A few years ago, hydrogen was considered one of the biggest promises in the transition to clean energy. Hydrogen’s reaction with air produces only energy and water, and many believed it would become the backbone of a NetZero future. But its adoption stalled once it became clear that storing and transporting hydrogen is extremely complex and expensive. In Europe, hydrogen-based energy is still roughly 2–3 times more expensive than fossil fuels.

Today, the global energy sector increasingly converts hydrogen into liquid ammonia, ships it internationally, and cracks it back into hydrogen at the point of use. Ammonia is the most efficient hydrogen carrier: each molecule contains three hydrogen atoms, it is already the second most-produced chemical worldwide, and it relies on a well-established global supply chain and infrastructure.

The problem is that cracking ammonia back into hydrogen is highly energy-intensive and costly; at large scale it typically requires 700–800°C with today’s commercial catalysts. This makes cracking the single largest bottleneck in the hydrogen value chain.

CatAmmon solves this with a revolutionary low-temperature catalyst that cracks ammonia at just 350–400°C, reducing energy demand and cutting cracking costs by up to 50%. The catalyst is ceramic-based, low-cost, and scalable for mass manufacturing.

On the production side, ammonia synthesis still depends on the 100-year-old Haber–Bosch process, which requires extremely high pressures of 150 atmospheres (equivalent to the pressure at diving at a depth of ~1,500 meters). CatAmmon’s second catalyst produces ammonia at just 1.5 atmospheres, dramatically reducing both CapEx and OpEx and enabling affordable green ammonia production.

Together, these breakthroughs remove the major barriers holding hydrogen back, making it cheaper, cleaner, scalable, and bringing the world significantly closer to a hydrogen-based NetZero future.