Business Description

Overview At SunHydrogen, our goal is to replace fossil fuels with clean, renewable hydrogen. Hydrogen is already a significant industrial commodity. Roughly half of global consumption goes into ammonia, most of which becomes fertilizer, and methanol, with oil refining accounting for much of the remainder, and smaller and emerging use in steelmaking and as a fuel. Free hydrogen is rare on Earth, so essentially all hydrogen must be manufactured, and about 95% of the hydrogen produced in the United States is made by steam reforming of natural gas (US Department of Energy, Hydrogen Fuel Basics). That process is inexpensive, which is why it dominates, but it emits carbon dioxide, and that carbon intensity is carried into the fuels, fertilizers, and materials hydrogen is used to make. We are developing photoelectrochemical, or PEC, panels that produce renewable hydrogen from sunlight and water. Sunlight absorbed by the semiconductor generates photovoltage and charge carriers that drive photoelectrochemical oxidation and reduction reactions at catalyst surfaces, producing hydrogen and oxygen without an externally applied electrical bias to the active device and without a separate electrolyzer or the power conditioning equipment that conventional electrolysis requires. A complete pilot or commercial system may use electricity for pumps, controls, sensors, data acquisition, gas handling, and thermal management. Because our panels are intended to produce hydrogen at the point of use, our approach is also designed to avoid the cost and emissions of delivering hydrogen from a central production plant. The components of our panels, and the terms we use to describe them, are defined under “SunHydrogen Panel” below. We have not determined the commercial model through which we will generate revenue. We may sell hydrogen panels to customers who own and operate them, sell hydrogen produced by systems we own or operate, license our technology to manufacturers, or pursue some combination of these approaches. Our current preference is to sell panels, and our activities to identify potential hydrogen offtakers are intended in part to demonstrate demand for hydrogen produced using our technology. Our eventual model may vary by market and geography, and it may differ from any of the approaches described above. We are pursuing two pathways to this architecture. The first uses commercially available, mass-produced thin film solar modules that are re-engineered with our proprietary hydrogen module design, which allows them to be manufactured on existing solar production lines without modifying those lines. This pathway is the basis of the hydrogen reactors we have built to date. The second uses our patented nanoparticle technology, Photoelectrosynthetically Active Heterostructures, or PAH, in which billions of electroplated nanoparticles per square centimeter, separated by a protective coating, each act as a self-contained water splitting unit. We continue to develop both pathways. On the thin film pathway, working with CTF Solar GmbH, we have progressed from small-area laboratory devices to hydrogen modules having a nominal aperture area of 1.92 square meters, which is the standard size of a commercial solar module, and we have built multiple hydrogen reactors incorporating those modules. On the nanoparticle pathway, we have established manufacturing processes for the semiconductor junctions and for the hydrogen and oxygen evolution catalysts, and have demonstrated technical proof of concept. Efficiency, durability, manufacturing yield, scalability, and cost on that pathway remain under development and validation. Our goal remains a production cost of $2.50 per kilogram of hydrogen, which we believe would allow renewable hydrogen to compete directly with hydrogen produced from natural gas. Techno-economic modeling prepared with Strategic Analysis, Inc. currently projects a production cost of approximately $4 to $5 per kilogram at commercial scale, before the benefit of any tax credits. 1 We expect the difference between that projection and our goal to be closed, if at all, through improvements across several elements of our technology and its supply chain rather than through any single change.…