Ned Stetson, Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office: All right. Hello, everyone. Sorry about that little snafu.
As mentioned, I'm the Program Manager for the hydrogen technology area within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Hydrogen Fuels and Technologies Office. As you've heard this morning it's been an exciting two years since our last AMR. We have a lot of interest growing in hydrogen globally with countries developing roadmaps and strategies and calling for investments in the equivalent billions of dollars for the deployment of clean hydrogen production technologies as well as the required infrastructure to enable the hydrogen to be used to help decarbonize a number of sectors of the economy. We have countries which are looking at developing hydrogen as a potential export product. And domestically, we just heard the exciting announcement this morning of the Hydrogen Earthshot where we're really looking at using hydrogen as an enabler to meet the administration's goals for clean energy production and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
So, the hydrogen technology area… there we go. So, the hydrogen technology area encompasses everything from the production of hydrogen molecules from the areas of feedstocks and clean energy conversation technologies through getting the hydrogen in the correct form for transporting and storage within the infrastructure to the final delivery and dispensing to various end uses. And then – as well as the onsite storage or onboard storage to be used when necessary. So, it's a very comprehensive effort. One of the major organizational changes that we've made since the last AMR is that we've now integrated all these areas onto one program, so we actually have a very comprehensive program and we have a very smooth transition from the hydrogen production all the way through the infrastructure to the final dispensing and use at the end use.
We are an application- or target-driven office, so we have various targets for the applications. For example, in hydrogen production you've heard for years we've had a $2.00 threshold target for transportation applications. With the announcement of the Hydrogen Earthshot we've now formalized the $2.00 a kilogram target for 2025 and we're developing technology-specific goals in order for us – to enable reaching that goal. So, for instance, for electrolyzers we're looking at 70 percent electrical efficiency, $100.00 a kilowatt stack cost, 80,000-hour durability, and a total system cost of $250.00 a kilowatt. To get to the 2030 goal of $1.00 a kilogram we are currently analyzing various scenarios to determine what the application-specific goals would have to be to enable us to meet that.
As we look at the various applications for hydrogen, we see hydrogen liquefaction as being another key enabling technology, as liquid hydrogen will play a greater and greater role. One of the issues with liquefaction today is that at today's liquefaction plants roughly one-third of the lower heating value of hydrogen is consumed just in the liquefaction process. So, we feel like we really need to get the energy requirement for liquefaction down to make it much more efficient, so we have a goal of cutting it in half to roughly six kilowatt-hours per kilogram of hydrogen, not only at the large scale but also in the low scale because we see low volume liquefaction still being applicable.
Another area of hydrogen being talked about a lot is for energy storage. For energy storage what we're really talking about is taking electricity, converting it through PEM electrolytes to hydrogen, storing the hydrogen, and then using a fuel cell or turbine to convert it back to electricity to put back on the grid.
We have targets of $250.00 a kilowatt for electrolysis. We have a $1,000.00 kilowatt target for station of PEM fuel cells. So, the question is what does the hydrogen storage cost have to be to be competitive with other energy storage technologies? So, earlier Sunita announced the NREL StoreFAST model. So, using a version of the StoreFAST model we've been analyzing what do the hydrogen storage costs need to be to be competitive with other energy storage technologies? Compressed air is the most aggressive, the lowest cost option today. For us to look at being competitive we're looking at roughly $5.00 a kilowatt-hour for hydrogen storage to be cost-competitive with CAES. If you look at pumped hydro, we – it looks like we can be roughly twice the cost, $10.00 to $12.00 a kilowatt-hour for hydrogen and be competitive with pumped hydro. So, again, these are preliminary analyses which will be at some point getting information and feedback from stakeholders and then issuing targets for these applications.
In terms of transportation we've had these goals for a long time, for light duty vehicles in particular. Now we're looking at heavy duty vehicles. We have the threshold target of $2.00 a kilogram for hydrogen production. If you look at today's technology using those trellises we are about $5.00 to $6.00 a kilogram – and I'll discuss that more in a little bit. If we were able to scale up the manufacturing and get the manufactured electrolyzers into the hundreds of megawatts scales we project it would be around $3.50 to $4.50 a kilogram.
