An initiative to develop low carbon hydrogen technologies has been awarded £5 million.
The Delivery of Sustainable Hydrogen (H-Delivery) consortia composed of 13 universities and 12 industrial partners, has received the initial grant for four years.
Among the participating universities is St Andrews', which will be looking at ways of generating hydrogen from clean renewable electricity, focusing in particular on decentralised energy.
Other goals of the consortia are to develop hydrogen into industrial feedstock, carry out economic appraisals of hydrogen production technologies and develop policies which will help with the transition to a low carbon hydrogen economy.
St Andrew's professor Irvine said: "There are two main technological barriers to the introduction of a Hydrogen Economy: efficient storage of hydrogen and low-carbon-footprint production of low cost hydrogen. In this project we seek to deliver new lower cost and improved efficiency methods for the production of sustainable hydrogen."
E.ON explains that hydrogen fuel cells work by carrying out electrolysis in reverse – hydrogen and oxygen are recombined into water, producing electricity and heat in the process.
