Latent Drive Ltd have won funding from Innovate UK to develop the **Catrode**, a combined catalyst and electrode for making Green Hydrogen by electrolysis of water. Catrodes are simple to mass produce, durable, efficient and provide an alternative to rare platinum group metals.

Latent Drive Ltd is an early stage deep-tech start-up. Its founders are pursuing an engineering approach to electro-chemistry, moving from an academic mindset to industrial scale production. We successfully completed the Oxygen Cell project in 2021, supported by Innovate UK with £75K funding, as part of the UK's pandemic response. This combined electrolyser and fuel cell technology to extract pure oxygen from the atmosphere for medical use. This project brought home to us the high cost and fragility of conventional catalysts for electrolysis of water.

The UK Government's Net Zero Strategy projects a 1000x increase in UK electrolyser capacity by 2035, and similar plans are being made across the world. This degree of scale-up is difficult to comprehend but is necessary to replace the huge quantities of fossil fuels that our economies are dependent on.

Electrolysers powered by off-shore wind are currently dependent on rare and expensive materials. State-of-the-art electrolyser technology suits off-shore wind power, but the acidic chemistry demands exotic materials including Iridium catalysts. We need to scale up a thousand-fold, but there is simply not enough Iridium and platinum available for the world to produce Green Hydrogen at the scale needed to avert climate change.

"_Current production of iridium and platinum for PEM electrolysers will only support an estimated 3 to 7.5 GW annual manufacturing capacity, compared to an annual requirement of 100 GW by 2030_" (IRENA report 2020)

There is a large body of published academic research on alternative catalysts for Green Hydrogen production. But investment and innovation are needed to move from the lab to the factory, and mass produce these catalysts.

Latent Drive has solved the problem of conducting catalytic activation of stainless steel at industrial scale, developing unique know-how which we have protected with patents. The support from Innovate UK means we can build Catalytic Activation machines that have 1000x greater capacity than the laboratory instruments currently available -- powerful enough to activate Catrodes for the Mega Watt scale electrolysers which are driven by offshore wind turbines.

**Catrode -- the catalyst is the electrode; the electrode is the catalyst!**