Natasha Nguyen, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Hi everyone. We’re going to kick things off so we start on time. Welcome to this months H2IQ hour part two, HydroGEN Advanced Water Splitting Materials Capabilities Overview. I’m Natasha Nguyen with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Next slide please. Please be aware that this Zoom webinar is being recorded and will be published online on our H2IQ webinar archives. If you experience any technical issues today please check your audio settings under the audio tab. But if you continue experiencing issues please send me a direct message. Next slide please. There will be a Q&A session at the end of the presentation and you can submit your questions in the question box which is located near the chat function. Next slide please.
With those housekeeping notes out of the way we’d like to know where you’re joining us from. So please feel free to respond to the polling questions that should be popping up on your screen right about now. And with that I’d like to turn now to Ned Stetson who will be delivering opening remarks. Ned is the program manager for hydrogen technologies within the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office from the US Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
Ned Stetson, Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office: Thank you Natasha. I would like to add my welcome to all of you to the special edition of the H2IQ hour. Hopefully you’re all aware that the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technologies Office Currently has an open funding opportunity announcement that’s titled funding opportunity in support of the hydrogen shot and the university research consortium on grid resilience. The Hydrogen Shot was the first of the DOE’s hydrogen – or sorry, first of the DOE’s energy Earth shot initiatives. It was announced by Secretary Jennifer Granholm at the programs intermittent review on June 7th of 2021. It’s got a very aggressive goal of reducing the cost of clean hydrogen production to $1.00 per kilogram within one decade so by 2031. So the first topic within this open FOA is the hydrogen solar fuels from photoelectric chemical and solar thermochemical water splitting. So we are looking at development of materials that can enable very efficient and low cost production of hydrogen directly from splitting of water.
The HydroGEN consortium was, is our consortia for the development of materials for advanced water splitting technologies. We launched it in 2016 and since that first round of FOA projects selected in 2017 they have supported more than 30 research groups. And one of their key roles is to provide world class facilities at the national laboratories to help accelerate the development of the technologies for projects selected through the funding opportunity announcements. So we do encourage all applicants to review the capabilities offered through the hydrogen consortium so you can determine those which are relevant to your research programs and you can reference those in your applications. So with that I am not going to take up much more time. I’m going to turn it over to Dr. Huyen Dinh. Dr. Dinh is a senior scientist in a group research manager at the National Renewable Energy Lab. She’s also the director of the HydroGEN consortium. So with that Huyen take it away.
Huyen Dinh, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Thank you Ned. Good morning. Good afternoon. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope everyone is well. I would like to give you an overview of the HydroGEN consortium and highlight a few successes and then I’ll do a demo of the hydrogen capabilities website. And then I will provide some examples of the hydrogen FOA awarded projects. We call them ______ projects and how they use the hydrogen capabilities successfully. And finally I will give you some tips for review during your proposal and your project stages.
So I’d like to start by briefly talk about the Hydrogen at Scale vision. It’s important and how our work contributes to it. So Hydrogen at Scale is an important guiding concept that shows the flexibility of hydrogen to couple diverse domestic resources with multiple industrial sectors and enables affordable, reliable, clean and secured energy. Hydrogen can also address specific applications that are hard to decarbonize such as ammonia production and metals production. The make, store, move and use of HydroGEN are all important pillars of the Hydrogen at Scale. Through materials innovation hydrogen plays and important role in Hydrogen at Scale by enhancing performance, durability and reducing costs of hydrogen production.
HydroGEN is an energy materials network comprised of – oops. Sorry. I’m trying to figure out how to get this one away. HydroGEN is an EMN comprised of five national labs shown here, NREL, Berkley, Idaho, Sandia and Livermore. The goal of HydroGEN is to accelerate foundational R&D of innovative materials for advanced water splitting technologies, to enable clean, sustainable and low cost hydrogen production. This graphic here shows the four early stage water splitting technologies that we focus on, low temperature electrolysis or LTE, high temperature electrolysis or HTE, photochemical water splitting, PEC, and solar thermal chemical water splitting or STCH for short. So as a consortium HydroGEN falls through crosscutting innovation using theory, guided applied materials R&D to advance all emerging water spitting pathways for hydrogen production.
