping those plants be operated sustainably and lowering their cost of production of electricity so we can March towards that goal of achieving the Earthshot goal.
And one of the advantages of this particular technology today is that it is able to—capable of producing also pure oxygen, and that has some value. And if it is sold for various purposes of decarbonization of our energy m its value could potentially drive this line down to the orange line, which you see.
And with that, I'm going to pass this on to Micah Casteel. I'll say a little bit more here and then I'll pass it on to Micah Casteel here. We're just going to highlight capabilities in these areas of our self fabrication and accelerated stress testing, materials degradation modeling, and some work we're doing in a synchrotron SOEC characterization. And I want to make a couple of remarks here.
Here's some links you can get back to some of the material we have shown in our Annual Merit Review for the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology Office program last year. And truly, we've been able to assemble a team here of national labs where we have, I would say arguably, the top five scientists and who are going to talk to us today in self fabrication accelerated stress testing, that's Olga Marina.
In understanding modeling materials degradation, that will be Brandon Wood from Lawrence Livermore National lab. And then David Ginley is our leader for the characterization, and Sarah Shulda who works directly for him will talk about the synchrotron SOEC characterization. So take it from there, if you will, Micah.
Micah Casteel, Idaho National Laboratory: Absolutely. Thank you, Richard. Let's go ahead and jump forward to the next slide. So starting here, this is very similar to what you saw on the low temperature electrolysis side of the house. We're taking a very similar approach, as you might imagine, in terms of figuring out which direction we need to go to improve the performance of these high temperature cells and systems in order to drive the cost of hydrogen down.
Much like the LTE side of the house, we have a roughly standard system design that allows us to see how the overall system efficiency is changed depending on exactly what we modify in the cell level. But unlike the low temperature side, we have some differences in terms of how we think about efficiency.
On the high temperature side of the house, we break our energy inputs into both thermal and electric. Thermal in this case ends up being about 15% of the overall energy input required, and that's really just to turn liquid water into steam. And so that allows us to use inexpensive thermal energy to make that steam.
And then once we're there, just due to some of the performance aspects of a high temperature system, our stacks tend to run on what we call the thermal neutral operating point. That's the simplest point to operate a system, and it's also the most efficient place to operate a stack. So in terms of our stack efficiency, we're hovering right around 34 kilowatt hours per kilogram, which is very, very close to 100% electrical efficiency from the LHV perspective.
But we don't intend to get any better than that in the near term. We intend to keep that roughly the same. And that's, of course, DC electricity input. So that doesn't include power components and the losses in that area. But what we're really pushing on is terms of pushing our current density up. We don't have any platinum group or iridium group metals in our systems. They are all—they're all straight nickel.
But by moving from 0.6 amps per centimeter squared towards a goal of about 2 amps per centimeters squared, we see a much bigger improvement in terms of how much material is required to build these systems. The other thing that we're looking at specifically is increasing the stack lifetime specifically from about 20,000 hours to about 80,000 hours.
So the combination of those two things together results in a very large decrease in terms of the capital cost to build these systems, even though we don't see a major reduction in the—or major improvement in the overall system efficiency. And that's really just driven by the fact that these systems are already very, very efficient. In terms of system electrical efficiency, we're actually greater than 100% HHV already because we're using thermal energy to make up for some of that energy input.
When you look at the overall total system efficiency, we're on the order of 47 kilowatt hours per kilogram right now, pushing towards something like 42 kilowatt hours per kilogram in the future. And so that's really the goal here on the high temperature side, is improving current density, improving performance both on the output side of the house, as well as increasing the lifetime of these stacks. And so with that in mind, I'm going to head it off to Olga Marina who's going to start talking about the actual testing we're doing.
Olga Marina, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: Hello, everybody. Olga Marina, PNNL. Yep, thank you. In H2NEW, in order to perform degradation studies and understand the degradation and mitigate this degradation, we need cells very similar to those used in the industry. We identify representative state of the art materials and cell architectures and the fabrication techniques, and also developed a batch fabrication process to minimize the variance between separate cells.
