Bill Gates-Backed Israeli Startup Raises $22M To Scale Up Green Hydrogen

H2Pro, a startup founded in Israel in 2019, has raised US$22 million in a funding round from clean energy funds backed by Bill Gates, among others, in order to scale up green hydrogen production, Bloomberg reports.

H2Pro aims to enable affordable green hydrogen production at scale, it says, through the use of a proprietary method for producing green hydrogen by splitting water that is over 95 percent efficient, safe, and cost-competitive with fossil-fuel hydrogen. The company’s E-TAC technology with 95 percent efficiency is more efficient than alkaline and Polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) water electrolysis with an energy efficiency of around 70 percent, according to H2Pro. The start-up also estimates that its membrane-free technology would be easy to scale and thus reduce capital expenditures (capex) by half compared to traditional electrolyzers.

H2Pro’s technology splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, but hydrogen and oxygen are generated separately in different steps, unlike in conventional electrolysis.

The company told Bloomberg that it could produce green hydrogen for $1 per kilogram by the second half of this decade, much more ambitious than current analyst estimates, which do not see this low a cost for clean hydrogen by 2050. BloombergNEF estimates that in 2019, a kilogram of green hydrogen cost between $2.50 and $6.80.

H2Pro, in which Hyundai Motor has also invested, is the latest company aiming to scale up green hydrogen production and make it cheaper.

Last week, Danish catalyst manufacturer Haldor Topsoe said it planned to build a large-scale facility to manufacture electrolyzers that would be used for green hydrogen production and potentially reduce the cost of green hydrogen by 20 percent.

Hydrogen, especially green hydrogen, has become the latest fad among energy companies, including Big Oil, who see potential in developing and investing in technologies to produce green hydrogen.

French supermajor Total looks to become a large producer of clean hydrogen one day, chairman and chief executive Patrick Pouyanné said at an event last month, while BP, Shell, and Eni are also developing green hydrogen projects.