Within the EMN framework HydroGEN is highly collaborative with many universities and companies, national labs involved as shown by this map here. Hopefully I can add your institution to this map if you’re awarded a project. To accelerate the awesome R&D to enable low cost hydrogen, HydroGEN has a network of world class capabilities that the community can leverage and streamline access. To streamline this access we have standard technology transfer agreements such as the NDAs, MTAs, the CREDAs and the intellectual property management plan shown here. HydroGEN also has a robust, secure, searchable and shareable data hub that is shared by all who are part of HydroGEN. As a consortium HydroGEN has also produced many high value products and disseminate them to the R&D community. Some of those are highlighted here including two R&D 100 awards, over 118 publications, four community benchmarking workshops and others listed here.
So this slide shows the structure of the HydroGEN consortium. You can see that the diverse HydroGEN leadership consists of the technology leads shown here. So the low temperature electrolysis is led by NREL. High temperature electrolysis technology is led by INL. PC is led by Berkley. STCH is led by Sandia. And we also have a cross cutting modeling approach here that is led by Livermore. As I mentioned earlier HydroGEN has a world class capability network comprising of more than 60 unique capabilities. These include materials, theory, synthesis, characterization and analytics. Please check our website to get more information about these capabilities. But I will do a demo in this presentation about the website and how to use it effectively.
So first I’d like to start by briefly talking about how the awarded projects collaborate with the HydroGEN EMN. During the FOA process the proposals call out HydroGEN lab capabilities that they like to be part of the project. And once they are awarded they get access to the HydroGEN capabilities. Then we collaborate and share data via the HydroGEN data hub.
So as part of the capability the labs support the FOA award projects gets awards through the personnel, equipment, the expertise, the materials and data, all these things shown here through this graphic. And this is an example. Next I will now talk about the capability nodes themselves. This shows you some of the ways that we can filter the capability nodes on the website but currently we have over 60 capability nodes and you can see the list of the different capabilities and different technologies there. I’m going to go straight to the website now.
Ok. So if you go onto h2awsm.org you get our front page here. And if you click on capabilities you get this page. And see here there are over 60 capabilities. You can enter a word in here to do search of the capability need or you can click on a capability class. Let’s say you are interested in a characterization capability to support the materials that you make in your project and you’re interested in STCH. And let’s apply that and see what we get. So these are the seven capabilities that come up that you could do, get to understand more. For example let’s see. Let’s start this one. So if you click on this capability you get the description, which labs this capability belongs to, who is the capability expert. And you get a description of what it can do, what its capability bounds are, why is it unique, how available it is, the benefits and then also some images of what the capability looks like and you can also look at some references of how these capabilities were applied there.
Let me go back. So maybe another one you can do is its characterization and do PEC this time. We apply it. You see there are 13 capabilities for PEC characterization. Again if you click on one of these you get a similar information capability expert you can contact and a description of what they are. So this is your starting point here. If you are looking for a specific capability, if you are making materials, you want to help with characterization or testing you come here and search for that. That’s good. I think it’s pretty easy and if you know a specific lab you want to work for you can also click on one of these labs to filter the search even further.
Now I’m going to go back to the presentation. So the capability can support the project really well depending what your needs are. You can see here there’s the smaller needs that say we need help with modeling. Then you can get that, look for that on the website if you need characterization or scale up or anything else. This slide just shows you the variety of different capabilities from the different labs and then some of the capabilities actually could support multiple water splitting technologies. In this presentation I’m going to be focusing on the STCH and the PEC capabilities because that’s what the FOA calls for.
So there are many examples over the years where access to the HydroGEN capability in those facilitate the success of STCH projects R&D objectives. I only have time to focus on a couple here. This slide highlights the depth of collaboration between Arizona State University and the three HydroGEN consortium capabilities listed here, the synthesis one from NREL, the microscopy from Sandia and the virtually accessible laser heated flow reactor from Sandia. So ASU’s objective was to computational discover STCH materials with simultaneously reduceable cations on separate lattices. They hypothesize that the ______ the STCH material behavior by finding a suitable perovskite structure that lowers temperature, requires a thermal reduction and increases its reduction – sorry, yeah, reduction entropy. So if their hypothesis proves out then it would be the first example of dual cation redox active system known to STCH. Very impactful. Would also be an example of an A-site redox STCH perovskite. In the end I’m happy to report that their computational work flow produced a substitute perovskite called CCXY. The composition is not revealed here because they’re still trying to get it published. But one of the C here is Cerium.
