Naturgy and the Instituto Tecnológico de Canarias launch a pilot project to test a disruptive green hydrogen production technology

  • This new electrolysis technology aims to increase efficiency and reduce costs by significantly cutting down on the use of scarce exhaustible materials and also allows for great flexibility and rapid response in terms of integration with renewable energies.
  • The two organisations have established a long-term partnership and plan to start a second testing programme early next year with a higher capacity electrolyser.

Naturgy and the Instituto Tecnológico de Canarias (ITC), a public R&D&I centre ran by the Government of the Canary Islands, will share their knowledge and experience to validate the performance of an innovative electrolysis technology to produce green hydrogen. The aim of this partnership is to install and test an experimental 2 kW electrolyser prototype to analyse the unit’s design and compare the results with current commercial systems.

This project is expected to increase the efficiency and reduce the cost of producing green hydrogen as fewer scarce and exhaustible materials such as noble metals are required. Moreover, the technology can be easily adapted to the variability of renewable energies, allowing for great flexibility and a rapid response.

This technology, known as an anion exchange membrane (AEM), has been developed by the Singapore-based start-up Sungreen. Naturgy has been working alongside this company since September 2022. As part of Naturgy’s collaboration with Sungreen and the ITC, a second phase of the pilot project with a 50 kW electrolyser is planned for early 2025 in Gran Canaria, which will be optimised with improvements and the results obtained with the 2 kW unit currently undergoing testing.

Jesús Chapado, who heads Naturgy’s Innovation area, stressed that “this project is a commitment from the company to facilitate the arrival of green hydrogen and promote its development at a lower cost. We expect this new technology to provide greater flexibility, self-regulation and self-efficiency in the production of this new energy carrier”.

Gonzalo Piernavieja, director of R&D&I at the ITC, said that “testing cutting-edge green hydrogen production technologies is part of our commitment to accelerate the effective integration of renewable energy sources into the energy model”. “We work alongside international energy companies to explore and validate solutions that aim to decarbonise the economy, positioning ourselves as a benchmark in the use of green hydrogen as a raw material in the carbon-neutral fuel manufacturing process”, he said.

Commitment to innovation and sustainability

Naturgy believes that innovation is an essential tool in the development of new energy solutions that make it possible to move forward in the energy transition, combat climate change and evolve towards technological solutions that promote the simplification of processes, cybersecurity and data management, with digitalisation also being another fundamental pillar for achieving the company’s objectives.

Naturgy Innovahub has a large number of industrial projects under way linked to innovation in the energy sector, and they have already led to the creation of two disruptive companies: GIRA Wind and W2BM. In collaboration with Ruralia, Postelectrica Fabricación and Invenergy Services, the first of these companies focuses on the integral recycling of wind turbines and the recovery of materials from blades and other wind turbine parts to give them a second life. The second project, promoted alongside Greene, aims to develop a technology to produce biomethane using a renewable syngas from the gasification of solid industrial waste.

The company’s innovation model is designed to weave collaborative networks with the ecosystem that allow us to respond to the complexity of the environment and solve challenges in an agile and efficient way, focused on digitalising processes and services. Thus, it has agreements with universities and works with technology centres and research groups, sector and business associations, organisations and government bodies, and, of course, entrepreneurs.

The Canary Islands, a laboratory for green technologies

The ITC is a public R&D centre and plays a key role in the Government of the Canary Islands’ strategy to promote the competitiveness of the local economy, contributing to the sustainable development of this region through knowledge and technological innovation. With a multidisciplinary approach, its R&D&I areas address the challenges of a vulnerable territory threatened by the pressures of tourism, the climate crisis and its situation as an OR (remoteness, insularity, small size, dependence on the outside world, etc.).

The ITC focuses its scientific-technological specialisation on strategic sectors for growth and economic diversification in the archipelago, highlighting the competitive advantages of the islands as a natural laboratory for the development of innovative solutions for the ecological transition and resource recovery. Among other lines of work, the ITC promotes the use of renewable energy resources and the development of sustainable power generation and self-supply technologies, and these capabilities are then transferred to regions around the world with similar conditions.

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