Connections Create. Create Connections.
Teijin’s people create our products through collaboration and connection. Together with our partners, internal and external, exploration, experiment and discovery help us shape and change the future for the better.
Progress, transformation, a good story and evolution all rely on change taking place. The story of Teijin, hydrogen and their role in the past, the present and, importantly, the future, also involves change.
People and ideas move the business forward and find new customers, markets and uses for what we make.
Our progress toward the challenge of net zero by 2050 started years ago when it became clear that what we make, our products, could be crucial to the world’s success in tackling climate change through the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Our progress is rooted in and enabled by innovation and knowledge exchange. In turn, our whole effort helping to take the planet toward net zero relies on the connectivity between the people having the ideas and making the products for our customers.
Hydrogen
A big topic now at the heart of the Teijin story revolves around hydrogen. Hydrogen has the capacity for dynamic useful and positive transformation built in. Burn hydrogen in air and it produces water. Give Teijin a challenge and it produces results: new products, new solutions.
Our products are made for markets both existing and emerging. Hydrogen is now at the centre of the Teijin story. As the most basic element, it does not exist alone in nature on earth. At the moment it’s produced mainly by steam methane reforming. This is a dirty, carbon dioxide-producing process. The hydrogen extracted in this way is often used in the refinement of more fossil fuels! That’s not going to get us to net zero.
Ultimately, there’s a better way and it’s the way that Teijin is going. Enabling green hydrogen production, transportation and storage.
Green Hydrogen Production
Green hydrogen is a key part of the new circular economy. Green hydrogen is extracted from water by electrochemical processes powered entirely by renewable resources. Like anything else in the new planet-friendly economies, this is a challenge. Currently it takes 1.5 times the power to create 1 unit of green hydrogen. Estimates vary but it looks like we are going to need around 170 Gigawatt of clean hydrogen power to keep the world working as it is today. Current global production of green hydrogen stands at about 0.3 Gigawatt and climbing. It’s a long way to climb, but climbing is easier if when we collaborate and connect.
To produce hydrogen by electrochemistry, conducting membranes are needed with excellent material properties. Our knowledge and expertise in polymers, films and separator materials can bring the next generation membranes for the demand of large scale electrolysers. These developments are part of the HyScaling partnership.
Hydrogen Transportation and Storage
Then there’s the issue of infrastructure, transportation and storage. Unlike standard oil and gas pipelines, hydrogen pipes must be able to withstand extremely high levels of pressure over long distances. Hydrogen can leak easily from the smallest defects in materials. This requires safe, and robust solutions. Reinforced thermoplastic pipe (RTP) made with Twaron© fiber offers a great solution.
Carbon fiber from Teijn, like Tenax©, will continue to play a leading role for hydrogen, finding uses in hydrogen storage tanks, and electrodes for fuel cells to convert hydrogen back to electricity.
So, challenges abound. But the people involved in Teijin’s hydrogen projects both inside and outside the company are clear that the ability and the potential to connect with each other, across departments, companies, countries, or even between different floors in the same building is key. All these hydrogen activities come together in Teijin’s business platform HyChance.
So, who is doing what and how do they connect?
People
Bert Gebben is a principal scientist at Teijin Aramid, has been with the company for a good few years and as principal scientist has the freedom to experiment and bring ideas to the table that can find a new places in the value chain. Bert has a new product in development, a sulfonated polymer that can be used in fuel cells and in water filtration and potentially in electrolytic stacks. As he says of the importance of connectivity “If you want to complete an idea or implement it then you need much more than the individual mind.”
The concentration on hydrogen engendered by Mark Breed means that Bert and many others can explore the potential of the new technologies and the new markets they will be able to service in the future. As he says:
“We don’t know exactly what role we can or should play, but we [Teijin] had the vision that it would be useful to look at the hydrogen economy. I had the idea [for sulfonated polymers] before this, and it’s nice for me because I had a landing place for the idea.”
In terms of connectivity, in the case of the polymers Bert is working on, the connectivity grows around the task at hand.
“So, a team grows around it.” he says, “There are people that are using my material and testing it, and then there are others who are asking well can we make a business around it, so I think it’s very nice now to be working in a group, and it still has to grow.”