For a fueling station, delivery to the fueling station and dispensing of the hydrogen, again, for light duty vehicles our target is $2.00. For heavy duty vehicles it looks like we can go to $3.00 – so, totally dispensed cost of $5.00 – and still be competitive. With today's technology and at capacities for today we're about $9.50 to $11.00 a kilogram. If we were to scale up the capacity of stations we project we'd be in the $5.00 to $8.00 a kilogram range.
For onboard storage, again, our target is $8.00 a kilowatt. At today's volume our projection is about $21.00 a kilowatt and we – if we get 100,000 units a year we've got $16.00 a kilowatt. So, we're still about 2X higher than what we need to be.
So, we carried out a lot of economic analysis to try and understand what are the drivers and where should we be putting our investments to try to reduce the costs and improve these technologies. For production a lot of it comes from electrical energy. This is looking at a high temperature where we also have a thermal energy input, but the electrical energy is a major driver. While we can't control the cost of electricity we can control the efficiency of the system and therefore try to reduce the amount of energy needed. The other is the capital costs of the system. So, these are a couple of key areas we work on – efficiency and the capital costs – but also durability because we need to increase the lifetime to reduce the overall maintenance costs.
When it comes to the infrastructure, again, looking at an 800 kilogram a day station, the compressor is about half the cost. And then, the hydrogen chiller, because we have to precool hydrogen at -40 degrees, the dispenser and storage – this is the high pressure cascade storage – these each cost roughly round 13, 14, 15 percent of the total cost. So, we get these four levers which we can work with. You will see as we go to the high throughput stations the compressor becomes even more dominant.
And then, for the onboard storage systems over half the cost comes from the carbon fiber. And this is looking at the total system from the refueling receptacle all the way to delivery of hydrogen to the fuel cell system, including mounting brackets, pressure regulators, and everything. But still, even looking at the total system about 50 percent of the costs or more than 50 percent of the costs is just coming from the carbon fiber that's used in the pressure vessels.
So, looking at our budget for the last several years we've had $70 million, $71 million last year and this year. We had about $29 million or $30 million going into production and $25 million into delivering dispensed part of the infrastructure and about $16 million going into the storage part.
This is the team. The team has grown a lot since the last AMR. So, looking at the production area we have technology managers. We have Katie Randolph, Dave Peterson, James Vickers, who joined the team several years ago as a fellow. This last year we were able to convert him into a federal technology manager. And since last AMR we've also had Will Gibbons join as a technology manager.
The production team is supported by Kim Cierpak-Gold as well as Levi Irwin. Levi actually split between the solar office and our office, so it gives us some coordination with the solar office and particularly the country's solar.
And then, this fall we're proud to announce we have a new fellow starting this fall, McKenzie Hubert. She'll be starting with us this fall.
On the delivery and dispensing side we have Neha Rustagi, Mark Richards, who – again, he's been around the community for many, many years supporting the office as a fellow the last couple years and we just a month ago converted him to a technology manager. And then, Brian Hunter.
And with the recent movement of Jesse Adams to take over as Program Manager for Technology Acceleration, Zeric Hulvey is currently the technology manager handling all the storage. But he's being supported by two ORISE fellows, Asha-Dee Celestine and Martin Sulic, who provide a lot of support there. And then, Eric Heyboer, who has also joined since the last AMR, he provides program support across the infrastructure side. And then, Marika Wieliczko, who started just over a year ago, she provides support across the whole program.
So, let's talk a little bit about hydrogen production. And when you look at the hydrogen technology track the orals for hydrogen production will be all day Thursday – or, Tuesday and the first two sessions on Wednesday.
So, when you look at hydrogen production, we heard this morning from our colleagues at Fossil Energy talking about the use of fossil resources to produce hydrogen with carbon capture utilization sequestration to make it clean. But our office is really focused on these clean energy pathways. So, we look at biomass, including waste, for conversion of hydrogen and then we look at water splitting. So, low and high temperature electrolysis and direct solar water splitting, which includes solar thermochemical and photoelectric chemical.