So this way, we can quickly produce multiple identical cells of different sizes from small 1 inch in diameter button cell to large planar cells with minimal variables. And so then we can share these cells between the labs, test them, compare the results, and perform post-test characterization. Next slide, please.
To test the electrochemical characteristics of cells, we use high throughput button cell test capability. In this capability, we test multiple small cells simultaneously. We can vary the experimental conditions because each cell will have individual gas flow controls, individual current voltage probes, and this approach allows us to collect DC or AC impedance data in time while we are varying the operating conditions.
For example, temperature, current, voltage, steam concentration, we can add impurities if needed, and also together run several multiple repeats and control cells. So this approach is suitable for studying cells related degradations such as interdiffusion, new phase formation, particle growth in the hydrogen electrode, for example, or electrode poisoning on the oxygen electrode side.
This approach is not suitable for stock related degradations. To test cells under more realistic conditions, for example, at highest utilizations or higher currents like in stack, we use cleaner cells. And we typically run cells with an active area of 1316 square centimeters. In these cells, we still don't use interconnects, and we want to study this cell degradation only.
However, in stacks, as you know, there are multiple interfaces and multiple components that can also induce some stock related degradations. And for that, we designed a SOEC test stands where we can operate planar cells with the realistic metal interconnects using realistic coatings and seals to better understand the effect of subcomponents on cell performance.
We also have several stack testing platforms where we can study actual SOEC stack related degradations. And those could include thermal gradients, high currents, or voltages, impurities, all those that we cannot learn from a single cell operation. Next slide, please.
We developed standard operating procedures and established cell baseline performance for up to 6,000 hours complementing several different projects, including fossil energy supported projects. And we run these cells under standard operating conditions. And we identified several degradation mechanisms. We are closely monitoring interlab cell performances. And we typically obtain reasonable reproducibility between the cells.
And the interlab performance comparison has also been initiated. And this is important because benchmarking is critical for SOEC technology advancement. How we compare the properties and follow existing protocols to make sure that everybody is measuring things the same way. So consistent testing, accurate comparison, and benchmarking within different project is very important. So this will drive the research forward. Next slide, please.
So our labs also initiated accelerated stress testing of multiple cells to evaluate their durability preferably in months and not in years so we can save the time on testing. We identified several stressors and applied them to provoke known degradation mechanisms. Just to name a few, we tested SOECs at somewhat higher temperatures, also at very high or much lower steam concentrations.
We also applied higher voltages and higher currents, and we also assessed the impact of voltage cycling, which is similar to dynamic stack operation. Next slide, please. After we test on cells or stack components or full stacks were either long term or short period of time to elucidate the gradations and locate them within the cell or stack. We perform post-test characterization using multiple bulk and surface techniques available to the labs.
Once we understand the degradations well, we can address them. We typically performed SEM/EDS analysis that allow us to identify materials interaction zones, migration of chemical species, cracking inside cells or electro determination, phase changes, and the combination of SEM with electron backscatter diffraction. It is usually sufficient to determine the phase information, including atom position and space groups.
If degradation signatures are not obvious, often range from length scales millimeters to atomic scale, may need to be interrogated. In this case, we can apply TM studies of scandium TM as well, and 3D atom probe tomography. APT allows dissecting samples one atom or ion at a time.
All these techniques, SEM, TM, and APT, they also allow us to identify the specific location of any changes in the cell stack. If the time and polarization is important, we can perform independent studies such as in operando the high temperature XRD, for example, to monitor the oxygen electrode in real time on the polarization. Brandon, over to you.
Brandon Wood, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: All right, thanks. So I'm going to talk about the modeling simulation within H2NEW high temperature electrolysis. A big part of what modeling and simulation is intended to do is really get at what's on the right-hand side of the slide here, which is the interplay between features at the materials component and cell scale, the operating conditions under which the device the stack or the cell is run, and the relevant degradation modes that emerge from that.
