Talmon Marco 承认他不是预期的气候技术专家。
2010 年，他与人共同创立了移动通讯公司 Viber，该公司于 2014 年被日本互联网公司乐天以 9 亿美元收购。 2015 年，Marco 与他人共同创立了叫车公司 Juno，该公司于 2017 年被以色列交通公司 Gett 以 2 亿美元收购。
在收购 Juno 后的几年里，Marco 将重心转移到让世界变得更美好。 “世界上显然存在很多问题，但我们认为最贴近我们内心的是气候危机。”
Marco 开始寻找可用于应对气候变化的技术，在他的研究中，他与以色列理工学院 Technion 的教职员工建立了联系，他们正在研究一种以非常规方式生产氢气的技术。
这门科学成为 Marco 的下一家公司 H2Pro 的框架，H2Pro 是一群试图通过专注于制造氢气的新方法来加速清洁能源革命的初创企业之一。
当氢气在不暴露于空气的受控环境中燃烧时，它会以热量的形式产生能量，水是副产品。 （氢气在空气中燃烧时确实会产生氮氧化物，就像在空气中燃烧时一样。）相比之下，燃烧化石燃料会释放危险的温室气体，主要是二氧化碳。
氢已经是各种工业过程和制造氨肥的关键商品，氨肥对于生产足够的食物来养活全球人口至关重要。但是，因为在受控环境中燃烧时，它不会释放温室气体，因此它也被探索为一些难以脱碳的行业和能源储存的潜在燃料替代品。
也就是说：必须生产纯氢——它在地球上并不大量存在。
最便宜的制氢方式是天然气，但该过程会导致二氧化碳排放。天然气的收集和储存也不可避免地导致甲烷排放，这是一种危险的温室气体。
另一种生产氢气的方法是用电将水 H2O 分解成其组成部分。
这通常使用称为电解器的水分解装置来完成。如果它以清洁能源为动力，它可以成为产生氢气的清洁途径。不过，它很贵，这是个问题。
Marco说，要降低氢气的成本，需要廉价的能源、高效率和低成本的设备。根据颜色编码的命名法，要使氢气变得清洁或“绿色”，它还需要由可再生或清洁能源提供动力。
H2Pro 无法确定可再生能源的价格，但“假设可再生能源的成本已经相当低，并且会继续变得更低，”Marco 告诉 CNBC。
H2Pro 解决方案
在典型的电解槽中，水分解时会同时产生氢气和氧气。将这两种气体放在一起是危险的，因为如果氢气和氧气被点燃（电力系统中的一种可能性），它们就会爆炸。为了防止这种情况发生，电解槽必须有一个膜来分离氧气和氢气。
“膜使它成为一个非常非常复杂的结构。这种结构导致电解槽价格昂贵，”Marco 告诉 CNBC。
Marco 说，H2Pro 解决方案不需要膜来保持氢气和氧气的分离。它在技术上不是电解槽，因为部分过程不是电化学的。
此外，一个典型的电解槽的效率约为 70%，这意味着进入电解槽的大约 30% 的能量会因热量而流失。 Marco 说，H2Pro 技术的效率将达到 95%。
这是因为 H2Pro 系统在反应中会产生自己的热量。 “我们不需要向系统输入热量。它会产生自己的热量来维持反应，”马可告诉 CNBC。 “那种热量不会让我们付出任何代价。” （这里的自然科学论文中更详细地解释了科学。）
该技术仍处于早期阶段，由 Technion 的三位科学家开创：Hen Dotan，现在是 H2Pro 的首席技术官，以及 Gideon Grader 和 Avner Rothschild 教授。
H2Pro 的目标是在 2023 年测试试点系统，并在 2024 年测试公用事业规模系统。周二，H2Pro 宣布已从比尔盖茨的气候技术投资基金、Breakthrough Energy Ventures 和全球领先的钢铁公司安赛乐米塔尔等投资者筹集了 7500 万美元。矿业公司。这笔最新的资金使其总资金达到 1.07 亿美元。
如果 H2Pro 可以制造绿色氢，那将有助于使钢铁制造过程脱碳，这是安赛乐米塔尔投资的原因之一。
After selling two software start-ups for over $1 billion, founder turns his focus to green hydrogen
Talmon Marco admits he is not the expected climate technologist.