So the NREL team here was able to synthesize a sufficient phase pure sample of the CCXY material for their own testing and for distribution to the other characterization modes. Sandia was able to efficiently show that this material can efficiently split water. And the advanced characterization carried out by NREL using XAS at Stanford’s SLAC facility and the EELS at Sandia’s high resolution STEM facility confirmed that ASU’s hypothesis was correct. So both XAS and EELS data agree and identify that the A-site Cerium is redox active and so is one of the B-site cations which is not shown here. So this example shows how strategic partnerships, synergy and information exchange between the nodes and the ASE facilitated project success in achieving their milestone.
The next example I would highlight is the depth of collaboration between University of San Diego seedling project and the HydroGEN consortium. UCSD’s objective was to develop a STCH material that’s composed of highly disordered polycation perovskite oxide. They hypothesize that they could obtain STCH material behavior by lowering its reduction entropy and thus the temperature required for thermal reduction and maintain high reduction entropy via traditional disorder. Here the UCSD formulated and synthesized materials for distribution to the HydroGEN consortium nodes for characterization. So again this data here shows that the Sandia virtually accessible laser heated flow reactor was able to show that this material can split water to make hydrogen and oxygen. And this was measured via the mass spectrometry and the flow reactor. Another experiment that Sandia contributed to was to definitively determine which cations are in the redox active in this polycation system using EELS. Finally they, NREL’s DFT capability was used to deduce why the cobalt cation system is redox active when its coordinated preferentially with the local oxygen vacancies. More importantly the HydroGEN labs nodes were critical in determining why subtle compositional variation in the cobalt atomic fraction in the oxide positively impacted water splitting functionality.
So next few slides I will walk through a few examples, PEC examples of the seedling projects to show you how you can use these capabilities with the synergy between your team and the lab capability experts can impact your project. The first example here is from University of Michigan. They propose to develop silicon based low cost photoelectrodes to achieve high efficiency greater than 50 percent and stable, greater than 1,000 hours water splitting systems. So the project used three capabilities from three different national labs, the operando capability here from Berkley, interface modeling from Livermore and surface modification from NREL. See these combined experimental and theoretical approaches shining light on the mechanism of protecting and self-improvement of the gallium nitride coating that was put on the silicon photoelectrode.
So SEM and XPS the team discovered that over time a new gallium oxygen nitride phase formed on the side wall of the gallium nitride. And this phase shows higher photocurrent when the locally approached by the atomic force microscopy. So the team at Livermore performed theoretical calculations that supported the experimental results and explained the origin of increased stability and activity of this material. And the team at NREL provided support in ______ catalyst for surface medication. So this project originated several publications and is a testament to how utilizations of capabilities at national labs can provide fundamental insights to use inspired science.
The second project I’d like to talk about is from Stanford University. This project involves the synthesis of III-V and silicon based semiconductors for efficient and durable PC water splitting. With a goal to use nonprecious lithium sulfide catalyst to improve stability and high efficiency hydrogen generating photoelectrodes. This project used, leveraged five HydroGEN nodes at two national labs as you can see here. The collaboration between NREL and Berkley enabled synthesis and the characterization of these three, these devices here to make good progress in extending the PEC systems operating at short circuit. NREL had a unique facility here that can synthesize a III-V semiconductor materials and combined with this characterization we’re able to adapt materials that have proved to have very high efficiency and durability.
Finally the third project I will highlight for PEC is from Rice University. This project focuses on the fabrication of highly efficient solar water splitting using 3D/2D hydrophobic perovskites materials to exceed 20 percent of solar hydrogen efficiency and low cost and durability. So to achieve this goal the PI collaborated with Dr. Xu, Dr. D. and Dr. T. from NREL and Berkley. Dr. Xu who is the PV expert for this hybrid organic, inorganic perovskite synthesis node was able to synthesize halide perovskite light absorbers for PC water splitting. And thanks to Berkely and NREL collaborated to develop this cell here, this project was able to leverage that and be able to demonstrate that their material had 100 percent faradaic efficiency for hydrogen production. So this project specifically benefited from both, from the nodes development that was ongoing within the HydroGEN consortium and the PI was able to perform these measurements because of that or else they wouldn’t have the capability to do that and be able to demonstrate that on their own.