Sorry. Can you go back one more? So there's a two-pronged—approach that we take. The first is to develop multiscale physics based models that integrate atomic scale and microstructural modeling methods with components cell and stack models. And the second is what Olga really referred to from the performance analysis and testing where we look at the data—the test data and infer degradation modes that are interest, which allows us then to come back and model those using the multi scale models. Next slide.
There's a variety of degradation modes that are active or potentially active within SOECs. The ones that we're tackling with an H2NEW are shown at the right hand side here. And they really run the gamut all the way from processes that take place at the interconnects to the electrodes, secondary phase formation, and ion migration and so forth. And also the electrolyte and the barrier layer looking specifically at unwanted cation migration. Next slide.
So a couple of examples I thought would be worth highlighting for the types of approaches that we're using. This one is to look at cation diffusion through the inner layer. And the approach here is to generate what's called a digital twin microstructure. So we can do this from microscopy or tomography data. Generating the computer representation of the microstructure of a component or a material.
And then from that, we examine the different phases, grains, boundary regions, surfaces, and voids that exist within the material or the component and we develop ab initio atomistic models of each of those regions, simulate diffusion using the ab initio models, and then put those into a continuum model where we can basically apply a gradient and look at the flux taking into account the full complexity of the microstructure.
And this allows us, for instance, to couple the diffusion properties to things like the oxygen chemical potential and the electrical potential. Next slide. Another example. This one is taken from the electrode side looking at unwanted secondary phase formation. And here, the approach is to extract the phase diagrams, understand basically the phase expression under different thermodynamic conditions from DFT, and then use that as an input into what's called a phase field model.
So this is a mesoscale microstructure evolution approach where the kinetics of the microstructure evolution can evolve according to the local thermodynamic conditions. So this gives us an opportunity to look under which conditions various secondary phases might be formed. Next slide.
So it's also important to remember that when you're looking at degradation versus performance analysis, oftentimes, performance analysis models will homogenize features and materials and components because they're really interested in the average properties or the effective properties.
Part of degradation is really analyzing extremes in those properties that are observed locally so-called hotspots. So we've developed a number of statistical methods within the consortium to try to extract these hotspots and look at the conditions under which they form. These are things like extremes and stresses, or extremes in current density, or electrical potential, or chemical potential gradients.
On the right-hand side is a parallel technique, this comes from my colleagues at NETL looking at databases of electrode microstructures and doing statistical inference based on properties of many, many electrodes. So for instance, running a forward performance model on thousands of different electrodes and looking at features, aided by machine learning, that are the most impactful for performance or loss of performance. And Sarah will talk and conclude about some of the ways that we analyze and validate and inform these models experimentally.
Sarah Shulda, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Thanks, Brandon. You can go to the next slide, please. OK. Today, I'm just going to spend very briefly a few minutes describing some advanced synchrotron techniques that we use within the consortium, and then I'm going to transition over to preview a community resource that we have where you can find final—you can find descriptions of all the capabilities available across the consortium on the low temperature and high temperature side for cell testing and diagnostics, characterization, modeling, synthesis, and processing.
But for now, just really quick a couple of synchrotron techniques and why be use them. If you look closely at the organization on the high temperature side, which we looked briefly at earlier, you can see that we've integrated characterization and modeling. This was intentionally done from the beginning to really provide a highly integrated framework for characterization and modeling that we work under.
This has been very effective. We're from the characterization site, as Olga so well alluded to. We identify and quantify degradation as a function of cell aging and operating conditions. We validate the accelerated stress testing protocols. But of equal importance, which also got alluded to, we provide the data for model development and validate those models, and ensure the models really are critical to gaining a mechanistic understanding of the degradation that we observe with characterization and can evaluate the impact on performance.
And really, these modeling results guide the characterization objectives in the experimental design. But to make this possible, we really need a multifaceted characterization approach where we're looking at everything from the molecular to the micron length scales.
