China's hydrogen industry has seen a significant increase in export orders for electrolysers, driven by a global shift towards clean energy and a growing number of green hydrogen projects abroad.
Electrolysers, the key equipment used to produce hydrogen from water, are likely to become a new growth driver for the export sector following batteries, photovoltaics, and electric vehicles.
One leading Chinese electrolyser manufacturer in Handan City, north China's Hebei province, has already doubled its production in the first half of this year compared to the same period of last year, with export orders primarily coming from Europe and North America.
The company is actively expanding its production capacity, with over 50 percent of its future output earmarked for overseas markets.
"Our current production capacity is 350 sets of water electrolysis hydrogen production equipment per year, and by the same period of next year, this number will reach over 1,000," said Ding Rui, deputy general manager of the hydrogen energy technology company. Industry experts highlight the growing global trend of using renewable energy sources like solar and wind power to produce green hydrogen through water electrolysis. This has led to a significant increase in green hydrogen projects under construction and planning worldwide.
The Middle East and North Africa, which are rich in renewable energy resources, are particularly eager to import electrolyser equipment due to their limited domestic supply capacity. This presents significant market opportunities for Chinese electrolyser manufacturers.
"According to our statistics, by 2030, global green hydrogen production capacity will exceed 40 million tons per year, corresponding to an electrolyser installed capacity of about 460 gigawatts, creating a vast market space worth nearly a hundred billion dollars," said Zhang Yu, secretary-general of the Hydrogen Energy Branch of the China Association for the Promotion of Industry Development.
China's hydrogen industry rides green wave with electrolyser export skyrocketing
Shanghai, a leading force for Chinese modernization, is accelerating the pace of building itself into a science and technology innovation center with global influence.
The tech-savvy metropolis is now speeding up the transition from structure building to function strengthening. Taking strengthening the capability of fostering original sci-tech innovations as the main task, it is pursuing both sci-tech innovation and institutional innovation to significantly improve its comprehensive strength in science and technology as well as the overall effects of innovations.
Over the past 10 years since Shanghai began building itself into an international science and technology innovation center, it has reaped fruitful results in sci-tech innovation, which has pushed the metropolis' GDP across the 4-trillion-yuan (about 570 billion U.S. dollars) mark.
In 2023, Shanghai's total research and development expenditure accounted for 4.4 percent of its GDP, and the city's fiscal expenditure on science and technology rose by 36.7 percent to 52.8 billion yuan (about 7.47 billion U.S. dollars).
Driven by science and technology advances, Shanghai's industrial transformation has sped up. The combined scale of the three leading industries of artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, and biomedicine in the city has reached 1.6 trillion yuan (about 226 billion U.S. dollars).
At the National Local Joint Humanoid Robot Innovation Center in Shanghai's Zhangjiang Science City, Qinglong, an open-source general-purpose humanoid robot with a height of 182 centimeters and up to 43 active degrees of freedom, is being trained to pick up oranges.
"After some training, the robot will be able to complete this move by itself when it encounters a similar scenario in the future," said Shi Zhihua, trainer of robot Qinglong.
Thanks to an advanced control software, Qinglong can skillfully perform fast walking, avoid obstacles, go uphill and downhill, and resist impact.
"We plan to build a venue that can simultaneously train 1,000 robots by 2027," Shi said.
The Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), a third-generation medium-energy synchrotron light source facility with 46 laboratories, has been operating around the clock to serve researchers from around the country, whose experiments cover a wide range of fields such as life sciences, materials science and chemical catalysis.
"We are using the SSRF's light to observe the phase change process of this material when it's heated to 1,100 degrees Celsius," said Song Shuang, a PhD candidate of Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
"Our team is developing materials for the energy sector," said Miao Zhikai, a researcher of Tianjin University.
"We are developing cathode materials for sodium-ion batteries," said Li Guodong, a researcher of Fudan University.
Though the laboratories at the SSRF have been running at full capacity, researchers still have to apply for them months in advance, reflecting the vibrancy of innovation in Shanghai.
Shanghai blazes sci-tech frontiers to boost innovation-driven modernization
