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The South Korean automotive firm, which aims to use the fuel to power its cars and wider society, unveiled the strategy this week (8 January) at the CES 2024 tech show in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The waste-to-hydrogen (W2H) and plastic-to-hydrogen (P2H) plans are part of a wider hydrogen blueprint, which the company said would “accelerate the establishment of a hydrogen society”.
“At Hyundai, we believe that science and humanity are two sides of the same coin; that advanced technology should also make people’s lives better. Clean hydrogen should be for everyone, powering everything, and available everywhere,” said president and CEO Jay Chang.
“The group is concentrating on resource circulation hydrogen production technology that aims to transform environmental pollutants into clean hydrogen,” an announcement said.
W2H involves the fermentation of organic waste – such as food waste, sludge or livestock manure – to generate biogas, which is then treated to capture carbon dioxide and produce hydrogen. P2H involves melting waste plastics that cannot be recycled, gasifying the molten plastics and producing hydrogen by removing unnecessary elements.
The company is already exploring W2H in Indonesia, where it is seeking the right location in West Java for production ‘mini-hubs’, which will use waste from local communities, and a wider industrial cluster that could promote the “growth of a hydrogen society”.
The firm is also developing megawatt-scale polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) electrolyser manufacturing capabilities for green hydrogen production, which it aims to commercialise within the next few years. By sharing the components of fuel cell systems, Hyundai hopes to achieve a competitive price compared to existing PEM technologies, which are about 1.5-times more expensive than alkaline electrolysers.
Other hydrogen-related Hyundai projects include participating in the NorCal Zero project in Northern California, which will use 30 Hyundai Xcient fuel cell trucks to support the decarbonisation of the Port of Oakland.
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