So, I mentioned that our current cost is $5.00 to $6.00 a kilogram. If you take grid electricity at $0.05 to $0.07 a kilowatt-hour with a high capacity factor and you take a conservative capital expense of about $1,500.00 a kilowatt that's where the $5.00 to $6.00 comes from. There's been a number of reports in the last year or so looking at hydrogen production through electrolysis, and if you look at the capital expense that they've come up with it ranges from $750.00 to $1,400.00. So, if we took the more intermediate cost of $1,000.00 for the CapEx we're still at roughly $4.50 to $5.50. If we actually looked at real renewable energy cases – so, this is from the NREL Annual Technology Baseline Report for 2020 – and looked at renewable energy and the $0.03 to $0.04 actual cost for renewable energy being generated from – at these sites with the lower capacity factors and using that middle of the road cost we're still coming up in the $4.00 to $6.00 range. So, that's why we're very comfortable saying that the current costs of renewable hydrogen generation through electrolysis is $5.00 to $6.00 a kilogram.
But now with the announcement of the Hydrogen Energy Earthshot or the Hydrogen Earthshot the question is how do we get from the $5.00 down to $2.00 by 2025 and eventually to $1.00 by 2030?
So, the levers we – if I can go back… The levers we have, first, we don't control the cost of electricity; however, we can control the electrical efficiency. So, we're really targeting improved efficiency for electrolyzers while also looking at low capital costs for the systems, improving the durability, which will help lower their operation and maintenance costs, but we also need to get low-cost manufacturing, and then we also need large-scale manufacturing. So, we need to get the deployment of electrolyzers up so we can actually increase the manufacturing capacity across the country.
So, for PEM this results – to get to the 2025 target of 70 percent electrical efficiency, $100.00 stack costs, 80,000 hours of durability, with an overall cost of $250.00, and with a reasonable electricity cost we project that we'll get the $2.00 a kilogram at that point. And for solid oxide, where now we have the thermal energy input, we get really high electrical energy efficiency, which is one of the advantages of solid oxide electrolysis. Again, with $100.00 stack costs, a 60,000 hour durability – so, for a total cost of about $300.00, again, we project we would be at the $2.00 a kilogram. And as mentioned, we're looking at various pathways to get us from the $2.00 to $1.00 a kilogram.
So, what's the approach? I like to describe our approach as a layered approach. We start off with a foundational layer, which is looking at advanced materials. So, this is looking at improved membranes, catalysts, ionomers for electrical and ionic conduction – so, all of the materials that go in. And this work has been carried out the last several years through the Hydrogen National Lab Research Consortium.
And then, the next layer up is advanced components. This is where you take these materials, integrate them into membrane electrode assemblies – so, now you're taking the catalysts and the ionomers and the membranes and integrate them together where we need to get to realize the performance of these materials as a complete system and make sure that the system is going to function properly and have the durability needed under real world conditions. So, that work is being led by our new effort, which is H2NEW, which we'll be describing in a minute.
And then, the top layer is really getting into advanced manufacturing. This is where we develop low-cost manufacturing processes to be able to manufacture megawatt-scale electrolyzers at low cost and meet the durability and performance that's been developed through HydroGEN, H2NEW, and lower level research efforts. And this we envision as all being industry-led activities.
So, talking about HydroGEN, this has been going on for several years. This past year we actually basically rescoped it and we've now done the HydroGEN 2.0. Part of the rescoping is reduce the efforts on PEM low temperature electrolysis as well as _____ conducting or high temperature electrolysis and move those efforts primarily into H2NEW. However, HydroGEN will still focus on the alkalinic exchange membrane, low temperature electrolyzers, as well as the proton-conducting solid oxide. These technologies are much lower level, and of course we'll continue working with direct water-splitting technologies such as solar thermal and photoelectric chemical.
Over the time frame of HydroGEN so far we've had 11 national laboratories, 10 different companies, and 39 different universities participating in over 30 projects. So, it's been a very large collaborative effort over the last five years or so.
