Hysilabs is a start-up developing a process for transporting hydrogen in liquid form, which would solve one of hydrogen’s main problems: transportation and storage.
One of hydrogen’s biggest problems is storage. Under “normal” conditions, 1kg of hydrogen takes up 11,000 liters… What’s more, dihydrogen is the smallest molecule AND is highly corrosive to steel. In short, an infernal headache.
Currently, to transport it, we mainly use compression (350-700 bars for hydrogen mobility) which consumes a lot of energy (>10% of the energy potential of the hydrogen transported), requires very heavy specific tanks and carries risks. More rarely, we use liquefaction, which is denser, but must be maintained below -253°C and consumes a great deal of energy (>20%). These difficulties make it imperative to develop alternatives.
Hysilabs technology
Founded by Pierre-Emmanuel Casanova and Vincent Lôme in 2015 in Aix-en-Provence, HySiLabs proposes to store hydrogen in a silicon solution (named “HydroSil) in the form of hydrides. Unlike McPhy and the designers of Powerpaste, HySiLabs has chosen silicon hydrides rather than magnesium hydrides.
This process would be
- Carbon-free
- Environmentally harmless (as opposed to ammonia NH3)
- stable, able to hold hydrogen for several days or months and be reused a lot.
Their competitors would be Hydrogenious and Chiyoda, but the vector proposed by the latter would be carbon-based and toxic (Source: Les Echos, to be verified).
HydroSil could transport 8.7% of its mass in hydrogen. A truck could therefore carry 7 times more H2 than a high-pressure hydrogen truck at 200 bars.
History and financing
The company raised €2 million and was the winner of the EDF Pulse prize in the Smart City category in 2018. It has also reportedly received €4 million from the European Commissions. Anticipating a larger round, it planned to set up a plant in Fos in 2020. This fund-raising still seems to be in progress, scheduled for 2022. They plan to register Hydrosyl with REACH in 2023 and use it for the first time (to power a hydrogen boat) in 2024.(Source)
To find out more, read our article on hydrogen storage.