For example, you need to zoom in to those interfaces and see what's going on at the molecular level, but also be able to zoom out to look at what's going on at the microstructural level, and also characterize very large areas of the cells regardless of whether we're talking about button or planar. You can go on to the next slide.
To do this and make this possible, we do all the great techniques that Olga described, the electron microscopy and the advanced and standard lab scale techniques, but we also incorporate a lot of synchrotron techniques. I'm going to briefly go over just a couple examples of techniques that we've found highly valuable within the consortium.
The first here, if you look on the left. By using the synchrotron, we're able to combine imaging at the nanometer resolution scale with spectroscopy. Shown here on the top left is a 2D slice out of a 3D tomography where we had 30 nanometer resolution and about a 30 micron field of view. So we can look at samples about tens of micron in size.
At that resolution, we can really get an understanding of changes in microstructure, changes in interfaces, changes in pores. But because the synchrotron with its variable energy allows us to collect X-ray absorption spectrum at each pixel if we're looking at 2D or Voxel if we're looking at 3D, we can get that chemical information.
This really proves its value, for example, looking at the fuel electrode. It allows us to separate the nickel structure from the [INAUDIBLE] and pore. So we can get quantifiable information, for example, on the triple phase boundary area and changes with that area as you age cells. Second example I wanted to highlight is X-ray diffraction.
You can get great results at the lab scale. But when you go to the synchrotron, because of that high brilliance and higher energy, we can actually characterize, within minutes, intact button or planar cells. We can do depth profiling without having to take the cell apart. So by changing the angle that the cell interacts with the X-ray beam, we can look at individual components. So the oxygen electrode versus the electrolyte versus the fuel electrode.
So, with this, we can get, within minutes per cell, quantifiable phase identification. We collect simultaneous X-ray fluorescence. So in each component, we can see what cations are there. And because we don't need to take the cells apart and we can do this within minutes, this really opens up to important opportunities. That's where we could do high throughput analysis, and we can also do in-situ or operando experiments.
A quick example shown here on the right. This was four data we collected on an intact button cell that had been aged 1,000 hours. With an experiment that took about five minutes, we're able to collect data that we can analyze. And from that data, we could see that all the expected phases that we expected to be there weren't there, but there's also quite a few additional phases that you wouldn't want to be there or degradation products.
And so with that, if you go on to the next slide, we're going to do a transition. I really want to—we really want to point out that we have a really great community resource. You can find this by going to h2new.energy.gov. This is a website where you can find all of the capabilities available across the entire consortium.
So, as I mentioned earlier, this is not just for characterization. This covers cell testing and diagnostic studies, characterization, of course, modeling, as well as synthesis and processing. In the way this is set up, when you go to this website, you will see that under the research at the top in the black bar, there's going to be a research link. You can click that.
At that point, you'll be able to choose between low temperature electrolysis or high temperature electrolysis. So that'll be your first filter. Shown here is the low temperature electrolysis site. The corresponding high temperature will look very similar. So the first thing to check—the first thing that you can do seen here is that you can search capabilities by keyword.
For example, you could stick in the keyword, catalyst. It will filter out any capability not associated with catalyst. And the other thing to notice that that's highly valuable is that you can also—down here where all these checkboxes are, these essentially act as filters. So you have a couple of ways to search. So you can search by catalyst. That would pull up numerous capabilities associated with catalysts.
You could then go down and choose a filter. So for example, maybe you wanted to filter out based on catalyst capabilities associated with a specific lab. So if you went down to the bottom and clicked on one of those labs, the results that it would show on the right in the blue would be catalyst research dealt with that that specific lab does.
Another way you can do, you can search or not search, I guess, is instead of going by keyword, you can just go straight to the filtering. So for example, you could choose a capability class. So you could choose characterization of structure and composition. That would filter out everything that's not associated with that type of characterization.
