Water, Water Everywhere - and Green Energy to Spare

Turns out offshore-wind farms and wave motion-capturing buoys aren’t the only ways to harvest clean, affordable energy from the sea.

Introducing Evolve Hydrogen, a 2020 startup developing a disruptive green-energy technology that turns seawater into “green hydrogen,” creating an affordable, ecologically responsible and, most importantly, credible alternative to outgoing fossil fuels.

Founded in 2020 by CEO Brian Gilman and President Spencer Teplin, Evolve Hydrogen Inc. – which relocated its operations from East Northport to the Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center in March – is itself an evolution.

Gilman and Teplin (also Evolve Hydrogen’s chairman and vice-chairman of the board) launched their first enterprise, Gilman Industries, in 2011. That pioneer of hydrogen energy is still kicking, now the patent-holding parent company licensing current (and coming) technologies exclusively to Evolve Hydrogen.

Primarily, the duo’s startups have ushered the flagship tech – a scalable generator that yields hydrogen from seawater, wastewater, tap water and any other water source – through a process patented in the United States, Canada and Europe.

Evolve Hydrogen’s in-development generators, called Evolve, are about two years from large-scale commercialization, according to Gilman, and the next 18 to 24 months will be filled with engineering, logistical and communication challenges requiring professional-grade supervision.

Hence, the startup’s move to the AERTC last month.

“We were always interacting with the Advanced Energy Center,” Gilman says. “And of course, we work a lot with Professor Devinder Mahajan at the Institute of Gas Innovation and Technology.”

Along with access to major-league minds and first-rate facilities, the AERTC has provided the ambitious startup with a wealth of critical connections – important not only to fleshing out Evolve Hydrogen’s game-changing technology, but to promoting the next-generation generators’ unique and comprehensive benefits.

Not only will Evolve Hydrogen be able to build a hydrogen electrolyzer in about two hours – not “18 months, like our competitors,” Gilman notes – but the company’s patented process is “not constrained to deionized water,” according to its CEO.

“We can use seawater, without desalination,” he says. “And we can use treated wastewater and other non-potable water sources.”

And of course, any basic chemistry class will tell you what you’re left with when you remove hydrogen from good old H20.

“Our only waste product is oxygen,” Gilman says. “You can dispel it into the atmosphere to offset carbon dioxide levels, or you can use it in fish farms or waste-treatment processes, even medical practices.

“Oxygen has a lot of chemical uses.”

The mission, then, is to both refine the core technology and spread the word. In addition to Public Relations Director Michele Gilman and Corporate and Public Outreach Director Charlie Ward, Evolve Hydrogen will be counting on a Technical Advisory Board comprised of “rather interesting people,” according to Gilman.

“We have a lot of veterans from the clean-energy field,” he notes. “We have Siv Almaas, who invented the burner technology for cooking with hydrogen, and Chris Jackson, who has 25 years in the fuel-cell and electrolyzer industry.

“We also have Dr. Katsuhiko Hirose, who is the father the Prius and the Mirai from Toyota,” Gilman adds. “And Naoufel Menadi, who’s on the cutting edge of injection molding and polymer development in Europe.”

Even with that impressive array of talent on hand, proper penetration of important energy, environmental and agricultural markets will require the exact right connections – and after carefully searching for the right home-base situation, Evolve Hydrogen found everything it needs in the Advanced Energy Center. 

“We have not only the right (scientific) collaborations here, but an extensive network which reaches out to public and corporate groups interested in the production and the expansion of green hydrogen,” Gilman says.

“Long Island, in general, is really trying to help us produce these products and become a manufacturer of bulk green hydrogen,” the CEO adds. “The Building and Construction Trades Council of Nassau & Suffolk Counties, and many of its partner unions, are really interested in making Long Island a primary producer and exporter of green hydrogen.”