This most recent funding brings its total funding to $107 million. On Tuesday, H2Pro announced it has raised $75 million from investors including Bill Gates' climate tech investing fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and ArcelorMittal, a global leading steel and mining company. H2Pro aims to have pilot systems being tested in 2023 and utility scale systems in 2024. The technology is still very early days, and was pioneered by three scientists at Technion: Hen Dotan, who's now H2Pro's chief technical officer, and professors Gideon Grader and Avner Rothschild. 'That heat doesn't cost us anything.' (The science is explained in more detail in a Nature scientific paper here.) It generates its own heat to maintain the reaction,' Marco told CNBC. 'We don't need to input heat into the system. That's because the H2Pro system generates its own heat in the reaction. The H2Pro technology will be 95% efficient, Marco said. It's not technically an electrolyzer, since part of the process is not electrochemical.Īlso, a typical electrolyzer is about 70% efficient, meaning that about 30% of the energy that goes into an electrolyzer gets lost to heat. The H2Pro solution does not require a membrane to keep the hydrogen and oxygen separate, Marco says. And that construct causes electrolyzers to be expensive,' Marco told CNBC. 'The membrane makes it a very, very complicated construct. To prevent this from happening, an electrolyzer must have a membrane to separate the oxygen and hydrogen gasses. Having those two gasses together is dangerous because if hydrogen gas and oxygen gas are sparked (a possibility in an electric system), then they explode. In a typical electrolyzer, the hydrogen and oxygen are produced at the same time when the water is split. H2Pro doesn't have a hand in determining the price of renewable energy, but 'the assumption is the cost of renewable energy is already fairly low, and will continue to get even lower,' Marco told CNBC. And for hydrogen to be clean, or 'green' according to the color-coded nomenclature, it also needs to be powered by renewable, or clean, energy. To drive down the cost of hydrogen requires cheap energy, high efficiency and low cost of equipment, Marco said. It's expensive, though, and that's a problem. If it is powered with clean energy, it can be a clean pathway to generating hydrogen. This is conventionally done with a water-splitting device called an electrolyzer. The collection and storage of natural gas also inevitably leads to methane emissions, a dangerous greenhouse gas.Īnother way of producing hydrogen is by breaking up water, H2O, into its component parts with electricity. The cheapest way of producing hydrogen is from natural gas, but that process results in carbon dioxide emissions. That said: pure hydrogen has to be produced - it does not exist on its own in abundant quantities on earth.

But because, when burned in a controlled environment it releases no greenhouse gas emissions, it's also being explored as a potential fuel replacement for some hard to decarbonize sectors and for energy storage. Hydrogen is already a key commodity in a variety of industrial processes and in making ammonia fertilizer, which is critical to generate enough food to feed the global population. (Hydrogen does make nitrogen oxides when burned in air, as does anything when it is burned in air.) By contrast, burning fossil fuels releases dangerous greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide. When hydrogen is burned in a controlled environment not exposed to the air, it generates energy in the form of heat, with water as a byproduct. That science became the framework for Marco's next company, H2Pro, which is one of a crop of start-ups trying to speed the clean energy revolution by focusing on new ways to make hydrogen. Marco began looking for technologies that could be used to combat climate change and in his research, he became connected with faculty members at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, who were working on a technology that produces hydrogen in a nonconventional way. 'There are obviously a lot of problems in the world, but the one that we felt was closest to our heart is the climate crisis.' In the years after Juno was acquired, Marco changed his focus to making the world better.

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