Mark Breed has a central role in hydrogen product applications for aramids and other Teijin materials. He is co-founder and part of the internal HyChance network a key part of the connectivity for which Teijin is creating the communication infrastructure.
Like most people, Mark’s network is formed from different angles and activities. Firstly, pro-actively via organised connection to colleagues to promote knowledge exchange through HyChance. He says “we meet once a month key stake holders updating each other, aligning, telling the story of hydrogen and why we do what we do. Now eight departments, around fifteen people depending who is available and what the topics are.”
Secondly, connections are made necessary because of the scale and nature of the task ahead. It’s something that Mark sees very clearly, “My key driver is a better world and sustainability. I also see a future for business. Hydrogen came on my path and if we want to keep below two degrees there is no chance without hydrogen. I’m optimistic but we have big challenges ahead – hydrogen is not a silver bullet.”
Carol Xiao is program manager of the Institute for Sustainable Process Technology (ISPT). An advocate for public-private partnerships Carol’s focus is on the HyScaling project which aims to reduce the costs of producing green hydrogen and support the implementing up to 4 GW of electrolyzer capacity in the Netherlands by 2030.
Carol’s approach to connectivity is shaped by her role in ISPT, an organisation which has no trouble in attracting collaborators and potential partners. She’s currently working with about 90 different organisations within her Hydrohub Innovation Program and HyScaling consortium is a large part of that program which is supported by 28 partners. As she says: “You cannot make the scale of change we need with hydrogen with small amounts of money. You also need a lot of smart people from different fields, Hyscaling is a great example of it” The importance of collaboration is not lost on Carol either. “We are here together to find the knowledge we want and that we do not have,” she says, “So, when we find an answer, we do share all together.”
Ton de Weijer is General Manager, in the Materials Technology Centre at Teijin and has been with Teijin for many years. He can look across the company, its different divisions and their activities. This also means he has the opportunity to catalyse new connections between people and departments and hydrogen is the key to a set of new and necessary connections.
He says, “Hydrogen is a great opportunity for Teijin because we can play a role in, for example, building the windmills, the electricity transport, electrolysis for hydrogen. Then there’s transportation, storage, fuel cells: the whole value chain.”
This implies greater collaboration between what are at the moment quite siloed and distinct business groups. Ton explains, “The thinking in the business groups is in their core business. They are asking, ‘how can I sell more of this material into this area?’ But that’s not the topic of hydrogen. What we want to do for Teijin is we want to be the company that helps you all the way from generating the electricity, to using it in your application.”
It’s a process that is enhanced by openness, sharing and trust in Teijin’s knowledge base and expertise. As Ton says, “I’m still surprised by all the knowledge and the new things I learn everyday – this keeps me a part of Teijin, actually.”
Eelco Rietveld is a consultant working with EY on the hydrogen project and Teijin Solution 2.0 End User Applications. His history with hydrogen is long, involving building hydrogen powered race cars and performing cradle to grave analysis. Solution 2.0 looks to find new markets by identifying new end users for hydrogen and polymer technologies further down the value chain.
Rietveld is very aware of the value of connection and connectivity, and the power of hydrogen to focus the mind on the importance of connectivity. As he says, “Hydrogen could be the great connector because you need chemicals, you need materials, you need for example,
fuel cell technology, you need a lot of knowhow – Teijin do have everything.”
As a consultant Eelco Rietveld has developed an overview of the problems, “Big companies,” he says, “always have trouble with silos and experts”. So, how do we break down the silos? “Have a tangible idea. If you have a tangible idea, then the conversation really
starts.” For Teijin the tangible idea is hydrogen and what can be done with it to enhance the business as the world moves to net zero by 2050. “But,” says Rietveld, ‘ if you want connections to work you have to facilitate them in terms of time, money and tooling.”
In other words, find the time to connect, create the conditions, and give people the tools. That’s what we are doing here.
Masayuki Chokai is researching membrane technology with Teijin as part of the Netherlands national HyScaling Project. He’s been with Teijin for more than twenty years and realises not only the value of connection and collaboration, but also the practical need for such things around the problems that need to be solved, the physical things that need to be made.
