Mattiq and Heraeus partner to develop and commercialize low-iridium electrocatalyst materials for green hydrogen production
31 January 2025
Mattiq, a clean chemistry company, announced a strategic partnership with Heraeus Precious Metals, a global leader in the precious metals industry, to develop and commercialize advanced electrocatalyst materials for green hydrogen production. The companies will engineer low-iridium catalysts to reduce significantly the amount of this rare and critical raw material for proton exchange membrane (PEM) water electrolyzer manufacturing before expanding into other innovative electrochemical solutions.
Iridium is one of Earth’s rarest naturally occurring elements, making the efficient use of this critical resource a requirement to serve increasing demand for hydrogen production and other applications. With current iridium loading requirements, PEM electrolyzers will be limited in scale of annual deployment. Solutions are therefore needed to reduce iridium content in electrocatalysts without sacrificing performance.
In their collaboration, Mattiq and Heraeus Precious Metals will shorten the traditional R&D-to-commercialization timeline, rapidly advancing low-iridium catalysts from prototype to industrial-scale solutions.
The foundation of this partnership is Mattiq’s previously announced completion of a comprehensive study of low-iridium catalysts for PEM water electrolysis, an effort that synthesized and characterized more than one million unique catalyst materials—three orders of magnitude more than all possibilities previously evaluated, according to the company.
Heraeus Precious Metals is a world leader in precious metals reclamation, processing, and catalyst manufacturing. Its dedicated Hydrogen Systems business line is spearheading the introduction of low-iridium catalysts for PEM electrolysis globally. The company identified this partnership as an opportunity to accelerate the speed at which its innovations come to market and meet the increasing needs of its extensive customer base. As an expert in manufacturing of advanced precious metal based catalysts, Heraeus brings the experience and capability to develop the identified solutions further, verify their feasibility for large scale manufacturing, and to deliver an end product at industrial scale and reliability.
This partnership builds on the ongoing collaboration between Mattiq and Heraeus, first announced in 2023 when Mattiq verified the performance of a new ruthenium-based catalyst for PEM water electrolysis. The companies intend to expand their partnership into novel applications in electrocatalysis to accelerate the economically viable decarbonization of the chemical industry.
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