Fluoropolymers Power the Clean Hydrogen Industry

Growing demands for clean energy have focused attention on hydrogen production. Innovators envision a society that uses hydrogen to fuel heating, power cars, and store and transport energy. Fluoropolymers are required to produce and deploy clean hydrogen.

The hydrogen industry’s biggest challenge is to decrease the levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH) in order to enable zero carbon green hydrogen as a financially viable alternative to fossil fuels as countries across the world work towards carbon neutrality. The European Union (EU), for example, attaches a key role to green hydrogen in achieving its Green Deal and has set a target of producing 10 million tons of green hydrogen domestically and importing an additional 10 million tons by 2030.

As a leading global manufacturer of fluoropolymers, including ion exchange materials, our technologies are at the heart of the hydrogen economy, making Chemours chemistry essential to producing and deploying clean hydrogen.

Without fluoropolymers, clean hydrogen doesn’t exist.

Many areas of the value chain are essential to the production and deployment of hydrogen, including the upstream chemical processes that use fluoropolymers. Fluoropolymer membranes create an environmentally safe way to generate large amounts of hydrogen without carbon dioxide emissions. These membranes help to reduce production disruptions, maintain consistently higher outputs, and promote an environmentally sustainable solution to hydrogen production. Fluoropolymers are required to produce hydrogen membranes. No alternatives possess all of these unique properties while delivering the same high level of performance.

What are fluoropolymers?

Fluoropolymers are a specialty plastic that possess a unique combination of properties that make them critical to modern life and a wide variety of sectors and industries. They are one specific class of PFAS, a group of thousands of chemical compounds with varying characteristics, properties, and environmental and safety profiles. Importantly, fluoropolymers do not pose a significant risk to human health or the environment when used for their intended purposes.