For Chokai-san, it seems the task becomes in some ways, the catalyst for connection. Networks emerge around the realisation of ideas. He explains, “So we are working on the membrane and if we are successful with the membrane, then we can go for technical integration, and then scaling up of production and then contacting the distributor.” In this case a set of connections grow with the project.
Chokai-san is clear on why connection, conversation and collaboration are so important. “I like to collaborate and cooperate with people externally,” he says, “because the resources inside individual companies are limited and the research is becoming complicated.” It’s another take on the idea that you need lots of smart people to tackle the particular problems presented by polymers.
Klaas Jan Schouten is New Business Technology Manager at Teijin Aramid working as an innovator and connector in the field of sustainable chemistry. His interest in hydrogen spans his undergraduate, graduate and corporate career.
Solution 2.0 and the ESTIC research program give new focus to his interest not only in hydrogen and how it can get us closer to net zero by 2050, but also in the value and practical benefits of promoting connectivity across Teijin, not just in the Netherlands but potentially worldwide. As he explains, “We want to open the doors to collaboration and connectivity as we believe there’s a lot of potential in working together to solve global challenges. Working together means internally but also working with external people, companies, universities because there’s so much knowledge and experience outside the company, too.”
For Klaas Jan, once connections are made, the subsequent work is facilitated by how we set up the relationship between collaborators. Klaas Jan is clear on his approach, “My core values are trust, there can be hierarchy or no hierarchy but I need to trust the people I work with…at the same time the other value for me is independence…I need freedom to explore, to try things, to fail even…these are my personal values but I feel they fit really well with Teijin.” In reality most valuable connections are shaped by how people are with one another. As Klaas Jan says, “Human chemistry, human solutions – it’s a Teijin slogan…but I like this human aspect, and I feel it.”
Thijs de Groot works in industry and in the education sector. His company, HyCC (a 50/50 JV of Nobian and GIG), is a leading provider of chemicals and Thijs is working in the field of hydrogen as part of the HyScaling project in which Teijin is also a partner. With a foot in academia and one in industry , Thijs is well aware of the importance of collaboration to realise large scale projects such as the greening of the hydrogen industry. As he says “the question is: ‘where can I find the best knowledge in the world to work on this problems?” So you start to work in a consortium, with Universities, peer companies, and now this is very much the way we work.”
The network, the connections it seems always grow and expand around the task and with the production of green hydrogen at scale the task is big, and so, therefore, is the network of connections. “There are many companies along the value chain, “ Says Thijs, “the stack manufacturers, engineering companies that can build these plants, component manufacturers making a membrane or an electrode, you have R and D organisations that come up with new components and then the end users of the hydrogen…you have a complex value chain, and it comes together in commercial and R and D projects.”
The nature of the corporate landscape has changed too and changed the nature of networks and connections. Whereas some twenty years ago companies like Nobian might have had a couple of thousand people on staff ready to deploy on R and D , now the workload is spread across a consortium of complimentary and non-competitive partners. Thijs explains, “A lot of work is carried out at the Universities, at start ups, at scale ups, at the Knowledge Institute: that’s where the action happens and less so in the big corporate company…it’s about defining the research question and then bringing the partners together, and then defining the deliverables: what are we going to do and how are we going to do it?” These of course are the key questions for any network of collaborators.
Dr. Julian Lowe is the Business Development Manager for Teijin’s Carbon Division and is also involved in the HyChance knowledge exchange platform. Julian’s area of expertise is in carbon fibres and composite materials and applications at the moment are directed toward the materials for storage and transport of hydrogen, to position Teijin in the market as an innovative leader. Julian’s a keen networker and is proactive within the Teijin organisation. He realises that the model of innovation is dependent upon connectivity across departments, divisions and cultures. This includes the bridge between academia and business. As he says “What’s good with academia is you have a much larger knowledge pool. In our small R and D environment everyone’s knowledge is linked to the next person’s knowledge. You have very few people who can think out of the box, in academia you have a massive pool of knowledge lots of people coming from different angles.” The collaboration and connection between business and academia is therefore key. Teijin realises it can’t afford to rely on the siloed specialisation within the company that has got it to this stage, though as Juilan says, ‘you tend to know and grow your network through specialsation, the question is then, where do you want to try and build your network?”