In 2010, he co-founded mobile messaging company Viber, which was acquired in 2014 by Japanese Internet company Rakuten for $900 million. In 2015, Marco co-founded ride-hailing company Juno, which was acquired in 2017 by the Israeli transportation company Gett for $200 million.
In the years after Juno was acquired, Marco changed his focus to making the world better. “There are obviously a lot of problems in the world, but the one that we felt was closest to our heart is the climate crisis.”
Marco began looking for technologies that could be used to combat climate change and in his research, he became connected with faculty members at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, who were working on a technology that produces hydrogen in a nonconventional way.
That science became the framework for Marco's next company, H2Pro, which is one of a crop of start-ups trying to speed the clean energy revolution by focusing on new ways to make hydrogen.
When hydrogen is burned in a controlled environment not exposed to the air, it generates energy in the form of heat, with water as a byproduct. (Hydrogen does make nitrogen oxides when burned in air, as does anything when it is burned in air.) By contrast, burning fossil fuels releases dangerous greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide.
Hydrogen is already a key commodity in a variety of industrial processes and in making ammonia fertilizer, which is critical to generate enough food to feed the global population. But because, when burned in a controlled environment it releases no greenhouse gas emissions, it's also being explored as a potential fuel replacement for some hard to decarbonize sectors and for energy storage.
That said: pure hydrogen has to be produced — it does not exist on its own in abundant quantities on earth.
The cheapest way of producing hydrogen is from natural gas, but that process results in carbon dioxide emissions. The collection and storage of natural gas also inevitably leads to methane emissions, a dangerous greenhouse gas.
Another way of producing hydrogen is by breaking up water, H2O, into its component parts with electricity.
This is conventionally done with a water-splitting device called an electrolyzer. If it is powered with clean energy, it can be a clean pathway to generating hydrogen. It's expensive, though, and that's a problem.
To drive down the cost of hydrogen requires cheap energy, high efficiency and low cost of equipment, Marco said. And for hydrogen to be clean, or “green” according to the color-coded nomenclature, it also needs to be powered by renewable, or clean, energy.
H2Pro doesn't have a hand in determining the price of renewable energy, but “the assumption is the cost of renewable energy is already fairly low, and will continue to get even lower,” Marco told CNBC.
The H2Pro solution
In a typical electrolyzer, the hydrogen and oxygen are produced at the same time when the water is split. Having those two gasses together is dangerous because if hydrogen gas and oxygen gas are sparked (a possibility in an electric system), then they explode. To prevent this from happening, an electrolyzer must have a membrane to separate the oxygen and hydrogen gasses.
“The membrane makes it a very, very complicated construct. And that construct causes electrolyzers to be expensive,” Marco told CNBC.
The H2Pro solution does not require a membrane to keep the hydrogen and oxygen separate, Marco says. It's not technically an electrolyzer, since part of the process is not electrochemical.
Also, a typical electrolyzer is about 70% efficient, meaning that about 30% of the energy that goes into an electrolyzer gets lost to heat. The H2Pro technology will be 95% efficient, Marco said.
That's because the H2Pro system generates its own heat in the reaction. “We don't need to input heat into the system. It generates its own heat to maintain the reaction,” Marco told CNBC. “That heat doesn't cost us anything.” (The science is explained in more detail in a Nature scientific paper here.)
The technology is still very early days, and was pioneered by three scientists at Technion: Hen Dotan, who's now H2Pro's chief technical officer, and professors Gideon Grader and Avner Rothschild.
H2Pro aims to have pilot systems being tested in 2023 and utility scale systems in 2024. On Tuesday, H2Pro announced it has raised $75 million from investors including Bill Gates' climate tech investing fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and ArcelorMittal, a global leading steel and mining company. This most recent funding brings its total funding to $107 million.
If H2Pro can make green hydrogen, that could help decarbonize the process that makes steel, which is one reason ArcelorMittal invested.
