Hysata: 'This is why our innovative electrolyser will make green hydrogen significantly cheaper'

There is arguably more buzz around Australian start-up Hysata right now than any other company in the global hydrogen space.

This is because the company not only says its novel “capillary-fed” electrolysers will be the most efficient on the market, but that they will also be cheaper to buy and operate than comparable electrolysis systems.

It is little wonder that, despite having not yet commercialised the technology, it already has an order pipeline of almost 40GW.

Q&A with Tom Campey

Our technology is capillary-fed electrolysis, CFE. And that name basically describes the core innovation which makes our technology so special.

“Capillary fed” relates to the fact that in an electrolyser you have electrodes, and in between the electrodes you have a separator or a membrane, which keeps the gases [ie, hydrogen and oxygen] separate as they’re generated.

Our innovation is that we use that separator as the way to get the electrolyte, which contains the water that you're splitting, into the cell and to the electrodes.

So, a typical alkaline electrolyser, say, will have electrolyte on both sides of the cell, and then as the gases are produced you generate bubbles, and those bubbles form a foam and you have to carry those bubbles away from the cell. The bubbles stick to the electrodes, and it's fundamentally a source of inefficiency and complexity in the system.

By using the separator to deliver the electrolyte to the electrodes, you eliminate bubbles and you vastly simplify the system and radically increase the efficiency of the cell.

Now, that’s about 20% better than incumbent alkaline and PEM electrolysers. And that’s really all because of that efficient cell, which is unlocked through the capillary fed design.

Well, that’s one part. We also [have] the separator, [which] as we’ve designed it, is essentially a foam — it’s a polymer that looks like a kitchen sponge, essentially, if you look at it under a microscope. And that’s saturated with our electrolyte, and that ends up being very, very conductive while having very good properties as a separator, keeping the gases separate.

That’s right.

KOH [ie, potassium hydroxide] — the same as [a standard] alkaline [electrolyser]. So, we have the benefits of alkaline in there… but the electrodes are not immersed in a bulk liquid. They’re just in contact with this separator, the sponge filled with the KOH.

The elimination of the bubbles and the high conductivity separator, lead to the low resistance and high efficiency of the cell.

And then you also get efficiency benefits from the balance of plant.

Because the cell is so efficient, we’re generating around ten times less heat than in a typical alkaline or PEM. And that just means there’s a much lower cooling load, which simplifies the balance of plant and reduces the energy required to cool the system.

We are still generating some heat in the cell, but it’s very small compared to a typical system.

And because we’re delivering the liquid in a very targeted way through the membrane, we don’t have all this huge amount of liquid circulating in the system.

Compared with a typical alkaline electrolyser, it’s about 20 times less liquid in our system per megawatt. And that just means smaller pumps, smaller tanks, less energy for driving those pumps.

The footprint is indeed smaller. In terms of the total system, we’ll be a little bit smaller than a PEM [electrolyser] and about half the size of an alkaline [electrolyser].

Really our value proposition is a lower levelised cost of hydrogen [LCOH]. And that comes down to main things. One is the efficiency. Making hydrogen takes a lot of electricity. And the less electricity you use, the lower that cost.

So, a 20% improvement in efficiency directly relates to a 20% reduction in the amount of renewable energy you need. So that’s the biggest factor [in reducing LCOH].

But the other factor is the capex [capital expenditure], which is the other key driver of the levelized cost.

And the capex of our system is low because of the simplified system, the simple cell design results in a low-cost stack, but it also results in simplification of the balance of plant.

And that means that the cost in the rest of the system that a customer would need to pay is lower. And that includes the installed cost of the electrolyser because it’s just such a simple system, it’s easy to install, so we can save [on] labour [costs] in the project construction.

I think it’s probably easiest to look at on a levelised cost basis, and there you’re in the double-digits levelised-cost savings on a whole-system basis. So that’s pretty significant.

It’s going to depend a lot on the specific project, on the customer, but fundamentally it’s a cost saving that any hard-nosed project developer cannot pass up.

It’s not 99.

Ten or above.

We have a 5MW commercial demonstration project that’s been announced with Stanwell.