The answer seems to be to cast the net as wide as possible. “We can get a lot more new ideas working with a larger network of scientists and other experts.” says Julian, “then you can take those ideas and put them in place to build your own block of information.”
Those blocks of information it seems will be the building blocks for the green hydrogen industry in which Teijin wishes to be a major, collaborator, enabler, investor and player.
Develop the answers to all these problems, the thinking goes, and we could be on track to produce the 170 Gigawatt of green hydrogen capacity to replace the linear ‘mine and burn’ model of fossil fuel use, with a circular system of infinitely renewable energy. Sounds great, and there is optimism amongst those working on the projects around hydrogen.
Optimism is the grease on which we slide into the future. Yet in some ways our scientists and researchers are dealing with old problems: the quality of the material we make and the issue of scale.
The Past
Some history. In 1766 Henry Cavendish, scion of the Duke of Kent and siloed in his research, as at that time only the gentleman natural scientist could be, passed time, among other scientific pursuits, by isolating a gas (previously made by Robert Boyle in 1671), by dropping acid onto iron.
Cavendish called the gas ‘inflammable air’. Then, standing on the shoulders of Cavendish, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier later stepped in with the latinate nomenclature in 1783. Hydrogen was named, taxonomized, understood and then, in time, commodified.
This little slice of history is important as it illustrates some issues with hydrogen that were there then and are with us still today. The relationship between Cavendish and Boyle’s approach – essentially nobles with an education and a good deal of time and money on their hands, experimenting with the qualities of materials – and Lavoisier, also a noble with education, time and money on his hands, can be summed up in the difference between quality and quantity.
The qualities of hydrogen were understood by Boyle and Cavendish in turn – the gas combusts in air and produces water.
But it was Lavoisier who contributed to the quantitative understanding of the element: its weight, mass and abundance. Lavoisier, like Cavendish, was busy. He was involved in the generation of the periodic table, the establishment of the metric system and the debunking of the idea that there was an undiscovered ‘fire-like’ element that was released when combustible materials caught fire (phlogiston theory).
Clearly a talented scientist, Lavoisier ended his days under the guillotine convicted of tobacco fraud by the revolutionaries who toppled the ancien regime.
Lavoisier was exonerated a year later. The note was made at his pardon that it would take 100 years to replace the head that had been removed in a second.
Luckily, these days we are less indebted to the genius of individual gentlemen scientists, working alone in their private laboratories, and more to the networks of collaboration and connection between genius scientists that fuel and facilitate progress in any given field.
The Present
Humanity’s historical relationship with hydrogen is complex, and as today’s scientists in Teijin work toward finding the means by which hydrogen can be produced as part of the circular economy, the issues of quality and quantity identified by Cavendish and Lavoisier are still, to some extent, with us.
The complexity in our relationship with H2 arises from the myriad uses to which this most basic of elements can be put. Since its discovery and isolation hydrogen has been at the core of some pretty disastrous human endeavours of the modern age. The great airships of the 1920’s and 30’s used hydrogen as the lighter than air gas to create lift: the Hindenburg was just one of many disasters in which airships fell from the sky in flames. Though, it was the paint on the airship that created the spectacular blaze.
The Manhattan project saw the inception of the research into fusion of the hydrogen isotopes tritium and deuterium. Essentially, an H-bomb is only limited in its destructive power by the amount of hydrogen within it. Whilst lighter-than-air aviation has adopted helium, the spectre of the H-bomb still persists, but with the will and skill of the networks of scientists and collaborators working on the problem hydrogen is rapidly moving to the status of saviour.
It’s the physical and chemical qualities of hydrogen that make this role possible and plausible. The relative simplicity of its chemical composition is the key to its potential. As we know, when it burns in earth’s atmosphere the principle by-product is water. Until and if (a big if) solutions such as fusion come on stream, green hydrogen is the only workable route to net zero by 2050.
