A high-throughput pipeline is being used to discover catalyst alternatives to iridium, which is extremely rare and expensive.
AI-powered chemistry and materials science company Mattiq has announced a new portfolio of efficient, durable catalyst alternatives for the expensive and rare iridium oxide currently used for water electrolysis in producing clean hydrogen.
Where clean hydrogen has been touted as a potential strategy to tackle the climate crisis, the global transition to a hydrogen economy has been stalled by the availability and price of iridium.
“There has always been a key technical bottleneck to argue against clean hydrogen production via water electrolysis. [Mattiq] wanted to solve that challenge so the argument could no longer hold back clean chemistry,” said Jeff Erhardt, the CEO of Mattiq.
Erhardt, says the goal is to build the world’s most technologically advanced clean chemistry company. Although they are starting with applications in clean hydrogen, the technology and development pipeline can be used to rethink chemistry and decarbonize chemical manufacturing at scale and across industries.
The Iridium Problem
Clean hydrogen is considered a potential solution to sustainable energy production and decarbonized manufacturing. To make clean hydrogen, one of the main techniques uses a catalyst to perform water electrolysis.
Traditionally, this catalyst is made of iridium oxide. Iridium is a rare, expensive element, and the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), a UAE-based intergovernmental organisation supporting countries in their transition to sustainable energy, says there will be a 10-times gap between the element reserves on the planet and what would be needed to meet international manufacturing and production demands by 2030. Right now, the supply chain crunch for iridium means the element is incredibly expensive to source, making it crucial for alternatives to be identified to support the transition to clean hydrogen.
Interestingly, despite being the standard for water electrolysis, iridium is not necessarily the best element for this process. Dr. Andrey Ivankin, the CTO and co-founder of Mattiq, says iridium is not the most efficient element for this process. However, because it’s very stable in the harsh, acidic environment required for electrolysis, it’s the default for this type of catalyst. So, Ivankin and Mattiq saw this as an opportunity not only to find a more readily available alternative to iridium, but one that actually performs better and is even more stable in this environment.
“Our goal was to alleviate the bottleneck and for [Mattiq] to create a springboard to leverage these same systems and architecture for decarbonizing chemicals and fuels,” explained Erhardt.
This fall, the U.S. federal government is expected to announce further investments in hydrogen hubs, and the U.S. Treasury Department is expected to update their clean hydrogen guidelines and subsidies to further incentivize production. Mattiq sees this as an important opportunity to bring their catalyst alternatives to market at scale as companies look to use and cost-effectively produce clean hydrogen.
Accelerating Catalyst Discovery and Development
In considering catalyst discovery, Mattiq wanted to take an approach that has already shown success in the pharmaceutical industry. For decades, researchers have developed high-throughput pipelines to support the initial discovery and development of drug candidates. Using combinations of microscale experiments, robotics and AI/ML, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have decreased the time-to-discovery of novel drugs for a variety of human diseases. In general, these pipelines involve screening thousands of candidate compounds for their activity against certain infectious agents or diseases.
The original core technology of Mattiq began with applying this logic to the discovery of novel catalysts. The company developed a process for massively parallel synthesis of inorganic materials on a microchip. Using inorganic nanoparticles, the company has essentially shrunk the electrolyzer technology to the nanoscale to do massively parallel materials science. This allows the company to test many different combinations of elements in various structures to evaluate their behavior, efficiency and durability as catalysts for electrolysis and beyond. These nanoscale experiments fuel hypotheses and prioritize different combinations of elements to test in increasingly large-scale devices.
“As a result, for each experiment, we generate tens of thousands of tests and gather data on structure, function, composition and performance for each combination of elements,” explained Ivankin. “We now have this technology to develop catalysts in a high-throughput way. Just like biology was transformed in the 1990s, we can now revolutionize catalyst development and materials science with this new high throughput discovery process.”
On top of this experimental process, Mattiq has developed a proprietary machine learning-based system to further accelerate the design and development of different catalyst compositions. Using AI-enabled technology, Mattiq prioritizes which combinations to test in their nanoscale electrolysis experiments.
“All the data generated in our experiments can be fed into algorithms to predict what materials to synthesize next that may have superior or worse performance to optimize in a rapid experimental cycle,” explained Ivankin.
Overall, this allows experimentation on the nanoscale to improve confidence in testing at the device scale, saving both time and money and allowing the company to accelerate their R&D process. The pipeline helps the company prioritize identifying more readily available elements that still perform the same or better than existing iridium-based technology.
“This work represents the most comprehensive, systematic study of the landscape of iridium alternatives that has ever been conducted,” said Ivankin. “Over the prior months, we synthesized and evaluated millions of combinations of different elements for durability, efficacy and practicality for industrial applications. Work that used to take years can now be done in a fraction of that time with greater rigor than ever before.”
Their pipeline is currently optimized for testing and validating different element combinations to be used in water electrolysis and all its various applications. But Mattiq is in the process of communicating with other potential partners and customers who either use iridium-based catalysts or other catalysts that could be optimized for performance and availability using the same pipeline.
Using Catalysts at Scale
In the not-too-distant future, Mattiq plans to announce a partnership with a large industrial partner to bring their catalysts to market at scale. By design, the partnership looks beyond the iridium challenge to apply electrochemistry broadly.
“Our grand vision is to decarbonize one of the three hard-to-evade sectors: the production of chemicals and fuels. We are starting with the iridium problem, but we want to go beyond iridium catalysts and use the same underlying technology to optimize a massively parallel, fully integrated, data-influenced development process,” said Erhardt.
Mattiq is careful about being pigeonholed as a clean hydrogen company. With their novel catalyst discovery and development pipeline, the company hopes to change how we discover materials and perform materials science. For the past 20 years, researchers and companies have been searching for alternatives to iridium. With this initial suite of iridium alternatives, the company has proven the power and success of their high-throughput system. They can now focus on testing performance, stability, and element availability for catalysts that can be used to decarbonize the chemical and fuel industries.
“In a manner of weeks, we generated the same data as the entire field produced over decades,” explained Ivankin.
We are clearly only at the beginning of seeing the power of this approach to materials science R&D, and it will be exciting to see what other catalysts can be discovered over the next few years. As global governments extend their investment in clean hydrogen and hydrogen hubs, iridium alternatives will hopefully represent the beginning of efficient, cost-effective catalysts for decarbonizing chemical and fuel production.
