H2Giga

With a total funding volume of 740 million euros, the three hydrogen lead projects (H2GIGA, H2MARE and TRANSHYDE) are a central contribution of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) to the implementation of the National Hydrogen Strategy. As one of the more than 130 industrial and scientific institutions that are working on the production of green hydrogen on an industrial scale, Ruhr University Bochum is most prominently involved in the H2GIGA project.

It is currently not possible to predict how high, exactly, Germany’s demand for green hydrogen will be in the future. One thing is clear, however: the demand will reach several million tonnes of hydrogen per year. If possible, the National Hydrogen Strategy aims to build up as much as five gigawatts of electrolysis capacity in Germany alone by 2030.

This requires efficient, durable, robust, affordable and scalable electrolysers. Even though there are already large electrolysers on the market today that work efficiently and over long periods of time, their production is still largely done through manual labour. This is time-consuming, cost-intensive and error-prone. What is needed is the mass production of electrolysers that can be adapted on a modular basis to their respective application sites. Mass-produced electrolysers are also necessary to make green hydrogen competitive. The lead project H2Giga is therefore dedicated to the development of serial production of electrolysers – across all technologies.

The Chair of Production Systems (LPS, Professor Bernd Kuhlenkötter) is the project coordinator in the FertiRob project and a partner in the HyPLANT100 project. In total, both projects have over 20 partners from industry and research.

In the FertiRob and HyPLANT100 projects, the LPS is researching automation for the industrialisation of hydrogen production. While the FertiRob project researches and develops automated stack production, HyPLANT100 focuses on the automated integration of stacks into large-scale electrolyser systems.

The Chair of Inorganic Chemistry I headed by Professor Ulf Apfel is involved in the DERIEL subproject, which deals with the risk minimisation (de-risking) of a newly developed pressurised (series PEM) electrolyser. The main objective is the construction and operation of two single-module test stands on a megawatt scale.