Some of the key accomplishments, recent accomplishments from it, in the area of alkaline exchange membrane electrolysis one of the issues there has been the durability of the membrane. And we've worked with Georgia Tech; one of the _____ projects has been able to develop very stable performance for over 750 hours at the relevant operating conditions. So, this is an exciting new development where we're getting good stable performance over a long period of time.
In the case of high temperature, one of the problems with high temperature electrolyzers is chromium poisoning, where chromium migrates from some of the stainless steel and its _____ and causes poisonous cell. Work at Nexceris and other seedlings has shown a protective coating which is able to give us very stable performance. We don't have the loss of performance you have with no coating.
In the area of solar thermal chemical, Arizona State University, they've used computer-aided material discovery to identify a new class of materials which has a second redox site, and this new class of materials, they've actually been able to synthesize the materials and actually evaluate them and shown stable performance, and they're actually getting higher hydrogen production capacity than the other ____ materials.
And then, photoelectric chemical, again, trying to get the cost down with a stable material. People have been looking at perovskites. And work at Rice University has just recently demonstrated a two and a half increase over – in the sun-to-hydrogen efficiency over the best AVR perovskite material. And this is integrated in a low-cost 3-D printed photoelectrochemical reactor cell, so a big improvement in the efficiency for this perovskite material.
The new effort we just launched, we're just launching this year is called H2NEW. It stands for Hydrogen for Next generation of Electrolyzes of Water. It's led by NREL and Idaho National Laboratories, with NREL leading the low temperature PEM activities and INL leading the high temperature oxide-conducting – solid oxide activities, being supported by work at Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, Pacific Northwest, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, and the National Energy Technology Laboratory.
So, this is the group that's really charged with enabling us to meet our overall efficiency goals of getting the cost down to $1.00 a kilowatt for the stack, improving the electrical efficiencies for the low and high temperature electrolysis, as well as getting the durability up. And in fact, durability is the first major focus. And they will be initially looking at understanding degradation mechanisms when you integrate the electrocatalysts, and the membranes, ionomers, and all the other components into a membrane electroassembly and when you start incorporating that into – with other components to make up a stack, and developing accelerated stress tests so we can understand the durability in a matter of weeks or months and not having to wait years.
How it functions? As we mentioned before, the lower level or layer is the hydrogen, the advanced materials. This group worked with seedling projects where they provided support to seedlings using the capabilities at the national lab. The PEM and the oxide-conducting materials we're migrating to H2NEW. H2NEW is really going to be focusing on the integration into components, and we will be running FOAs and CRADA calls for groups to join H2NEW. In this case we'll be looking for activities that can actually support and fill in gaps within the national lab expertise, so these will be real partners and not just receive support for national labs. And then, this will all be carried out in close coordination with the manufacturing efforts so that what they're looking at is reflective of what we come at with our manufacturing line. And they'll be using an iterative approach doing both in-situ and ex-site testing – and really – and feeding knowledge back into the manufacturing processes.
In addition to that we're looking at the manufacturing. So, last year we ran a FOA topic on low-temperature electrolysis manufacturing – so, this is looking at PEM specifically. We committed $14 million of DOE funds. Three projects were selected – at Plug Power, 3M, and Proton Energy, looking at single-piece multifunctional integrated membrane anode assemblies, looking at how we can incorporate the catalysts in electrodes to fabricate them so we get very efficient use of catalysts and reduce any precious metals that are required. And then, Proton is looking at the porous transfer layers and how you can actually optimize the manufacture of the porous transfer layers in large area cells.
This year we have another FOA topic on manufacturing, this time focused on high temperature. We've committed $10 million of DOE funds in this year's topic, and it's really looking at how do we reduce the part count and processing steps to manufacturing the oxide-conducting cells, and how can we incorporate real-time quality control metrology so we can actually improve the quality control and reduce reworks, and with a targeting of getting the manufacturing costs down to $300.00 a kilowatt. Both of these activities are co-funded between our office and the Advanced Manufacturing Office.