You could then say, OK, well, I'm really only interested in membranes. So then you could go to the components and choose membranes. That would act as a second additional filter that would filter out everything that's not associated with characterization of the membranes. And then if you wanted to go one step further, you could once again filter according to lab.
If we were able to click on this and when you go to the website, you'll be able to. If you click on the plus sign, it's an expandable collapsible menu that will really show a very high level description of the capabilities within that class as well as the primary and additional contacts and have the contact information there so you can reach out to people.
Not on the site yet but we'll be in the very near future is when you do expand—when you do expand those sections is that there's going to be a link that you click on for each capability. That will provide very detailed descriptions of the capability, how it's used, and what it can tell you. So with that, I hope that's helpful. I think it'll be much more clear when you go to this site and are able to play around your cells. And I'm going to hand this back over to Dave who will run the question and answer section.
McKenzie Hubert: Is Dave on mute for anyone else?
Cassie: Yeah.
David: I'm sorry about that, yeah. Yep.
Cassie: There you go.
David: So thanks, Sarah. We don't have that many questions yet. So we will get to those that have been submitted, and I will also say anyone that wants to submit to questions, please do. The way we'll work this is I'll summarize where I ask the questions and direct it to a certain panelist that I think might be the best one to answer it.
But certainly feel free to pass it on to someone else or for any of the other panelists to answer as well. To start with some of the ones that were submitted, earlier there were a couple that were related to electrolyzers and durability. One of them, which was submitted during Debbie's presentation, was wondering whether the iridium dissolution is a function of potential or a change in the potential?
Debbie: So it changes both as a function of potential and changes in potential. So the curve that I showed was a staircase profile where as you're transitioning from one potential to the next, you see a spike in dissolution, and then it comes back down to a steady state level of dissolution, which is also a function of potential. And so this high point or the greatest rate of dissolution was actually at around 1.55 volts and that was under steady state conditions.
David: All right. Thank you, Debbie. There's another question about, are the durability tests being done on full cell or half cell? Again, for PEM. Do you plan to investigate the effect of flexible operations on the BOP? Maybe Guido. Yeah
Guido: So we conduct a lot of experiments in the fuel cell. We believe that RDE or half cell experiments may be useful to some extent, but the integration aspect of these cells is really important. Therefore, we believe that specifically the degradation experiments but also the benchmarking experiments should happen also in the cell. And currently, we are limiting on cell type experiments. I mean, we do these technoeconomic analyzes on the system. But right now, we have not any stack testing or system testing activities included in the new H2NEW consortium.
David: All right. Thank you. There was a question that was posted to the chat, which I'll go ahead and summarize and provide—which was answered online. I can provide a quick summary of that and this is for those who will be viewing the presentation and weren't able to do it live. Another question related to whether efficiencies are based on LHV or HHV.
And I'll just say that historically, our office has always looked at efficiencies based on LHV going back to a huge emphasis on transportation fuel cells, both light duty as well as heavy duty vehicles, in which case the efficiencies are LHV. we realize for hydrogen production, there are certainly any number of applications where HHV is a more relevant metric, but obviously, there are concerns with saying it's using HHV for producing and then LHV for conversion in your—but losing about six kilowatt hours per kilogram between when it's produced and before it's used.
A better way and a way that we really would like to see efficiencies are looking at the kilowatt hours of input required per kilogram of hydrogen. That's much more ambiguous than just seeing a percent there. But of course, we're not going to be able to get away from percents completely. It's like there have been a number of questions coming in. Let's see.
There's a question about, if folks want to get involved in H2NEW, what is perhaps the best way to go about doing that? One way is, of course, through submitting proposals to relevant fellow topics that potentially will be come out in the future is one good way. Another, a context in the H2NEW website to reach out to folks. And maybe I'll let Bryan as the overall director comment a little bit more on that.
Bryan: Yeah, thanks, Dave. I think that what you said is by far and away the most straightforward and obvious route. Is that through the upcoming solicitations that access to H2NEW assets and coordination with the research. H2NEW has a mission to basically publicly disseminate our findings. And so that will happen through AMR presentations on an annual basis through a number of different presentations at scientific conferences along the way.
