Research Consortium Focuses on Hydrogen Energy

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced an initiative aimed at accelerating the development of advanced water splitting technologies for producing renewable, clean-burning hydrogen energy. This initiative, named the HydroGEN Advanced Water Splitting Materials consortium, consists of six DOE national labs. These labs will make their resources available to researchers in industry and universities in an effort to increase collaboration among all parties involved.

HydroGen’s annual $10 million budget will be used for research grants. The hope is that this will fuel—no pun intended—the type of growth that’s been seen in recent years in the wind and solar industries. The consortium offers two routes for entry:

DOE Funding

This focuses on leveraging HydroGEN’s capabilities. The DOE’s Fuel Cell Technologies Office plans to release a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) entitled “Fuel Cell Technologies Office Annual FOA.” Once released, interested parties can apply for funding under the consortium.

The FOA can be found on the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s (EERE) website. There will also be webinars and/or weekly public teleconferences where applicants can ask questions and gather additional information from technical representatives.

Lab Partnerships

Interested organizations can engage in cooperative R&D agreements or strategic partnerships to share the resources of the national labs. HydroGEN is developing a standard non-disclosure agreement, which each member lab would sign prior to any collaboration, to protect any research findings.  HydroGEN is expected to launch an online data portal sometime in 2017 to securely house experimental and computational data.