And in parallel to all that we've also been carrying out a separate effort looking at benchmarking and protocol development for all the advanced water-splitting technologies. This effort is led by NEL. Also, Proton Energy – NEL is a parent company of Proton Energy – Arizona State University, Caltech, and Pacific Northwest National Lab. And they're really charged with developing best practices and characterization methods so that we can try to get uniformity on how these technologies are both characterized and reported so that we can get better reproducibility across labs. Part of this effort was to hold annual workshops. Recently, this past year they held the third annual AWS workshop. This was a virtual workshop because of the pandemic. But actually, the advantage of that is we had over 200 participants representing over 15 countries participate. In the prior ones we were down closer to 100 attendees, but being virtual we were able to get better participation from the international community as well.
In the final effort of this current phase of the work they are finalizing the protocols that have been developed so far. So, over the three years to date they've developed the roadmaps for the four different water-splitting pathways. They've actually drafted and reviewed 45 test protocols, and there's another 25 that are currently under review, and the goal is to get all these published before the end of this calendar year in the Frontiers in Energy. So, that should be a big benefit for the research community in these technology areas.
And then, finally, for production we are also looking at production using biomass and waste streams. So, one of the efforts we've been carrying out for a while is you take ligneous-cellulosic materials – so, this could be corn stalks and cobs, et cetera, and you can use fermentation, and when you run it through fermentation you get about four equivalents of hydrogen per equivalent of sugar. However, you take the effluent, because in that process you also create a lot of other organic byproducts, including _____ fatty acids. You take the effluent from that and you run it through a microbial electrochemical cell; you can get up to another eight equivalents of hydrogen per sugar molecule. So, you can basically triple the amount of hydrogen produced when you couple a fermentation process with the MEC.
So, through a lab effort with NREL, Pacific Northwest, Lawrence Berkeley, and Argonne, they've been working this technology. Back in 2019 we ran a FOA topic and we selected a project led by Oregon State University, which is looking at improvements to microbial electrochemical cells – so, again, get better improvement in the operation of this system.
And in the current FOA topic, we had another FOA topic which is looking specifically at waste streams. So, this could include things such as wastewater, food waste, _____ waste, et cetera. And so, again, we're looking at getting – improving the efficiency of the production, getting the cost of the production down, and we expect to be able to make an announcement soon. There's a total of about $2 million in federal funds committed to this effort.
So, moving on to hydrogen infrastructure. With H2@Scale we are now looking at a very diverse set of end uses. It's no longer just looking at transportation.
So, transportation, for years we were focused on light duty. Recently we expanded it to look at heavy duty. So, medium and heavy duty trucks. But not only on-road but also looking at marine vessels, rail, et cetera. So, these are large contributors of both fuel consumption as well as greenhouse gas emissions. Also looking at synthetic fuels, which could be used for aviation, as well as the heavy duty transportation applications. We are also looking at different processes – so, ammonia, the second-most widely produced chemical worldwide. We started looking at metal production – so, iron production, steel production, cement production, et cetera. These, again, very energy-intensive processes and with a large greenhouse footprint. And then, also, just for power production and providing heat and power to buildings and other operations. Hydrogen can be used in all of these.
However, the quality, the pressure, the quantity of hydrogen for these can be very different than for transportation. So, this means that we have to be very flexible in the infrastructure and looking at especially the dispensing part. So, when we talk about the infrastructure part we're really looking at once we produce the hydrogen molecule we have to convert it into the appropriate form for transport and storage within the infrastructure. So, predominantly today it's gaseous hydrogen, which could be – which is often shipped by trucks; it could also be put in pipelines. We also have liquid hydrogen. You have to liquefy the hydrogen and today it's primarily shipped by truck. There's a lot of activity now, especially for potential export markets, looking at marine transport of liquid hydrogen, but also you can look at rail. And then there's carriers. So, this is where the hydrogen is bonded within another material and depending on the form of the material – it could be liquid or organic or maybe something like ammonia, which is liquefied gas – you can use trucks, you can use ships, you can use rail, you can use pipelines. But then, once you get it to the end use you need to be able to dispense it to the final use application.
So, the hydrogen infrastructure technology area looks at this entire gamut from converting the molecule to the right form for transport and storage to final dispensing, and especially in the case of transportation even the onboard storage technologies.
So, looking at the delivery and dispensing aspects, these oral projects will start on the – in the third session on Wednesday and go through all day Thursday.