For specific aspects of individual focus where you have specific needs and you'd want our assistance in helping, the number one way to do that, I believe, would be through FOAs. There's also the ability of the individual labs to work with other partners within H2NEW—the individual labs within H2NEW to work with individual partners on very specific areas as well. But from my perspective, trying to work together through FOAs is probably the preferred and top mechanism I expect to happen going forward.
David: All right, thank you. There's another question with respect to whether there's a similar program for AM electrolyzer systems? And I can go ahead and say that most of our AM electrolyzer support is currently through the hydrogen advanced water splitting materials consortium. That's generally considered to be a bit of a lower TRL technology. There aren't many commercial products out there today, and there are still some significant development—materials development needs there.
So a lot of the emphasis to date for AM electrolyzers has been through the hydrogen consortium whereas H2NEW has been focused fairly more on PEM and liquid alkaline technologies. Let's see. Another question related to iridium PGM dissolution is wondering whether iridium or PGM dissolution in a fuel sell is comparable to RDE dissolution or if there are any comments you can make on that comparison between the two? And I'll ask Debbie to respond to that.
Debbie: Yeah. That's really where that work is going in terms of taking those iridium dissolution rates that we determine in aqueous sell, modeling the processes, and then translating that to the results of the degradation of the cell performance. So that is the next step. We also have plans to couple an electrolysis cell with our ICP aspect to look at iridium coming off of the cell in the effluent water.
David: OK There was another question, which maybe I'll broaden a little bit, is concerning what products are you using for your testing? Anything from current companies, whether components or cells and maybe just at a higher level? What is your level of interaction with the electrolyzer OEMs, whether it's through the stakeholder advisory board or otherwise? And I'll let Bryan start with that, and then Richard answer for the HTE side.
Bryan: I'll let Guido go for the LT side for us.
David: OK.
Guido: Yeah. So the key reference cell is a cell that we currently create ourselves within H2NEW. The reason for that is that commercial products often have higher loading still. And we were looking at future generation MEA with the far side of some loading reductions have already taken place and understanding what needs to happen to move to even lower loadings.
So we obviously don't make porous transport layers all ourselves. So we use commercially available porous transport layers or components that move into our cells. But we also have been accepting, to some extent, materials from companies that reached out to us that allow us to benchmark materials. So we would like to understand what different natures of, let's say, PTL materials give us.
In our pathway to understanding what properties are really important, what makes a good PTL, we would like to screen different concepts of PTL materials, for example. The same could be true for some other materials. However right now, we're not working hand in hand with industry to develop any products or have a very fixed material set other than our reference cell. Just to pass it on to Richard to answer for the high temperature.
Richard: Thank you, Guido. And David, I have a couple of remarks here and then I'll let Olga also jump in. And we picked this reference material standard electrode supported system because it seems like where the 30 years have led most of the industry to be, and the types of stoichiometry that are in each of the electrodes and the electrolyte. And so I think it's a pretty good representation of the majority of stakeholders.
Then we do have our stakeholders who are also advising and giving us some help in understanding how those results might be relevant to them or if we should test some other material sets. And on that fact, we have actually taken and got some other material sets which we have brought in to be tested so we could compare and see if there are major differences both in the polarization effects over time and maybe some of the materials evolution over time. So we are looking at some variation from the standard. And with that, Olga, would you like to add to some comments?
Olga: Sure. Thank you, Richard. We also looked at the commercially available materials, which is cells, and there isn't much actually to compare it to. So companies are still developing their cells, and there is lots of proprietary information going into each cell that we respect.
And because we would like to publish our results, we decided we will use state of the art materials that everybody else is using, and we can go deeper and explore these materials and present the results to the community. If there are providers willing to supply some of the cells for benchmarking, we will be very happy to do that, and we can discuss the terms. Thank you.
