Putting hydrogen to work on industrial heating

The H2GO team presents its technology to Rishi Sunak and Bill Gates

A partnership between startup H2GO Power and Baxi will bring climate neutral heating to a wide range of industrial applications.

H2GO Power, a hydrogen energy startup created at Imperial from research carried out at Cambridge University, has signed a partnership with major boiler manufacturer Baxi to develop systems that will decarbonise a wide range of industrial heating processes. Its first application will be using hydrogen to pre-heat natural gas before it enters the distribution system, without creating greenhouse gases.

“This partnership is a key milestone for the company,” says Dr Enass Abo-Hamed, the company’s co-founder and Chief Executive. “Baxi is a market leader in the heating manufacturing industry, and it has chosen H2GO Power out of all the other solutions on the market as a partner to build new products with.”

Hydrogen is a vital part of efforts to decarbonise the economy, both as a zero-carbon fuel in its own right, and as a means of storing energy from renewable sources. However, no-one has yet found an economic way of using pure hydrogen for industrial heating. This is the challenge that H2GO and Baxi have taken on.

H2GO’s core technology is an innovative way of storing hydrogen. Instead of compressing the gas for storage in cylinders, its system allows hydrogen to be absorbed, stored and released in a safe, highly controlled way. This highly adaptable approach has been developed for a range of applications, from storing surplus renewable energy to industrial heating. This could stretch from the cement, glass, and ceramics industries, to chemicals, food and drink, and paper and pulp.

"Hydrogen is a viable alternative net zero energy carrier that can meet the needs of these hard to decarbonise sectors, and can be used for mass storage of variable renewables – such as wind and photovoltaics – to use at times of peak demand for heat,” says Karen Boswell, Managing Director at Baxi UK & Ireland. “Developing practical, cost-effective ways of storing hydrogen addresses both decarbonisation and energy reliability, making this project a particularly interesting solution for multiple use cases."

Developed at Imperial

H2GO’s technology is based on research carried out at the University of Cambridge, which was then  developed further and commercialised at Imperial. In 2017, the H2GO team took part in the Cleantech Accelerator run by Imperial for the Climate Knowledge Innovation Community (Climate KIC), which has since evolved into the Undaunted climate change innovation partnership.

Dr Abo-Hamed then continued to develop the company through a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Hub Fellowship, in the laboratory of Professor Nigel Brandon in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering.

“Imperial really welcomed us when we moved from Cambridge and I started the RAE fellowship,” she says. “They gave us mentorship and access to courses, and we worked alongside engineers from Nigel's lab, and ended up applying for grants with them. So, we developed and learned from everything that was around us at Imperial.”

Professor Brandon also joined H2GO Power’s advisory board, sharing his expertise as a scientist and a founder of the startups Ceres Power and RFC Power. “He's always been a mentor, and has advised me on a lot of matters in addition to technology development, such as how to think about the future of the product, and how to anticipate obstacles and design our way around them. The greatest leadership lessons I have acquired, I actually learnt from him.”

H2GO Power joined Imperial’s White City Incubator in 2020, and currently has offices and laboratories there and in the near-by Scale Space.

Inside the partnership

Within the new partnership, Baxi will provide boilers that run on pure hydrogen, while H2GO will engineer the systems needed for each application. “Our teams have integration, automation and software capability, so that they can take the hydrogen boiler, and integrate it with a hydrogen storage system and a hydrogen production system,” Dr Abo-Hamed explains.

We can take the hydrogen boiler, and integrate it with a hydrogen storage system and a hydrogen production system. Dr Enass Abo-Hamed H2GO Power

While this approach will work with any production method for hydrogen, the ideal is to use green hydrogen, created using renewable sources such as solar or wind power. “Since a lot of hydrogen will be generated in this way, it needs to be stored in a very controlled and a very safe way, and that’s where our solution plays an important role.”

The system also requires software able to manage the connection between the renewable energy source, hydrogen generation and consumption. “Our software is able to predict the best time to generate hydrogen, the best time to store it, and best time to use it,” Dr Abo-Hamed says. “When that is linked to demand from the user, there is no waste – economic waste, in this case – in the process. That matters, because costs are always a disadvantage with new technologies, and controlling them is the key to making them profitable and appealing to customers.”

Getting gas moving

The partnership includes plans for an industrial-scale demonstration project, hosted by Northern Gas Networks, which will test a system for safe, carbon-neutral gas pre-heating.

Before gas can be supplied to homes and businesses through the distribution network, its pressure must be reduced. This process can cause the gas to freeze, so pre-heating takes place to allow the gas to flow. Traditional pre-heating units are highly energy and cost-intensive, often burning gas to create the heat, emitting carbon dioxide in the process.

The system that H2GO Power and Baxi will test, called heat-in-the-box, sets out to lower the cost of pre-heating, while cutting out additional carbon emissions entirely.“If successful, the pilot will be a game changer for the UK and beyond,” says Dr Abo-Hamed. “We are also pleased to have the backing of the UK government from its £1 billion Net Zero Innovation Portfolio, which will go a long way in delivering our long-term ambition to reduce energy costs while playing a role in the transition.”