NewHydrogen Files Third Patent Application for ThermoLoop Hydrogen Production Technology

NewHydrogen, Inc. recently announced that it has filed a third provisional patent application jointly with the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) to protect developments related to its clean hydrogen production technology, ThermoLoop.

The patent application is titled "Isothermal Chemical Looping Hydrogen Production." According to NewHydrogen, the application builds on two previous patents and covers the latest improvements to the ThermoLoop thermochemical water-splitting process, as well as novel material compositions discovered by the UCSB technical team. The process produces hydrogen by splitting water using thermal energy, combined with advanced solid-state materials and machine learning-driven materials discovery methods to improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

NewHydrogen is currently building the ThermoLoop Engineering Test Unit (ETU). The unit is an automated demonstration test system capable of round-the-clock iterative operation without human intervention, designed to acquire high-resolution engineering data. The company states that this data will be used for the design of its first commercial pilot plant and will help advance the project from fundamental R&D to engineering validation.

NewHydrogen CEO Steve Hill stated that the ETU will help the company transition from basic scientific validation to the dataset required for establishing its first pilot plant, providing a basis for subsequent scale-up applications.

According to information disclosed by the company, the ThermoLoop technology aims to reduce the reliance of clean hydrogen production on high-cost electricity and instead leverage low-cost thermal energy. The company believes that existing and future power generation facilities, particularly small modular reactors, could serve as potential heat sources for such thermochemical hydrogen production processes.