Smoltek Nanotech : We have the technology to make production of green hydrogen profitable

Green hydro­gen, pro­duced from fossil-free elec­tri­city is con­sidered, both with­in the EU and glob­ally, to be a key tech­no­logy to man­age the green trans­ition. Cur­rently, there are no oth­er fossil-free altern­at­ives for many indus­tri­al and ship­ping areas. Green hydro­gen has the poten­tial to become the lead­ing solu­tion for fossil-free steel pro­duc­tion and heavy ocean freight.

When pro­du­cing green hydro­gen in large sol­ar or wind farms, it is cru­cial to be able to quickly start and stop pro­duc­tion. This pro­cess requires the spe­cif­ic PEM elec­tro­lys­is tech­no­logy, where the expens­ive and rare met­al iridi­um splits water into hydro­gen and oxy­gen. Unfor­tu­nately, the lack of avail­able iridi­um risks mak­ing mass pro­duc­tion of PEM elec­tro­lyz­ers unprof­it­able. This is due to today’s over­use of iridi­um, as well as the fact that the price of iridi­um is fore­cast to rise sig­ni­fic­antly in the com­ing years.

Smol­tek’s nan­o­ma­ter­i­al – proven tech­no­logy lead and a clear path to com­mer­cial man­u­fac­tur­ing
Smol­tek Hydro­gen has developed a nan­o­ma­ter­i­al that has been proven to work well in long-term stud­ies, and the com­pany has a clear path to reach the goal of 0.1 mg of iridi­um per square cen­ti­meter, which Smol­tek as well as the lead­ing insti­tute Fraunhofer con­sider to be the level at which large-scale man­u­fac­tur­ing of PEM elec­tro­lyz­ers becomes com­mer­cially prof­it­able. The com­pany is not aware of any oth­er indus­tri­ally veri­fied solu­tion that is able to reach this tip­ping point.

To cap­it­al­ize on this head start, Smol­tek Hydro­gen is now seek­ing fin­an­cially strong part­ners to fin­ance the remain­ing devel­op­ment and com­mer­cial­iz­a­tion of the nan­o­ma­ter­i­al, includ­ing scale-up of pro­duc­tion capa­city, and cre­ate the con­di­tions needed to reach its tar­get of a 30% mar­ket share, cor­res­pond­ing to approx. 20 bil­lion SEK in net sales in 2030. This pro­cess has been con­cret­ized with Smol­tek’s ongo­ing bid­ding pro­cess for Smol­tek Hydro­gen, which is expec­ted to take 6-12 months.

We have high ambi­tions as we are cur­rently unique in provid­ing a solu­tion to a crit­ic­al prob­lem. Fol­low­ing the present­a­tion of excel­lent long-term res­ults, we have star­ted to more firmly work towards becom­ing the elec­tro­lyz­er man­u­fac­tur­ers’ col­lab­or­a­tion part­ner for the next gen­er­a­tion of elec­tro­lyz­ers. The interest from lead­ing play­ers is strong even before we have act­ively star­ted to reach out to the mar­ket, and dis­cus­sions and tests are already under­way with a num­ber of lead­ing com­pan­ies. Our tar­get is to reach a 30 per­cent mar­ket share in 2030 togeth­er with part­ners, which would cor­res­pond to a turnover of approx­im­ately 20 bil­lion SEK. And even if the pro­jec­ted sales volume is large, a giant fact­ory plant is not required. But it is urgent to start build­ing a pilot plant, because time is short. For that reas­on, the ongo­ing bid­ding pro­cess is an import­ant step on the way there.

Ellinor Ehrn­berg, Pres­id­ent of Smol­tek Hydrogen

Plan for indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion of the nan­o­ma­ter­i­al
Dur­ing the next year, Smol­tek Hydro­gen plans to estab­lish a pilot plant for small-scale indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion to, togeth­er with cus­tom­ers, man­u­fac­ture pro­to­types of new elec­tro­lyz­ers and, togeth­er with machine sup­pli­ers, be able to cre­ate the spe­cific­a­tions for the first large-scale plant. There are sev­er­al pos­sible paths for­ward regard­ing volume pro­duc­tion, but in a such a fast-grow­ing industry it is not unusu­al to build up the busi­ness oper­a­tions as an inde­pend­ent com­pany, as an altern­at­ive to being part of a lar­ger indus­tri­al structure.