The Future & some of the Science
So how can this be achieved? Well, we know how to make lots and lots of hydrogen[1], current global output is around 75 million tonnes of pure hydrogen, mostly made using fossil fuels, via steam or oil reforming and coal gasification and used in the refinement of more fossil fuels and oil and petroleum derivatives.
Now depending on its method of manufacture hydrogen is classified as green, grey and blue. Grey is made with steam methane reformation, (SMR) a ‘dirty method’ where the energy is simply sourced from the grid with no regard for its origins or indeed the destination of the by products of CO2 and CO. Blue hydrogen can be made either by SMR or electrolytic processes and utilises carbon capture and storage (CCS), but is still environmentally impactful, but for the moment is a bridge to green. The goal is to produce green hydrogen at scale using, by definition, entirely renewable energy sources. Green hydrogen is made by splitting water using electro-chemistry. At the moment input energy exceeds the output energy of the hydrogen produced by a factor of at least 1.5 and there are concomitant costs in both the market price and the environmental impact.
A kilo of green hydrogen can cost around €4.05/kg compared with grey hydrogen €1.64/kg (March 2021). Although the recent spike in natural gas prices has put some sources of green hydrogen on parity it’s unclear what will happen to the market in the mid- to long-term.[2]
There are three main routes to the production of hydrogen at the moment:
Alkaline, using potassium hydroxide, is the most mature technology and is widely used in the chlorine and fertiliser industries, but has some limitations. Most large-scale hydrogen production by electrolysis is currently using alkaline electrolysers (AE). Needs 50 kWh/kg hydrogen. PEM units use pure water and are relatively small in scale and can be flexible in operation. They can also generate hydrogen at high pressure (30-60 bar, compared with alkaline 1-30 bar). However they use expensive electrode catalysts (platinum, iridium) and membrane materials and have short lifetimes. Needs 55 kWh/kg hydrogen.
Solid oxide electrolysers use ceramic materials and operate at high temperatures. They suffer from a slow ramp up time, they are less durable than other types. Needs 40 kWh/kg hydrogen.[3]
Other technologies are on the horizon including anion exchange membranes (AEM). Unlike PEM units, AEM membranes are able to function without reliance on so-called noble metals (iridium and platinum), plus AEM’s can tolerate a lower degree of water purity, which reduces the input water system’s complexity and allows filtered rain and tap water rather than purified water to be used. There are obvious benefits to using water sources that are less than pure. These benefits are balanced by the fact that AEMs cannot currently be linked with the renewable energies (solar, wind, etc.) for power generation owing to AEM based systems inability to maintain high-pressure hydrogen, because of the required use of a porous diaphragm and liquid electrolyte.[4]
But there is a way forward – relatively recently, researchers have developed a third-generation technology, anion exchange membrane (AEM) water electrolysis. This technology integrates the benefits of PEM and alkaline electrolysis. The AEM electrolysis technology uses low-cost catalytic materials, as in alkaline electrolysis, and a solid polymer electrolyte architecture, as in PEM electrolysis technology.
AEM electrolysis technology works in an alkaline environment (pH 10). This makes it possible to use non-noble-metals. The membrane used is a polymeric membrane. It is relatively inexpensive and has low interaction with atmospheric CO2. This electrolysis technology should offer better performances and at a lower overall cost.
This is in part where the networks inherent within Teijin Aramid, and in the wider hydrogen community across business and academia come in. Knowledge sharing and exchange will drive and enable the progress necessary to achieve the goals we need to reach to mitigate the effects of burning billions of tons of fossil fuels. This, then, is the idea behind Connected Research: enable, enhance and encourage connection and collaboration
- International Energy Agency, The Future of Hydrogen – Seizing today’s opportunities, Report prepared by the IEA for the G20, Japan (June 2019)
- S&P Global Platts
- https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the-environment/hydrogen-production-and-uses.aspx
- Schalenbach, M., Zeradjanin, A. R., Kasian, O., Cherevko, S. & Mayrhofer, K. J. J. A perspective on low-temperature water electrolysis—Challenges in alkaline and acidic technology. Int. J. Electrochem. Sci. 13, 1173–1226 (2018).