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Today we’re all at sea, as we meet a startup working on a more cost-effective way to generate plentiful green hydrogen, assisting the shift to renewable energy.

But before you scroll down to read about Latent Drive, some things you should know…

• Hey, VCs! Imperial College London and The Royal Academy of Engineering’s Enterprise Hub are taking applications for their Science and Technology Venture Capital Fellowship

• Aimed at mid-career VCs and entrepreneurs transitioning to VC, it offers a programme to help them identify high-potential, scalable, life science and deep tech ventures

• Find out more and apply here

Also:

• London-based fashion tech startup Hey Savi announced a £2.2 million pre-seed round earlier this week. They’re calling it one of the biggest pre-seed rounds ever raised by a UK all-female founding team

– Martin

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Latent Drive wants to turn offshore wind farms into green hydrogen factories

Hydrogen is a cornerstone of clean technologies. It can avoid pollution while powering everything from vehicles to electricity generation. 

But hydrogen has a dirty secret: producing it often uses fossil fuels, because ‘green hydrogen’–produced without fossil fuels–is more expensive.

The reason for this is the power needed to run the electrolysers that extract hydrogen from water are much cheaper to run on electricity from non-renewable sources.

Looking to resolve the issue of expensive green hydrogen, and make it a truly ‘green’ power source, is Dorset-based startup Latent Drive.

The team has developed SeaStack, an electrolyser designed to drive down the cost of producing hydrogen from renewable sources. To do this, the product is designed to be placed out at sea, on offshore wind farms. 

Unlike traditional electrolysers, which require fresh water to operate, SeaStack can work directly with salt water from the sea, installed on existing platforms at wind farms so they can generate hydrogen alongside electricity, and pump it back to shore.

The problem with traditional electrolysis approaches, co-founder and technical director Joseph Ely explains, is that when you split hydrogen from salt water, you tend to also split the salt, which releases dangerous chlorine gas.

“We have burnt holes straight through traditional electrolysers with chlorine gas from our first trials… It's quite dramatic how aggressive chlorine gas can be,” he says.

And while traditional electrolysers can split water without splitting the salt, it can only happen at a low, steady power level. That is definitely not possible out at sea where a wind farm generates electricity at varying levels as the wind changes strength.

And so Latent Drive has developed what it describes as a “unique cell architecture” that allows it to generate hydrogen from salt water out at sea, without any of the traditional problems.

How it works

So what is Latent Drive doing differently? To quote Jennifer Aniston, “here comes the science bit”, courtesy of Joseph’s fellow co-founder, and his father, Frazer Ely:

“Instead of just simply splitting the water, we do it in two stages. We first of all dissociate water into ions. That takes place in a seawater chamber, which is an entirely polymer chamber which seawater flows through. Then those ions, and only those ions, flow out through selective membranes to the electrodes. 

“That means the final stage where we evolve hydrogen and oxygen takes place away from the seawater and in a more controlled environment where we're not encountering the problems of splitting the salt.”

Frazer says SeaStack can be fitted either on individual wind turbines or on the substation platforms that collect power from the turbines. It can be added to existing wind farms, but he believes it will mostly be incorporated into new-build projects, as operators would need to build a hydrogen pipeline out at sea, in addition to electricity cables.

Frazer believes SeaStack will allow wind farm operators to get more value from their facilities. Rather than curtail electricity production in high winds when the grid might not be able to handle it, they can use that energy to produce (and sell) more hydrogen.

Looking to a specific market need, Frazer points to the Hydrogen Backbone Link as an example. This is designed with the aim of pumping hydrogen from Scottish waters to mainland Europe. 

There are concerns that not enough hydrogen could be produced for this pipeline with traditional methods that need to couple electrolysers with desalination tech to purify the sea water. Latent Drive aims to be the solution by making offshore hydrogen production far more cost effective.

The story so far

Father and son team Frazer and Joseph both come from an engineering background.

Amid fervent demand for ventilators during the worst days of the Covid pandemic, they received grant funding to extract pure oxygen from water vapour in the air. 

However, the catalysts needed to split water into oxygen and hydrogen were prohibitively expensive. So they took a different approach.

“We set about developing our own unique catalyst using our unique process in an engineering approach, which converts the surface of stainless steel directly to a catalyst,” says Joseph. 

“We don't add any precious metals, and that’s a lot cheaper, because all it is is stainless steel that's been treated electrochemically. The cost of the electrode is no longer the most expensive part of the stack, which it was before; it's no longer a cost limitation for us.”

This approach led Latent Drive to target the hydrogen market with Catrodes, a product that allows third-party electrolysers to operate more efficiently. This is now on the market and Frazer says it’s generating sales.

But it’s with the SeaStack that they want to make a major impact.

Now a team of five, Latent Drive has developed a prototype of SeaStack, “about the size of a large microwave” as Joseph describes it. 

Frazer says the current unit would have use cases such as refuelling a hydrogen-powered fishing boat, but it would need to be significantly larger, and supplied in stacks of multiple units, for use at a wind farm.

The startup plans to run trials with SeaStack in harbours and at off-shore sites next year.

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