Green hydrogen is the gateway to every Power-to-X pathway. Whether the goal is synthetic kerosene for aviation, e-methanol for shipping, e-methane for the gas grid or simply long-term storage of renewable electricity — it all starts with splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using renewable power. The catch: today, producing green hydrogen by electrolysis is roughly twice as expensive as making hydrogen from natural gas. A new research project led by Switzerland’s Empa, together with two French partner institutes, wants to change that.

Why green hydrogen matters for Power-to-X

Hydrogen is considered a cornerstone of the energy transition because it can replace fossil fuels in sectors that are hard or impossible to electrify directly — heavy industry, long-distance transport, aviation and shipping. When hydrogen is produced from renewable electricity, it is called green hydrogen. When it is later used in a fuel cell or burned, it reacts with oxygen to form water again, releasing no greenhouse gases.

For Power-to-X, green hydrogen is the indispensable building block. It is the molecule that allows surplus renewable electricity to be stored chemically, transported, and converted into the synthetic fuels, gases and chemicals our industrial society still depends on. As long as green hydrogen remains expensive, every downstream Power-to-X product — e-fuels, e-methanol, e-ammonia, sustainable aviation fuel — also remains expensive.

The cost problem: rare metals in the electrolyser

The main cost driver in producing green hydrogen is not the electricity. It is the electrolyser itself — more specifically, the materials it is built from. The project at Empa focuses on Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Water Electrolysis (PEMWE), a technology considered particularly well suited to the fluctuating power output of wind and solar.

Inside today’s PEMWE electrolysers, key components are manufactured from corrosion-resistant titanium and then coated with platinum. Both materials are expensive, hard to process and geopolitically sensitive. As long as every new gigawatt of electrolyser capacity requires significant amounts of platinum and titanium, scaling green hydrogen to the volumes needed for global Power-to-X markets remains a structural bottleneck.

Empa’s approach: titanium oxide instead of platinum

Researchers from Empa’s Materials for Energy Conversion laboratory, together with the Institut de la Corrosion in Brest and LEMTA in Nancy, are developing an alternative. Their idea: replace the expensive platinum coating with a special form of titanium oxide — a highly crystalline, oxygen-poor rutile — and use steel as the carrier metal instead of pure titanium.

First results confirm a high corrosion resistance of the new coating. The team has already succeeded in coating the so-called bipolar plate of a PEMWE electrolyser with titanium oxide using Physical Vapour Deposition (PVD), a process that is already widely used in the hydrogen industry. That last point matters: a laboratory breakthrough that cannot be manufactured at industrial scale is of limited value. “It is important to us to develop something the industry can actually use,” Empa materials scientist Konstantin Egorov is quoted as saying.

What this means for Power-to-X in Switzerland and beyond

Cheaper electrolysers do not solve the green hydrogen cost problem on their own — the price of renewable electricity, full-load hours and the regulatory framework remain decisive. But material innovation is one of the few levers that can systematically reduce the capital cost (CAPEX) of electrolysis. Every percentage point of cost reduction in the electrolyser translates directly into cheaper green hydrogen, and from there into more competitive Power-to-X products.

For Switzerland, with its strong materials science base and its strategic interest in defossilising hard-to-electrify sectors such as aviation, heavy transport and process industries, projects like this are doubly relevant: they strengthen the domestic Power-to-X value chain and reduce dependency on critical raw material imports.

The project runs until the end of 2026. After that, the researchers plan to bring industry partners on board to commercialise the technology.

Source

punkt4.info, 21 May 2026: Empa-Forschende wollen Grünen Wasserstoff günstiger herstellen.