So, that’s really the start of our large-scale systems in the field. That’s a 5MW electrolyser system.

It’s a 5MW stack.

Essentially.

That’s right. We’ve demonstrated all the core parts of the system in our facility. And now it's just about scaling up and taking it to the market.

There’s no more science. The science has been done. Now it’s just engineering and scale-up.

The manufacturing is really the third benefit of our system. So I touched on the efficiency and the installed cost. Manufacturing and ability to scale is really the third benefit.

So our system is a very elegant design, which is simple to manufacture. And it also uses earth-abundant materials. And therefore, our scale-up will be subject to less constraints than what other players have been seeing.

No.

The main materials are like in a standard alkaline [electrolyser]. We have nickel, and we actually use a polymer as our cell frame, which means it’s a low-cost, easy-to-manufacture system.

Well, we’re talking with some customers that are looking at making polymers out of green hydrogen. So that will be our ultimate goal, to have a completely circular zero-emission supply chain. There’s a journey to get there, of course.

We’ll be reaching gigascale shortly after our demonstration, so from around 2026.

On an installed capex level. Because it’s not just about the capex, the electrolyser. A real driver of the installed capex at the moment is the EPC [engineering, procurement and construction] cost, and in particular the cost to install and construct an electrolyser facility, including that balance of plant. So having a system that’s modular, easy to install, and that removes complexity in the balance of plant means that the total installed costs will be much less.

Well, the simpler the system, the less opex there is typically. There are less pieces of kit to maintain and replace.

Just two months ago, we moved into our new facility in Port Kembla, just south of Sydney, and that will be the location of our first manufacturing line.

And then we’ll demonstrate the manufacturing at commercial scale there, and then scale up globally from there.

Our customers are located across the world, and in time we expect to have manufacturing based on where our customers are.

We do. We already have 9.4GW of signed conditional orders and LOIs [letters of intent]. And we have a pipeline of a further 30-plus gigawatts’ worth of demand from customers that we're talking to.

Well, there’s a lot of demand in the industry, and there’s a lot of people who want the best technology.

I hope that’s not the case. What we are often seeing in the industry is that people with very large pipelines of projects will typically have multiple projects and they'll have projects that go in phases.

So while they might deploy one of the incumbent technologies in an early phase, if it’s earlier than our timeline, then they’re looking to us for subsequent phases. So I don’t see people being held up, as such, given the fact that there’s just such a pipeline of projects out there.

None that I can [disclose].

I can tell you about the customers that we’re targeting. We’re targeting customers in the hard-to-abate sectors, and customers that are project developers that are going to produce hydrogen or derivatives like ammonia for those sectors. So it’ steel production, it’s ammonia and methanol for shipping, it’s the oil & gas sector [where hydrogen is used for remove sulphur from crude oil and to produce certain oil-based products]. It's all those large-scale applications that are hard to decarbonise without hydrogen.

Based on demonstration of manufacturing, scale up and operation of the system at commercial scale.

That’s probably not details that I can go into.

Not something that we’ll be announcing yet. But, there is a lot of investor interest in our company. We had a Series A round last year, which was A$42.5 million, and that was oversubscribed and we still see significant investor interest.

Virescent Ventures, which is the venture arm of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which is Australia’s green bank. So they came in at our seed round and they led our Series A.

There’s also IP Group Australia and Kiko Ventures, which are both specialising in deep tech VC [venture capital]. We have Vestas Ventures, so Vestas is the world’s largest wind turbine company. Vestas, they’ve invested in us, Hostplus, one of the Australian pension funds.

No.

It’s an incredibly exciting business. It’s pretty rare, I think, in any sector that you get a real step-change technology coming along.

Typically, what you see in most technologies is incremental improvements, where people chip away at a technology and steadily improve it over time. It’s what we’ve seen in the solar industry, it’s what we've seen in the wind industry, but it’s rare that you get a real leap.

And it is indeed a leap.

We’re already operating at the efficiency that Irena, the International Renewable Energy Agency, had as its 2050 target. So to be already here in the early 2020s at that level gives you an indication of how much of a leap this is..