Virginia Class PEM Electrolyzer Cost Reduction by Reduced PGM Loadings

Giner Inc (Giner), having built over thirty operational PEM electrolysis cell stacks for the US Navys Seawolf, Ohio, and Los Angeles Class submarines is the worlds leading supplier of such equipment. Our proposal is to leverage the results of our earlier work on advanced PEM electrolyzer catalysts into a project aimed at productionizing and optimizing the best candidate material. Since anode catalyst loadings are approximately one order of magnitude higher than currently proven cathode catalyst loadings we expect to concentrate our development efforts on the anode materials. We propose to run optimization experiments on the low PGM anode catalyst to optimize the anode loading at or below 0.25 mg/cm2 which has been demonstrated to provide equivalent performance to our standard anode catalyst at 16 times that loading level. During the optional portion of the Phase I we propose to longevity test the down-selected catalyst loading at Navy submarine cell stack operating conditions. Our initial cost studies indicate that successful conclusion of this effort will definitively lead to a greater than 20% reduction in stack cost from the $1M figure stated in the solicitation to less than $800k.