Located in Loiu, in the Biscay Region of Spain, the company says its new plant has capacity to produce tens of thousands of palladium alloy membranes per year, with plans to increase capacity in the coming years.

Having invested more than €3m ($3.1m) in the new plant, it is hoped it will lead to the industrialisation of such membranes, which have proved costly, and difficult to manufacture and scale in the past.

“Once the first production line has been validated, our objective is to significantly increase the capacity of the plant, vertically integrate the manufacturing process of the membrane and build new plants to tackle new markets,” said Andrés Galnares, CEO of H2SITE.

Galnares added, “Our objective is to significantly increase the number of membranes produced each year for the next 3 years, which entails continuing to invest in production assets similar to those we have already installed and increasing their level of automation to further reduce our costs.”

Launched in 2019, H2SITE’s technology converts different raw materials into hydrogen, as well as being able to be used for the separation of hydrogen from gaseous mixtures in low concentration. In June (2022), it announced it had raised €12.5m ($12.9m) to scale up its technologies.

Read more: €12.5m raised to scale membrane reactor technology

Asier Rufino, CEO of TECNALIA Ventures and President of H2SITE, commented, “At TECNALIA we have been working for 20 years on the development and scaling up of hydrogen technologies its entire value chain: production, distribution, transport, storage and end uses. Together with the Technical University of Eindhoven (TU/e), the technology H2SITE leverages on was created. Today, H2SITE has scaled the process, has industrialised it, and is managing to reduce its cost to be able to develop new use cases.”