So in the next three slides I wanted to highlight just a few capabilities that I think is related to the current FOA because they’re called out in the FOA. So the first one here is the NREL hybrid organic/inorganic perovskite material node. This node has supported several HydroGEN projects in the PC to produce PEC here. And they do things from covering, making material, perovskite materials, devices and characterizations because perovskite absorbers are promising for high efficiency and low cost PEC water splitting.
This slide here highlights the NREL high flux solar furnace capability. It is ideally suited for small scale feasibility studies. It’s available for on site testing for both – it’s been used for both PEC and STCH solar, STCH materials testing. And this final one is from Sandia. It’s national solar thermal test facility or NSTTF for short. It has 16 kilowatt of solar furnace, a high flux solar simulator and 6 megawatt power tower. Again these capabilities can be used for on-site testing.
So the next two slides I want to give you some tips at both the proposal stage and the project stage. So for now attending this webinar is a great first step. I showed you how I encourage you to go to the HydroGEN capabilities website to search for the lab capability just as I’ve shown you. And if you found some that you like or have more questions about or you don’t know what you want you can email, [email protected] for capability suggestions or even to ask for connections to the capability experts. Next I encourage you to engage with the capability experts to better understand the capability and how to collaborate with them. So if you’re an experimentalist and you need some modeling expertise you might want to reach out for modeling capability here as an example. And the thing I think will be helpful to work out the work scope with the capability experts at this point too. And I recommend choosing around three to four nodes to support your project to be most effective use of the funding that DOE will provide to the labs to work with.
At the awarded project stage I want – the reason I encourage you to get to know the capability initially and get to know the experts and develop the scope there is because I want you to be able to get ready, ready in the beginning of the project when its awarded so you can go right in and you can start the project right away. I encourage you to hold regular project team meetings with all of the team members involved including the capability experts so that they all understand what the big pictures are and how each team member contributes to the work. We will provide you with a HydroGEN SharePoint site project site so that you can use it as a secure way to communicate with your team members, share information, milestones or literature, schedule meetings and work on quarterly reports and AMR presentations and papers together. And we will also provide you with a private secure data hub project site where you can share with each other the raw and processes data, upload your experimental and computational data as well as just synthesis and characterization data. It’s important that you use this to share information. And that’s the end of my presentation. I’d like to acknowledge DOE for their funding especially the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technologies Office and all their managers here. Thank you very much for attending this webinar and so to reiterate please email any questions you have about the HydroGEN capabilities to this email here, [email protected]. And if you have any questions about the FOA itself use this particular email.
Ned Stetson: Thank you very much for the presentation. I do encourage all of the attendees if you have any questions please go ahead and put them in the Q&A so you can submit them. We do have a few in here now. So first one should be kind of an easy one for you. What is the TRL for these technologies? TRL stands for technology readiness levels.
Huyen Dinh: Yes. We are more with lower TRL. We focus on around one to three, two to three, TRL two to three. Within low temperature electrolysis we focus more on the AEM, the alkaline exchange membrane electrolysis ‘cause that’s lower TRL than PEM as an example. And the same thing for the high temperature electrolysis. It’s more focused on the lower TRL technology which is a proton conducting ______.
Ned Stetson: Ok. Thank you. And I do want to point out to all the attendees. Concept papers for this funding opportunity announcement are due on September 23rd which is a week from today. So we do encourage you to please as Huyen provided in the tips review the capabilities available and if you have questions or interests please reach out to the consortium. So one question which we had which we didn’t answer was asking about the cost targets. So in the Hydrogen Shot has a very aggressive cost target of less than $1.00 per kilogram within one decade which puts it at 2031. However we have an intermediary target of less than $2.00 pr kilogram for 2026. This is also included in the infrastructure investment and jobs act also known as the bipartisan infrastructure law which is specifically has a goal of validating the cost of clean hydrogen from electrolysis at $2.00 per kilogram. So we do have an intermediate target per kilogram in 2026 with an ultimate target of less than $1.00 per kilogram in 2031. So I’m not seeing a lot more questions to respond to coming in. Maybe I just saw a bunch more come in.
