HC-H2: What’s It All About?

You can watch the presentation given by Prof. Peter Wasserscheid as part of Forschungszentrum Jülich’s Science Online series by clicking the link here.

HC-H2 is the largest ongoing structural change project in the Rhenish mining area. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research alone is providing the project with € 860 million in funding until 2038. Prof. Dr. Peter Wasserscheid talks about what our cluster aims to achieve.

Whenever Peter Wasserscheid explains his idea, he likes to talk about a bottle deposit system for hydrogen. This idea of deposits for H2 bottles is one of the topics being investigated at the new Institute for a Sustainable Hydrogen Economy (INW), of which Wasserscheid, a professor for chemical reaction engineering, is a founding director.

INW is different from all other institutes in Jülich, as it is not situated on the campus of Forschungszentrum Jülich but rather at Brainergy Park where it forms the core of the Helmholtz Cluster for a Sustainable and Infrastructure-Compatible Hydrogen Economy (HC-H2) in which INW is developing demonstrators in the Rhenish mining area together with many partners.

Research at the institute focuses on technologies that follow electrolysis and come before fuel cells to ensure that hydrogen can be used to provide energy on an everyday basis, in a similar way to batteries and fuels. Or indeed like a returnable bottle that is emptied and then refilled.