David: OK. Thank you, Olga. There's a question here wondering whether there's essentially any static durability testing planned for and progress for the LTE work? And I was struck that towards Guido.
Guido: Sure. That may be a question for Bryan as well. But to date, our development or technical readiness level work ends at the single cell level. We have been doing some stack work that was more rainbow stacks to get high throughput combinatorial samples tested over longer periods of time, but not call it industry sized megawatt or hundreds of kilowatt type stacks.
That is something—it's a capability that's available within the National Lab space. So we could do this. It's done on an individual basis with the companies right now. I don't know, Bryan, if you want to expand on that with regards to what the plans are of H2NEW? I don't see this on the horizon right now.
Bryan: What I'd add is that within H2NEW, we plan to do some testing at the stack level. But most of it is really based on understanding individual cells more so than stacks. And so doing short stacks and rainbow stacks to give us higher throughput or to understand how different cells behave underneath similar environments is a capability that we have in place and that we're looking to expand to help us in terms of throughput and bandwidth.
Beyond things about 10 kilowatts in size in general, I think that we would be happy to onboard information that came from those, but we don't have any active plans to try to do any testing that pushes the stack considerations in a major way. Most of our efforts are focused at the component and single cell level.
David: Thank you. There's a question, I think I've seen it pop up a couple of times, about sharing perspective with respect to cost reduction analysis and which of these technologies has the most potential to hit $1 per kilogram? And really from our perspective, they all have that potential. And you could also throw in or add AM and the proton conducting solid oxide electrolyzer cells as well.
We see there is such a wide range of applications for the hydrogen produced, and such a wide range of clean electricity sources. And also, there's opportunities in all five of these technologies for performance improvements, efficiency improvements, certainly cost reductions, particularly with manufacturing at scale that there's really no clear candidate that will come to the forefront and dominate the whole market.
There will be different technologies and different applications spaces that will be the best option. So we are really trying to keep a broad based approach and support technology development on a broad front there. I'll wait a second in case anyone else wants to add to that.
Richard: May I add to that, David? You have a nice program, a continuum of research and hydrogen, and then there's technology acceleration. Some of the questions I find which would be pertinent to cell and stack design may come in those other program areas. And some of the, as you mentioned, the early TRL work comes down in HydroGEN.
And so I think you have a nice continuum of things moving up through the system to where they eventually get into the stack design and then system design. So understanding all the programs is a good answer to some of those questions. Somebody asked about pressure, and it's a function of cost. And you put it in a pressurized system or do you compress the hydrogen when you're done. And those are all done in the techno and economic assessments, which are done both for LTE and HTE.
Bryan: I'll build on it a little bit. I mean, there's a lot of uncertainty in this. And I think that H2NEW is trying to do a lot of the analysis to reduce some of the uncertainty and some of the things that go into the underlying aspects of this. I spoke a little bit about the electricity markets.
These electricity markets aren't the only thing that matter. If you look at things like high temperature, , electrolysis basically, having waste heat that can generate dry steam is a big enabling factor beyond just the connection to the electricity markets. And so we're also looking at what regions where the economic sense makes the most sense.
And then based on some of the other features, to concur with what Dave said, I believe that the electrolysis needs are going to be huge, and that each one of these technologies will have a piece of the marketplace. And it's basically how big that market is will depend on how the electricity system evolves at some level, and what other sources like waste heat are available to potentially contribute to hydrogen generation in some way.
David: All right. Thank you, Bryan. And with that, I will go ahead and end the Q&A session. I want to thank all of the panelists, all the speakers, very much appreciate all your efforts in this. And with that, I will pass it back to Cassie. Thanks.
Cassie: Thank you, Dave that concludes our H2IQ Hour for today. Once again, I want to thank all of our presenters. A recording of today's webinar and presentation materials will be available within the coming weeks. Be sure to subscribe to HFTO news to stay up to date. Those links are in the chat. Thank you for attending. We look forward to seeing you at our next H2IQ Hour