James Vickers, U.S. Department of Energy: Hey. I’ll just introduce myself. I’m James Vickers. I’m the hydrogen lead from the DOE side and Ned is my program manager. I work closely with Huyen. Wanted to thank Huyen for this great presentation and really just showing us really all of the capabilities, all of the ways that hydrogen is set up to ensure that the projects that we select are successful in meeting our end goals. I mean there’s so, so much. I hope that everyone takes a look at the website and looks at some of those capability nodes. And if you are submitting a concept paper to really think about well what is it that you can do and what is it that you can’t do. And we are really trying to fill in those gaps to make sure that, yeah, anything that you need to get done the national lab expertise equipment and everything is put to use to ensure that you meet your end of project goals.
Ned Stetson: Thank you James. So Huyen one question that came in is are you open to international collaborations or is it only open to US corporations or companies or entities? The asker is actually located in Belgium but is with a US company.
Huyen Dinh: That’s a question for you Ned.
Ned Stetson: Yeah. So we do actually have foreign work waivers which can be submitted with applications. Usually we require US taxpayers dollars to stay in the US. However we do actually have some waivers which do allow collaborations with entities outside the US. So if it is a US company I’m sure there’s a way that we can actually work with you. So we do encourage you to consider submitting. But there was a foreign work waiver that would be required.
Huyen Dinh: Let me add that we do collaborate with international community on water splitting technologies through some of – one way is through the benchmarking workshops that we have. We invite the international community into joining us to develop standard protocols and benchmarking protocols so that’s one way. But we also share information through the website and the data hub and we’re part of their international community’s conferences or workshops that they have so that we can share how we do things and they can share how they do things. ‘Cause this really is an international effort. The other part I would like to mention is we don’t just work with DOE FOA awarded projects even though that is the main way that we collaborate with others outside of the HydroGEN consortium. We do have creatives in place so that if companies were interested in using the HydroGEN capabilities directly and not having to go through a FOA project you can work with us directly and you just have to find us to do the work.
Ned Stetson: Thank you Huyen. So another question and I’m going to paraphrase the question. It’s asking about essentially the flexibility of the nodes to be able to adapt to specific designs or materials included in the proposal. So if it’s not your I guess your standard material or device how adaptable at the nodes within HydroGEN?
Huyen Dinh: I’d say we’re very adaptable. Our experts have been working in this space a long time and worked with many different materials. For examples in the PEC space we’ve worked with both thin film type of materials like semiconductors but we also work with teams who are working on nanoparticles, the particle design. So we work with them on best to develop. If we have to we’ll develop some capabilities to suit the needs. But mainly we have expertise in the equipment and the capabilities to help you whatever that material is.
Ned Stetson: So one question is where can we find more information about the funding opportunity announcement? Are universities eligible to submit a proposal? So the funding opportunity announcement is available through the DOE’s EERE funding opportunity exchange portal. If you just Google search EERE exchange you’ll find it and then from there you can find all the EERE funding opportunity announcements. If you select the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technologies Office this should be one of the top opportunities to pop up in the list. And yes, universities are definitely eligible so we do encourage applicants from universities, industry, etcetera. Does the user need to pay in order to use the lab’s facilities and capabilities. So Huyen do you want to take that one?
Huyen Dinh: Sure. So it depends on how you want to work with us. If you want to like I said work directly with us to fund us and use the capabilities for your specific project then yes, you’d need to provide funding. If you’re going through this FOA and get awarded through DOE then DOE will fund us to help support you and you wouldn’t have to pay us. Hope that answers the question.
Ned Stetson: Yep. Thank you. Another one, is there any TRL requirements for this funding opportunity? And it appears this person works in the private industry and is seeking help with higher level techniques of development for the materials. So we are an applied office within the Department of Energy. Therefore we start as basically TRL two, basics of fundamental research which is the definition of TRL one is geared up primarily to Office of Science. And then the applied offices of _____ such as energy efficiency, renewable energy, the office of fossil energy carbon management, the office of nuclear energy and the office of electricity, etcetera. We carry out research that starts at TRL two and higher. So most of the work within HydroGEN as Huyen had mentioned earlier is at the TRL two and three level. However we don’t preclude working on higher TRL materials. It just has to fit within the bounds that define within the FOA topic.
