36Kr Exclusive: Hyde Hydrogen has received a strategic investment from Aramco Ventures and will continue to expand its overseas green hydrogen business.

Text | Zhang Yichi

Editor | Su Jianxun

36Kr has learned that Hyde Hydrogen has recently received a strategic investment from Aramco Ventures. This is Aramco Ventures' first investment in the hydrogen energy field in the Asia-Pacific region and its first investment in China. As the core project (Anchor Project) of Aramco Ventures' hydrogen energy sector, Hyde Hydrogen will receive continuous support in the global green hydrogen business market expansion and technological progress.

Green hydrogen is hydrogen produced using renewable energy sources (such as solar energy, wind energy, etc.), achieving zero carbon dioxide emissions from the source and is regarded as one of the clean energy sources with the greatest development potential.

Currently, the high cost of green hydrogen is the main obstacle to the growth of green hydrogen demand. According to BCG analysis, among the current cost of green hydrogen, fixed costs including the hydrogen production system account for only about 10%, while the cost of green electricity is as high as 80% - 85%. Optimizing key cost indicators such as the power consumption level of the hydrogen production equipment and modular production from the supply side is crucial to promoting the development of the green hydrogen industry.

Yao Changsheng, CEO of Hyde Hydrogen, said that the current high cost of green hydrogen is mainly because this is an emerging field. The large-scale green hydrogen plants that are being planned and implemented around the world today have never appeared before. This emerging industry faces technical and commercial challenges. Most traditional electrolyzer solutions are not designed for new energy electrolytic hydrogen production, with a high degree of customization, low consistency, and poor adaptability to fluctuating power, making it difficult to reduce the cost of large-scale green hydrogen production.

Hyde Hydrogen has globally pioneered the square plug-in pressurized electrolytic water hydrogen production system Hydolyser®, which realizes an arbitrarily expandable electrolytic system (250kW to 20MW) through a standardized plug-in stack design. It has features such as high efficiency, high dynamics, easy maintenance, and intelligence, and ranks first in the shipment volume of square electrolyzers in the Chinese market.

In terms of the demand side, although Musk once questioned the business logic of hydrogen energy vehicles, in Tesla's Master Plan 3, green hydrogen and sustainable fuels are listed as important carbon reduction means in the industrial and shipping fields. Yao Changsheng told 36Kr that the relationship between the green hydrogen industry chain and the fuel cell industry chain is like the relationship between the oil and fuel vehicle industry chains. Compared with the landing time of hydrogen energy vehicles, the green hydrogen industry has just started. The first large-scale green hydrogen projects in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East will only be completed and implemented one after another starting from 2025. Currently, the entire industry is still in a very early stage.

After large-scale industrialized production of green hydrogen, green hydrogen can be in the form of various carriers such as hydrogen/gaseous hydrogen, green methanol, green ammonia, and green aviation kerosene, and has huge application potential in different scenarios and industries, including but not limited to the energy field (as a long-term energy storage method and alternative fuel to replace coal and natural gas), the transportation field (providing power for heavy-duty ground transportation, ships, aircraft, etc.), and the industrial field (such as reducing carbon emissions in the refining, chemical, steel, and metallurgical processes, etc.).

Although the investment in early hundred-megawatt-level green hydrogen projects is very high, energy companies in major countries and regions are facing pressure for policy and business transformation and have taken the lead in making layout investments in the green hydrogen field.

Take Sinopec as an example. Sinopec Capital, through a dual-wheel drive of direct investment and fund investment, focuses on the goal of Sinopec Group to build China's first hydrogen energy company and has invested in multiple hydrogen energy industry chain enterprises. In this context, at the beginning of 2024, Sinopec Capital completed a strategic investment in Hyde Hydrogen.

This strategic investment by Aramco Ventures in Hyde Hydrogen is another important strategic investment for Hyde Hydrogen following the strategic investment from Sinopec at the beginning of the year. It will further accelerate Hyde Hydrogen's development speed in technological innovation, market expansion, and international cooperation, helping the company build a more solid and reliable partner and business network in the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, Central Asia, and other regions, and explore the business potential in other markets, injecting new impetus into Hyde Hydrogen's international development. This cooperation is also a milestone for promoting the development of the global green hydrogen industry.

Currently, Hyde Hydrogen's business is distributed in China, Europe, the Middle East, and other countries and regions. It has in-depth cooperation with world-leading energy companies such as Shell, TotalEnergies, Sinopec, China Energy, and Goldwind to jointly build benchmarks and promote the development of the hydrogen energy industry.