it has developed a portfolio of novel, durable alternatives to iridium, a rare and costly element critical to clean hydrogen production.Iridium is a critical component of proton exchange membrane water electrolyzers, which major industry players are beginning to manufacture at large scale. PEM electrolyzers rely on iridium oxide catalysts, straining the supply chain of one of the rarest naturally-occurring elements on Earth.
“Mattiq’s approach fills a major unmet need; it is important not just for the future of clean hydrogen but also for the rapid development of a wide range of chemicals on the road to electrification and decarbonization,” Carmichael Roberts, Mattiq’s board director, co-founder and managing partner of Material Impact and investment co-lead at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, said in this week’s statement.
“Key enabling materials —could be cobalt, could be platinum, could be iridium — are critical to the energy and climate transition going forward,” Erhardt told MINING.com. “Our unique capability is we don’t have to pick one, and experiment one at a time because we can run so many experiments at the same time, millions of different combinations.”