Ayrton Energy mimics margarine to store hydrogen safely

As a fuel, hydrogen has a lot going for it. You can burn it for heat to replace coal, you can run it through an electrolyzer to generate electricity, and you can use it to refuel a vehicle as quickly as gasoline or diesel. But it’s challenging to get hydrogen to where it’s needed.

As the universe’s lightest gas, hydrogen is tricky to contain. It leaks through tiny cracks, and it can diffuse into certain metals, breaking them down. To transport the stuff usually requires compression or liquefaction, both of which require a lot of energy. But there’s an alternative: attaching hydrogen atoms to a carrier molecule that’s easier to move.

The idea isn’t new: So-called liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHC) have been around for decades, and most rely on volatile organic compounds like toluene and methylcyclohexane. Those chemicals play nice with hydrogen, but little else given their toxicity and how much heat and pressure they need to release the gas. 

A new startup, Ayrton Energy, says it has an alternative: an LOHC that can be transported and processed at room temperature and pressure. And it’s nontoxic.

“It actually looks like water,” Natasha Kostenuk, co-founder and CEO of Ayrton Energy, told TechCrunch. “It’s a safe, non-toxic liquid. I wouldn’t drink it, but it wouldn’t kill you.”

Kostenuk and her co-founder, Brandy Kinkead, didn’t set out to upend how hydrogen is transported. Initially, they had a vision of replacing diesel generators with ones that run on clean hydrogen. 

“We needed a hydrogen storage solution,” she said. “First we thought, well, we’ll just find one. We were just going to integrate pieces from the industry. But we could not find a hydrogen storage solution that made any sense to us. So we came up with a solution.”

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Kostenuk wouldn’t disclose which oil her company is using, but said it stores hydrogen similar to how canola oil is turned into margarine, which is made from vegetable oils. Unlike the animal fats that make up butter, vegetable oils are liquid at room temperature. To make margarine, producers expose vegetable oils to hydrogen gas in the presence of a catalyst (which helps facilitate the reaction). As the oils are hydrogenated, they solidify.

Ayrton takes a similar approach. “It’s hydrogenation,” Kostenuk said. “We’ve just found a novel way of doing the hydrogenation and dehydrogenation compared to traditional LOHC.” The equipment that adds and releases the hydrogen to and from the oil is similar to electrolyzers that are used today to produce hydrogen from electricity. As a result, the company can use commercially available equipment for a large part of its operations, and scaling will just require building more modules, not bigger parts.

Transporting Ayrton’s oil doesn’t require anything special, either. “People who are already using liquid fuels, for example, we can reuse a lot of that infrastructure. Pipelines, rail cars, trucks,” she said. “I’ve spoken to pipeline companies that have excess lines that aren’t being used they’re trying to find ways to reuse older infrastructure.”

Kostenuk envisions using tanker trucks to deliver hydrogenated LOHC to an industrial facility. Once empty, it’ll take dehydrogenated LOHC back to the processing plant so it can be reused.

Ayrton’s process requires less energy round trip than liquefied hydrogen, ammonia, or methanol, Kostenuk said, and a little bit more than compressed hydrogen. The advantage, though, is that the LOHC can carry twice as much hydrogen per liter than compressed hydrogen and has lower up-front costs because it can reuse existing trucks, pipes, and pumps.

The company recently raised a $6.8 million seed round led by Clean Energy Ventures and BDC Capital, with participation from Antares Ventures, EPS Ventures, SOSV, The51, and UCeed Investment Funds. With the funding, Ayrton plans to scale its technology to the point where it’s making two to three tons of hydrogen per day by 2027.