One of the major efforts we've had in this area for the last several years is the Hydrogen Materials Compatibility Consortium, or H-MAT. This is really looking at how do we improve the materials and identify what materials are compatible for hydrogen servers, and metallic as well as polymer materials? So, again, it's a national lab institute with Sandia National Lab leading the areas in metals and Pacific Northwest leading the areas in polymers.
So, the issue is how do we improve materials to avoid things such as blistering of polymers used in seals as well as cracking and other failure modes? And also, looking at metals, looking at how do we improve the metals so that we can actually get the costs down and improve the performance of metals?
So, ideally they work with the actual producers and actually can work with the actual materials and hopefully the actual products that's used in the infrastructure. So, for instance, in the polymer side they look at various materials that usually include plasticizers or fillers, and then they look at what happens when you start cycling it in service of hydrogen. And in this case it's looking at these filler particles where when you start cycling and you start putting in the hydrogen you start seeing the formation of voids.
So, ideally what they do is working with real products from vendors they are able to identify what are the failure mechanisms – or, what are the mechanisms that lead to the failures? And then, by computationally modeling it they can then look at strategies to help mitigate those failure modes. And so, they've actually been able to iterate in this process with actual producers of elastomer-sealed materials, for instance, and actually been able to improve the materials and get better service.
Certainly, with metals – and this is an example where they took nine different microstructural variants of a single pressure vessel steel and they were able to actually do a correlation and understand the relationship of the microstructure and the strength and the other properties of the material with its fracture resistance. So, again, using this they were able to identify ways to improve the production of the materials – so, for instance the heat treatment and the annealing temperatures to actually get better performance so we can actually get longer life and hopefully lower cost from these materials used in service.
So, related to that is a newer effort – Sunita mentioned this a little bit earlier. We are looking at the blends of hydrogen and natural gas. So, a lot of people wonder why would you blend hydrogen into natural gas? Well, for utility companies this is envisioned as a fairly low cost, easy way to start reducing carbon dioxide emissions from their applications or from their uses. A 30 percent by volume blend of hydrogen and natural gas would reduce CO2 emissions by 10 percent.
So, one of the questions we're constantly asked is, well, what level of natural gas – or, hydrogen can I blend in natural gas? And technically you can go from near zero to 100 percent blend. The question is what would be safe and practical? Because when you start blending hydrogen to natural gas we have (a) material compatibility issues, (b) we have issues with, for instance, combustion characteristics because the combustion of hydrogen is different from natural gas, the energy content is different. But another advantage is the fact that if you look at the US, if you look at the transmission network as well as the distribution network of natural gas we have over 300 million miles of pipeline. So, this is a way to actually produce a very large amount of hydrogen and put it into the natural gas pipeline, so this is one way to get rapid scale-up of hydrogen production. So, if we just blended 20 percent of hydrogen and natural gas we could essentially double the renewable generation.
So, we have the H-MAT consortium working understanding the compatibility of materials in a blended situation. In the CRADA call we ran this past year on this we had a very large response. Currently, we have over 20 stakeholders that are involved in this effort and we have a lot of other companies that are asking to join, so there's a lot of interested in this HyBlend effort.
The other area we are looking at is the heavy duty refueling station components. So, as I mentioned earlier, when you look at heavy duty stations – so, this is looking to be able to refuel 50 heavy duty trucks somewhere inside of 6 hours – the cost is dominated by the compressor. And then then the high pressure cascade storage is the second-most costly element. So, we are understanding this; we are looking at other station designs, looking to see how can we mitigate the effect of the compressor. And in response to trying to develop the – both the station designs and components for heavy duty refueling we ran a CRADA call in FY20 from which we selected five projects at roughly $10 million DOE funding looking at station designs as well as doing some R&D and cost analysis on the refueling methods, and especially chiller designs.
This year in the FY21 FOA we had a topic looking at the domestic supply chain for high-flow hydrogen stations. These are gong to be three-year projects. We had about $8 million – or up to $ millions of DOE funds being committed and looking at all of the various components – so, compressors, chillers, nozzles, hoses, meters, et cetera. And again, we expect selections on these projects to be announced soon.
