Particular Materials joins X-SEED: a new frontier for green hydrogen
We are proud to announce our participation in X-SEED (Experimental Supercritical Electrolyzer Development for Hydrogen Production), a European research project co-funded by the European Union through the Clean Hydrogen Partnership. The project brings together five partners across industry and academia with a shared mission: making renewable hydrogen more affordable and accessible.
The global transition to clean energy urgently demands scalable, cost-effective hydrogen production. Today's electrolyzer technologies still face significant cost and efficiency barriers that prevent widespread adoption. X-SEED addresses this challenge at its root: by operating in supercritical water conditions, the electrolyzer eliminates the need for a membrane (component that is both costly and subject to degradation) while producing high-purity hydrogen with a target energy consumption below 42 kWh/kg H2 and a production cost of 3 €/kg.
Within the consortium, Particular Materials brings a unique and strategic capability: deep expertise in supercritical water processes. Leveraging our proprietary continuous-flow technology, we will produce a wide range of non-precious metal catalysts through supercritical water metal precipitation, directly addressing the project's goal of keeping Critical Raw Material content below 0.3 mg/W. Beyond catalyst production, our company's engineering expertise and infrastructure in supercritical water processes will be instrumental in the design and development of the electrolyzer itself, capable of operating under the extreme conditions of 374°C and 220 bar that define the project's technological breakthrough.
A distinctive element of X-SEED's sustainability vision is the use of industrial wastewater both as a source of metals for catalyst synthesis and as an electrolyte for the electrolyzer itself, transforming industrial by-products into valuable inputs for clean energy production.
The project is coordinated by Leitat Technological Center (Spain) and counts on a carefully assembled consortium: SNAM, Industrie De Nora, Particular Materials and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), to cover together the full value chain from materials science and electrochemical engineering to industrial scale-up and energy infrastructure.
X-SEED represents a natural extension of what we do at Particular Materials: engineering nanomaterials that unlock real-world performance. Operating in an European consortium of this standing represents an important opportunity for us to contribute to the development of sustainable energy technologies and to further consolidate our role in research on advanced materials.
