NewHydrogen, Inc. (Santa Clarita, Calif.), the developer of the ThermoLoop® production technology for industrial-scale clean hydrogen, announced that it has completed construction and commissioning of its engineering test unit (ETU) and is now capable of demonstrating long-duration stability of its ThermoLoop® process.
The primary purpose of the ETU is to generate the engineering data needed to design the company’s first commercial pilot plant.
The ETU allows continuous cycling between the hydrogen-producing oxidation reaction and, without interruption, the reduction reaction, resulting ultimately in oxygen production.
“Continuous operation is where an engineering team learns how a process actually behaves over time,” said Ryan Patrick, NewHydrogen’s senior chemical engineer, who led the ETU construction effort and is overseeing its operation. “The data we collect from the ETU will be used to design and determine the specifications for our first commercial pilot plant.”
Using results from an ETU is the standard, industry-accepted pathway for designing a commercial pilot plant. The company’s ETU serves as the bridge between its bench-scale laboratory experiments and its first commercial pilot plant, and it is purpose-built to characterize the process performance and kinetics of ThermoLoop® under continuous, repeatable operating conditions.
This milestone builds on the company’s previous announcement that it would automate the ETU’s controls, a step designed to give NewHydrogen’s engineering team continuous testing capability with greater precision and repeatability from run to run. With construction and commissioning now complete, the company will use the resulting data from long-duration operation of the ETU to define the specifications for its first commercial pilot plant. A successful pilot plant will provide the basis for the ultimate commercial application: an industrial-scale ThermoLoop® facility built to meet the needs of the clean hydrogen market.
Clean hydrogen demand is now measured in gigawatts, not megawatts. These industrial-scale systems are defined as 1 gigawatt or greater, the level at which hydrogen can meaningfully displace fossil fuels in the industrial marketplace.
Present production methods have not been built for that scale. Worldwide installed electrolysis capacity totaled only about 4 gigawatts in 2025, spread across many small and mid-sized projects rather than integrated, single-gigawatt-scale plants, even as announced project pipelines have reached into the hundreds of gigawatts. ThermoLoop® is designed from the outset to close that gap.
The NewHydrogen industrial-scale base-case system assumes production capacity of 200,000 metric tons of hydrogen per year (m.t./yr). This scale represents a major industrial plant, roughly equivalent to a 1.5- to 2-gigawatt (GW) dedicated electrolysis plant or a large commercial steam methane reforming (SMR) facility.
The market ThermoLoop® is built to serve already exists at enormous scale, but it currently relies on fossil fuel feedstock, usually natural gas. Instead, ThermoLoop® uses heat to split water to produce clean hydrogen.
“Our ETU is the foundation for everything that comes next. With the unit built and commissioned, we can now cycle ThermoLoop® continuously and demonstrate the long-duration stability of the process, which will generate the engineering data that will define our first pilot plant. From there, a pilot plant can scale to major industrial plants needed to meet the demands of an eager market,” said Steve Hill, CEO of NewHydrogen.