Green Hydrogen Startup Electric Hydrogen Raises $380 Million
Hydrogen electrolyzer manufacturer Electric Hydrogen (EH2) announced today that it has raised $380 million with the completion of its Series C funding round, with proceeds from the financing aimed at accelerating the company’s manufacturing and deployment plans.
Hydrogen is viewed as one of the key building blocks of the transition to a cleaner energy future, particularly for sectors with difficult to abate emissions, in which renewable energy solutions such as wind or solar are less practical. The development of clean hydrogen capacity, such as green hydrogen, which uses renewable energy to power the process to extract hydrogen from other materials, will require massive investments in areas including infrastructure, electrolysis, transport and storage.
Founded in 2020, Massachusetts-based EH2 manufactures powerful electrolyzers that produce green hydrogen from renewable electricity and water. The company is manufacturing 100 MW electrolyzer systems capable of producing nearly 50 tons of green hydrogen per day at low cost, to help decarbonize heavy industries, such as mining and steel. EH2 is currently installing manufacturing equipment in its 1.2GW factory in Devens, Massachusetts, which it anticipates will begin production of commercial electrolyzer systems in early 2024. The company said that it has more than 5 GW of electrolysis systems already reserved by customers.
EH2 CEO and co-founder Raffi Garabedian said:
“To address the global climate challenge, we need new technologies that help critical industries reduce their emissions. Electric Hydrogen’s 100MW electrolyzer systems do that. Today’s hydrogen comes from natural gas and coal and accounts for around 2.5% of global carbon emissions. There has not been a viable solution to this problem because renewable green hydrogen has been too expensive to produce at scale. The Electric Hydrogen team is changing that and the opportunities for decarbonization go far beyond today’s applications.”
The oversubscribed financing was led by metals and green energy company Fortescue, as well as Fifth Wall and Energy Impact Partners, and included participation from new investors bp Ventures, Oman Investment Authority, Temasek, Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, the United Airlines Sustainable Flight Fund, New Legacy, Kajima Ventures and Fatima Holdings USA. Existing investors participating included Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Equinor Ventures, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Rio Tinto, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Capricorn Partners, Prelude Ventures, and S2G Ventures. To date, EH2 has raised over $600 million.
In addition to the investment, Fortescue also signed a procurement agreement with EH2.
Mark Hutchinson, Fortescue Energy CEO, said:
“Fortescue is committed and focused on supporting the creation of green technology to help heavy industry decarbonize and producing green hydrogen at scale globally is integral to that. Electric Hydrogen, just like Fortescue, is working at the speed and scale necessary to help deliver green-hydrogen projects around the world.”