By Hagai Gilboa and Maor Shalom Swisa

Translated from the original Hebrew

Two professors and a Ph.D. from the Technion mobilized to tackle one of global warming's most intractable challenges: the carbon dioxide emitted during hydrogen production—an industry responsible for 2.5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. After developing a breakthrough technology that lowers the cost of green hydrogen production, they were joined by serial entrepreneur Talmon Marco and prominent investors, including Bill Gates and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. The goal: sell clean hydrogen at one dollar per kilogram, disrupt a $200 billion industry, and shut down one of the world's major pollution sources.

In the Caesarea Industrial Park operates an Israeli startup poised to reinvent one of the most polluting industries on the planet. H2PRO, founded in 2019 following a shared bus ride between two Technion professors and later incorporated under the leadership of serial entrepreneur Talmon Marco, wants to fundamentally change how green hydrogen—hydrogen produced using zero-emission, renewable energy—is manufactured.

The mechanism: a re-architected electrolysis process—the long-established method of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen—engineered to boost efficiency and drive production costs down to one dollar per kilogram. The objective: make green hydrogen economically competitive against polluting, fossil-based alternatives.

Globally, approximately 100 million metric tons of hydrogen are consumed annually, representing a massive $200 billion market. "The primary markets for hydrogen are refineries, chemical manufacturing, steel mills, and down the road, aviation fuels," explains Tsahi Rodrig, the company's CEO. The core issue? Generating this hydrogen currently accounts for 2.5% of total worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.

The Costly Path to Going Clean

"Roughly half of all industrially consumed hydrogen goes toward ammonia synthesis, while the other half supports the petroleum refining sector," says Prof. Gidi Grader, a Technion co-founder of the company. "This sector generates immense pollution purely because of how it is produced." Today, the vast majority of hydrogen is generated via a cheap yet carbon-heavy process known as Steam Methane Reforming (SMR), which strips hydrogen out of natural gas.

The clean alternative—familiar to many from introductory chemistry classes—relies on water electrolysis: utilizing electricity to split water into separate hydrogen and oxygen molecules. While it is an established technique, it remains prohibitively expensive. "Current electrolysis production costs cannot compete with emissions-heavy methods," notes Prof. Avner Rothschild, another co-founder from the Technion. The single most expensive component? The membrane situated at the center of the electrolyzer cell to keep the generated gases apart.

"A membrane is a heavily strained barrier," Rodrig explains. "The longer the electrolyzer operates, the more that membrane degrades. When it fails completely, a critical safety hazard emerges: gaseous hydrogen and oxygen mix, triggering an explosion." This vulnerability prompted the company's central hypothesis: what if you could simply eliminate the membrane altogether?

Rewriting the Rules

"Our innovation took an unquestioned engineering premise and dismantled it," Rothschild says. Instead of generating hydrogen and oxygen simultaneously with a physical barrier separating them, H2PRO’s technology generates them in two distinct phases. During the first step, one electrode generates hydrogen while the second electrode chemically stores oxygen. In the subsequent phase, the electrode releases the captured oxygen. "This enables a system architecture that significantly reduces capital and operational costs," he states.

Executing this required an accompanying breakthrough. "The modified cycle required an entirely different electrode," Rothschild explains. "It took substantial time to re-engineer the electrodes, reformulate their chemical composition, and adjust their physical structure." At the company’s R&D labs in Caesarea, researchers synthesize these electrodes from scratch—blending metallic powders and sintering them at 1,200°C to yield a durable component capable of withstanding the electrolyzer's demanding operational envelope.

Protecting this proprietary breakthrough posed distinct intellectual property challenges. "In energy generation, you cannot patent the end product, because hydrogen is a naturally occurring element," explains Dr. Revital Green of the Ehrlich IP Group. "Once you purchase hydrogen, there is no chemical signature indicating how it was sourced. Therefore, intellectual property protection must focus on the apparatus, the specialized components, and the integration process."

For hydrogen to qualify as genuinely green, the underlying electricity must come from renewable sources like wind or solar. However, these generation sources are inherently variable. "Standard electrolyzers struggle to cope with supply fluctuations [intermittent power surges and drops]," Rothschild says. "That operational friction comes with a heavy economic penalty."

H2PRO's design was built specifically to accommodate power swings. "Standard commercial electrolyzers cannot tolerate continuous startup and shutdown cycling," Rodrig notes. "Frequent cycling degrades the components and ruins the unit. Ours is engineered to handle intermittent operation natively." This capability means the system can be wired directly into solar arrays, theoretically allowing agricultural operations growing cucumbers or tomatoes to simultaneously generate and monetize hydrogen on-site.

The Race Toward the Target Metric

"Hitting the one-dollar-per-kilogram price point requires driving down every single cost driver across the stack," Rodrig says. "The biggest variable is electricity. Once input power costs drop to roughly five cents per kilowatt-hour, delivering clean hydrogen at one dollar per kilogram becomes viable."

Reaching that milestone will take time. Talmon Marco, company chairman—who previously sold Viber for $900 million in 2014 and Juno for $200 million in 2017—maintains a pragmatic timeline. "One dollar per kilogram will be a demanding target to hit," Marco acknowledges. "However, reaching a low, commercially competitive price point is realistic, likely within the 2031 window."

Marco, driven by a desire to apply commercial engineering to climate mitigation, views scalable, low-cost green hydrogen as indispensable. "Clean energy initiatives have faced shifting sentiment recently, but technical progress continues steadily, especially in China. I believe the sector will eventually align with where global priorities must head: solving systemic climate risks."

H2PRO has secured over $100 million in capital from backers including Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Singapore's sovereign wealth fund. The company currently runs a 50-kilowatt pilot installation at its Caesarea plant. In February 2026, a 500-kilowatt deployment is scheduled to go live at Tziporit near the Sea of Galilee, followed by plans for a utility-scale deployment of up to 50 megawatts in Spain or Portugal.

"There is simply an acute deficit of green hydrogen capacity today," Rodrig concludes. "Even if industrial consumers decided to switch immediately, the volumes do not exist. Building the industrial base from the ground up is essential. Aviation, commercial shipping, and heavy freight are all looking to transition to hydrogen. We are looking at an addressable market that could easily reach into the trillions of dollars."