CleanInnoGen Energy Solutions is a Foresight 50 2023 Honouree
Industrial waste heat to green hydrogen by a thermochemical process.
CleanInnoGen (CIG) helps to decarbonize heavy industries like steel and cement by using their waste heat to drive a chemical process, the copper-chlorine cycle, that produces green hydrogen and oxygen on site. The hydrogen and oxygen can be used in the industry’s process for fuel switching to a non-carbon source and for improved combustion efficiency, thus helping decarbonize their operation. The process uses significantly less electricity than water electrolysis.
The process has applications in any industry that has waste heat temperatures of 600 degrees C. This includes cement, steel, ceramics, glass, and sintering plants. Driven by the need to achieve net zero by 2050, the market size in heavy industry alone, cement, and steel, is significant.
Why our venture should be considered one of Canada’s 50 most investable cleantech companies:
We brought together a formidable technical team to scale this disruptive technology including scientists from Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) with decades of experience on the technology. It will secure the execution of the next phase of scale up and advance it from TRL 5 to TRL 7. The process is unique; there is no other company taking this technology to market. Waste heat to hydrogen means that, unlike direct water electrolysis, we are not using electrons to make electrons (electricity to hydrogen) so our overall process efficiency is higher. We are using an underutilized by-product of an industrial process to drive a chemical reaction for producing hydrogen and oxygen.
We have a multi-national construction materials company as a strategic investor, host pilot site, and first purchaser that will bring 200+ global installations to kickstart commercialization. CIG is also exploring the prospect of large-scale hydrogen production from concentrated solar and nuclear plants (Small Modular Reactors).