So, moving on to the hydrogen storage aspect, in 2019 we updated our baseline cost projections. So, 2013 we were projecting about $22.00 a kilowatt-hour at 100,000 units a year. Today we're at about $16.00 a kilowatt-hour, 400,000 units. So, that's about a 30 percent reduction we're seeing between 2019 – or, 2013 to 2019. And this is for the whole system, so this includes the fueling receptacle all the way to – gas molecules all the pressure vessel, including in-line tank valve, the pressure, regulator, and everything required to mount the system and deliver hydrogen to the fuel cell.
This is for a single tank design. However, all the cars out there today actually have multi-tanks, so the pressure vessel with the in-tank valve is what we call a repeat unit because that's a part that has to be replicated every time you put a multiple – a tank in. So, we just took that repeat unit which is the pressure vessel and the tank valve. This is the cost breakdown. So, we go from about $16.00 to about just under $12.00 a kilowatt-hour when you do that. However, the carbon fiber has gone from a little over 50 percent to a little over 75 percent. So, this kind of gives us an idea of just looking at the pressure vessel itself and the tank valve.
When we look at heavy duty trucks we do not yet have a baseline system defined. People are looking at putting hydrogen behind the cab, outside the rails, inside the rails. People are looking at anywhere from 60 to 100 kilograms onboard storage. So, we have not yet defined that total baseline system. However, we can take a repeat unit – so, this is looking at a tank that would fit behind the cab with about a 20 kilograms usable capacity. When you do the same breakdown we see that we're a little bit cheaper, about a little over a dollar less per kilowatt-hour. Carbon fiber is about 77 percent. This other tank components such as the boss and the liner and the dome have – they essentially go away. But it's really the resin in the lining in the carbon fiber that dominates.
So, from this we project that we're probably going to be a little bit less than this cost for total system for heavy duty trucks. And _____'s analysis presentation will show that they're about $12.00 a kilowatt-hour for a 60-kilogram system based on one of the systems they're looking at. But it really emphasizes the impact of carbon fiber.
So, our major effort around this is how to reduce the cost of carbon fiber? In 2017 we ran a FOA topic and selected several projects looking at reducing the cost of the precursor, which counts for about 50 percent of the total carbon fiber cost. These projects are wrapping up now. There have been some delays because of the Covid for the past, last year, so Oak Ridge will be extended for a while, but the two university projects are essentially wrapping up. They've all made progress. However, we're not quite at where we hoped to get to, but they've shown potential of at least 18 percent reduction in the carbon fiber cost.
In the 2020 FOA we ran a new topic looking at going from a precursor all the way through the conversion of carbon fiber and into the tank itself. So, these teams were required to have a carbon fiber manufacturer as well as a tank manufacturer. We selected four projects from this effort. The University of Kentucky is continuing with their – to further improve their hollow carbon fiber efforts. We have the University of Virginia, which is looking at a non-polycrylic nitrile low cost precursor fiber that's been developed in some federally funded programs. Hexagon Lincoln, which is a tank manufacturer itself, is looking at an optimized precursor fiber spinning and conversion process as well as improved utilization of the fiber in the tank itself. And then we have CCSC, which is the nonprofit that runs the Institute for Advanced Composite Manufacturing Innovation. They're leading the effort looking at the melt spinning of precursor fibers, again to get the dramatically reduced costs.
These efforts are being run as a two-phase effort. The first phase is for two years. All four projects would participate. At the end of those two years the properties of the carbon fiber produced as well as projections of a tank – the performance of a tank using those carbon fibers would be evaluated against criteria which have been developed, and the project which best comes out against the criteria will be selected to continue to phase two, which is a three-year effort, at the end of which they have to be producing tanks and demonstrating the performance of the actual tanks. Total commitment for this effort is $15 million and is being jointly funded by our office, the Advanced Manufacturing Office, and the Vehicle Technology Office.
