The chief executive of an Australian company that builds commercial-scale electrolysers to split water into hydrogen and oxygen will join a business delegation accompanying the prime minister’s four-day official visit to the US to explore clean energy opportunities created by the Biden administration’s US$369bn Inflation Reduction Act.
Paul Barrett, the chief executive of Hysata, says the company expects to ramp up to as much as one gigawatt of capacity annually within years.
“We’ve delivered ahead of time, ahead of budget and we’re ramping up really rapidly with the space to do it,” Barrett said, referring to the company’s new site near Port Kembla, south of Sydney.
Barrett said the company had “made some pretty outstanding progress” in the past year.
“We want to be the world’s biggest electrolyser company and definitely have the technology to do that,” he said.
Hysata, which works on technology originally developed at the University of Wollongong, received more than $23m in grants from the federal and Queensland government. Those funds, along with $42.5m of its own capital raising, will support the development of electrolysers that use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen with about 95% energy efficiency and just 5% waste.
Hydrogen, particularly produced using renewable energy, is expected to become a major new energy source to replace fossil fuels in the production of steel, aluminium and other industrial processes. Among the challenges, though, will be getting the price of hydrogen low enough to compete, particularly in the absence of carbon price.
The company is not expected to make fresh announcements during this week’s visit to the US. Of interest, though, will be exploring opportunities generated by the Biden administration’s US$369bn (A$585bn) clean energy investment portion of the Inflation Reduction Act.
“We’ve got huge interest from the global investment community and in what we’re doing and we’ll be tapping into that at the appropriate time,” Barrett said.
Vestas, one of the world’s largest producers of wind turbines, is among the investors, as is IPGroup.
Hysata employs about 60 staff now, a number that will probably swell to the hundreds next year.
The company has bought the equipment needed to build 100 megawatts of electrolyser capacity a year, and will have the line operating next year, Barrett said.
The plant is designed to replicated to meet “conditional pre-orders and letters of intent” for gigawatts of more capacity, with a further 40-50GW in the pipeline.
“These are pretty big, multibillion dollars of [signings] and, you know, tens of billions of dollars in a pipeline,” he said. “We’ve got tailwinds that I think is getting us a lot of international exposure.”