So can you give a little more detail about this statement in the FOA, while solar hydrogen could be used to generate, could also be generating electricity from photovoltaics or concentrated solar power CSP coupled with low or high temperature electrolyzers, these paths are not included in this topic. The reason for that is we have a totally separate program. We actually have a new program through the bipartisan infrastructure law also known as the infrastructure investment in jobs act that provides substantial amount of funding for the development of electrolyzer technology. So this funding is, this topic is specifically for non-electrolyzer technologies because we have substantial funding for that through the bipartisan infrastructure law. This funding which is through appropriations is being specifically directed towards direct water splitting. So therefore not generating electricity and using electricity through electrolyzer for instance. It is for direct water splitting technologies. There will be additional funding opportunity announcements on electrolyzer technologies. James or Cassie do you have the FOA number? There’s a question about the FOA number itself. I don’t have it here in front of me.
James Vickers: I’ll look it up and put it in the chat unless Cassie can do it.
Ned Stetson: Yeah. We will be collecting the questions and posting responses to most of the questions as well.
Cassie Osvatics, Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office: Yeah. I don’t have that number on hand James so if you’re looking that up that would be great.
Ned Stetson: So question regarding is this FOA only focused on development of STCH materials? Specifically could it also include new pathways for solar collection and/or reactors which can achieve higher temperatures more efficiently or cost effectively to support a variety of STCH approaches? So we are really focused on the materials that split water in STCH. However sometimes that does require some design of reactors. So I know – do we have Tony available to respond to this question?
Tony McDaniel, Sandia National Laboratories: We do. Hey Ned. So I’m Tony McDaniel, the technology lead for STCH. If these, if you have other questions and want to know more about node capabilities, etcetera for STCH I can certainly guide you as the applicants prepare their submission for next week. So the question regarding a FOA focused on development of STCH materials specifically could it also include new pathways for solar collection and/or reactors which can achieve higher temperature more efficiently or cost effectively to support a variety of STCH approaches. I think if you read the language in the FOA itself there are, there is room for not only thermochemical cycles based on metal oxides but I think other concepts including James and Ned, I think hybridized concepts. Is that correct? ‘Cause there’s an example I think in the FOA that talks about an older copper chloride cycle that also used electricity in addition to heat from concentrated solar power. So I think there is room for submissions that have ideas different than traditional two step metal oxide cycles.
James Vickers: That is true Tony but I think part of what the question is asking here is certainly reactor design can be a component. But I think a topic that was just reactor design and didn’t have a material component would not be of interest here. There can be some material development in addition.
Ned Stetson: Thank you Tony and James. Another question, are photo electrodes other than perovskites in this call of interest? So perovskites are a material that are encouraged to look at. We are looking for some investigation or further investigation of perovskite materials in these two technology areas. However the call is not exclusively for perovskite materials. So we are interested in all novel materials which have potential in these technology areas. However we do specifically encourage people to look at perovskites as well.
Huyen Dinh: There’s a question about matching funds Ned. Should it be specified in the concept paper or only in the FOA?
Ned Stetson: Matching funds do not necessarily need to be called out in the concept papers. There is a section in the FOA which explains exactly what should be covered in the concept papers and what needs to be covered in the FOA applications so I do encourage all recipients to review that. The concept paper does not include a detailed budget but the FOA application will require a detailed budget. So I’m going to propose since we don’t seem to have a lot of new questions coming in right now that we go ahead and end the webinar now. We do appreciate everybody attending and we do appreciate all of the questions. You can submit further questions but we will be going through all the questions that get submitted and we’ll post those along with the presentations and a recording of the webinar on the website. So Natasha do you have anything else you want to do?
Natasha Nguyen: I think we’re good for now. Thank you all for attending today. Thank you to our speakers. A recording of today’s webinar will be available online soon and please be sure to join us for our next H2IQ hour and sign up to receive our news for latest updates, upcoming events and opportunities. Thank you everyone.
Huyen Dinh: Thank you everyone for attending today