Bulk hydrogen – again, we're looking at bulk hydrogen. And for the amount of time I'm not going to go through a lot of effort – or a lot of detail here. But strategic analysis, we're focusing in on a cost analysis for a liquid hydrogen storage to be usable for stations so we can actually identify what are the key cost drivers so we can – where we may want to put effort to reduce the costs of liquid storage. But we also are currently finalizing negotiation of a new project being led by Shell looking at extremely large-volume liquid hydrogen storage systems. These are the type of volumes that people are expecting to be needed for an export market for hydrogen. To put this in context, we're talking 20,000 to 100,000 cubic meters. Currently, the largest liquid hydrogen storage vessel in the world is in the final stages of construction at the NASA Kennedy Space Center. That is 1.2 million gallons, which converted is less than 5000 cubic meters, so we're talking about systems which are 4 to 20 times larger than the current largest existing liquid hydrogen storage system. And we're targeting a CapEx which we benchmarked against liquefied natural gas storage systems.
We are also looking at intermetallic hydrides for stationary storage, which offers advantages of low-pressure, low-cost operation. And so, these are national laboratory-led efforts and right now we're – at least from a model perspective we're seeing some very good performance here.
For carriers, we're looking at hydrogen carriers. Some of the key efforts in carriers includes a centralized production of the carriers – so, this is where the carrier is produced, taken to the end use application, the hydrogen is released, and then the spent material is brought back in the case of a two-way, or for a one-ways such as ammonia, the nitrogen would be vented.
And we're also looking at carriers where we can actually do the regeneration onsite – so, this is where, for instance, you use renewable energy to regenerate the carrier. When you don't have sufficient renewable energy you use the carrier that brings hydrogen to supplement the renewable power, and then when you have the excess renewable power you, again, regenerate the carrier.
And doing some benchmarking against other hydrogen storage technologies – so, this is a number of carriers with a – coupled to a PEM fuel cell. We're looking at energy density versus the power density. Here's where redox batteries fall. And then, we have 250 bar, which is a common pressure for storage of hydrogen and liquid hydrogen, and you can see we have carriers which are actually outperforming a number of the conventional ways of hydrogen storage right now.
And then, a couple of the other recent efforts we have right now, looking at for instance – this is an analysis led with Lawrence Berkeley with Argonne and Pacific Northwest, which is looking at tying – methylcyclo coupled to enable a 24/7 operation of a totally renewable powered steel production where you take the excess renewable energy to generate the carrier. When you don't have sufficient renewable power you use the carrier to supplement that. And then we have a second effort which is the same team led by Argonne looking at dibenzyltoluene and some other carriers in a microgrid application.
And then, HyMARC is the biggest lab consortium we've been running. It's been going on for several years now. I'm not going to go into details here, again, for the sake of time. A couple of key accomplishments – this is one of the new exciting ones. For hydrogen absorbance, one of the issues of hydrogen absorbance is that the energy – the binding energy of hydrogen is too low, so we have to operate at cryogenic temperatures. It's been projected we need 15 to 25 kilojoules per mol binding energy to be at room temperature. They just reported in the Journal of American Chemical Society – JACS – a new vidanium mock material which actually has a _____ absorption of 21 kilojoules a mol, right in that ideal range. The capacity is still low but it's still 38 percent better than compressed gas. And it's a 27 percent impairment over any of the other state-of-the-arts absorbents at room temperature. So, that's an exciting new development.
And then, again, just for matter of time, another exciting development – this is – actually, one of the student projects at the University of Southern California working with PNNL have shown an iridium catalyst for the decomposition of formic acid where they can get very high rates but also directly generate over 170 bar of pressure from the decomposition of formic acid. So, this can be a big advantage in applications where you need higher pressure because you can eliminate some of the compression stages to reduce the cost of compression.
So, as I wrap up here, we are a very collaborative effort. We collaborate across the DOE. We collaborate across the government as well as internationally. And this is just a number of the milestones over the last several years. And then, finally, I'd just like to announce that we are looking for two new fellows. So, if there's anybody out there that would be interested in joining our team we have openings for two new ORISE fellows, specifically helping out with hydrogen production and the delivery and dispensing infrastructure activities. So, if you're interested please – here's the site. If you Google
"ORISE science and technology policy fellows" you can probably find this.
So, with that I will end. And thank you all.
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