John Risley’s World Energy GH2 plans to work with Dalhousie University to test a roster of potential replacements for the costly precious metals used in green hydrogen production — with the help of AI.

World Energy earlier this summer received environmental approval to build a four-gigawatt wind farm and 1,200-megawatt hydrogen plant near Stephenville, Newfoundland and Labrador. Project Nujio’qonik will have an order of magnitude more capacity than the largest green hydrogen project currently operational, Sinopec's 260-megawatt Kuqa facility in Xinjiang, China.

But green hydrogen production — in this case to be powered by 328 wind turbines, as opposed to the historical norm of coal or natural gas — relies on a process called water electrolysis, which splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The chemical reactions used in the process require precious metals as a catalyst, to which researchers at Dalhousie hope to find an alternative.

The scientists are backed by $500,000 from the National Research Council of Canada and led by chemists Mita Dasog and Michael Freund, along with computer scientist Frank Rudzicz. They plan to develop an AI tool to analyze thousands of published research papers to identify potential replacement catalysts, the most promising of which will be subjected to laboratory testing.

The final stage of the process will see World Energy test the catalysts under “realistic water conditions,” the university said in a press release.

“Given the local interest in green hydrogen, it is also important that we create a path to manufacture electrolyzers without significant backlogs,” said Dasog. “Moving away from precious metals will help mitigate some of the challenges associated with their supply-chain.”

World Energy plans to build Project Nujio’qonik in stages of 600 megawatts each, with the aim of selling the hydrogen to Germany as an alternative to Russian gas. Later, the company also hopes its hydrogen could offer a potential means of greening carbon-intensive transportation businesses.

Other industry players in the region have shown similar interest. The Port of Halifax, for example, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Port of Hamburg in 2022 to share decarbonization tech. Halifax port CEO Allan Gray has said that includes information-sharing related to hydrogen fuel.

On Project Nujio’qonik, meanwhile, the Qalipu First Nation is one of two main project partners, along with the Town of Stephenville. The First Nation has about 23,000 members across Newfoundland and Labrador and backed World Energy’s regulatory bid with a Traditional Land and Resource Use Study.