News

The ENDURE Swedish week ends with our final general assembly which took place this Thursday at Elicron in Ljungaverk. After visiting the local wind- and hydropower facilities, embedded in its magnificent nordic landscapes, we wrapped up three years of research and development in alkaline electrolysis, and prepared ourselves for its last stages, not without a glimpse of nostalgia for our dynamic and productive consortium.

The lab-scale electrode campaign ends with important scientific breakthroughs, the dissemination of which will continue beyond the project timeline. These new electrodes are being tested in industrially relevant stacks at ZSW and FHa, the results so far indicate promising performance and durability. These technical achievements were also backed-up with rigorous simulation work, both on the lab and industrial scales. It is not premature to say that we are proud of the overall outcomes of ENDURE.

We thank the Elicron team for their warm welcome and the perfect organisation of this general assembly.

The SWEETHY symposium, taking place this week in Stockholm, gathers over 100 scientists and industrials around the crucial theme of durability in low-temperature water electrolysis. All important aspects are being covered, and the discussions between participants, catalysed yesterday around a gorgeous dinner at the Vasa Museum, will continue until tomorrow evening.

The ENDURE consortium was showcased through a presentation of Renaud Delmelle on our lab-scale electrode developments. The HyFlow and TiNTHyN projects were also presented as complementary and parallel activities towards the construction of technical solutions for green hydrogen production.

The General Assembly gathered I+D leaders at the Aragon Hydrogen Foundation on 17.06.2026 to coordinate advanced cell development and life cycle sustainability. The deployment of the green hydrogen economy in Europe demands not only ambition but millimetric technical precision. With this purpose, partners of the European consortium ENDURE gathered at the Aragon Hydrogen Foundation headquarters to hold their General Assembly, a key face-to-face meeting that served to synchronise the gears of research aimed at maximising the durability and efficiency of current electrolysis systems.

During the working sessions, the partners engaged in a deeply enriching technical exchange. The day structured the debate around the core Work Packages of the project, spanning from laboratory-scale materials science to market viability and the end-of-life of components.

We thank Vanesa Gil, Lidia Martínez and Carla Ochoa for the great organisation of this event and we look forward to the final six months of the ENDURE timeline. 

Read the full article from our Download Center!

In our second press release, we are reflecting on 2 years of scientific and technical achievements, and looking forward to the current year, where the technologies developed within ENDURE are put to the test in various industrial-scale setups.

Check the full document on our download center!

Last week at the European Hydrogen Energy Conference 2026 (EHEC), Nicolás van Dijk gave a talk entitled "Experimental validation of a 10kW alkaline stack by ENDURE harmonized testing protocols".

The baseline 10kW stack - built by Stargate Hydrogen and tested at Fundación Hidrógeno Aragón - is the backbone of stack development within ENDURE. The first work package closes with its investigations and sets the mark for current stack testing and development. Key insights from this study include:

• Successful stack testing campaign with protocols developed within ENDURE.

• Assessment of operating window of the test bench.

• No permanent degradation observed after 573h of operation and 45 ON-OFF cycles.

• Cell-by-cell EIS analysis.

Improving the durability of hydrogen generation is key to scaling up a sustainable energy future. Within the ENDURE project the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) has now developed a framework for accelerated stress tests (ASTs) for alkaline electrolysis electrodes – based on the findings of reports JRC133726 and JRC122565 from the Joint Research Centre.

In the future, AST investigations should provide information about the long-term behavior of electrodes by accelerating degradation processes representative of real operation. Therefore, AST protocols are to be designed to simulate these processes by systematically applying defined stressor types in a controlled and separated manner. As a first step, ZSW developed 14 single-cell AST protocols addressing the following stress categories:

• Dynamic load

• Excessive load

• Repetitive on–off cycling

• Reverse currents

• Electrolyte impurities

All protocols are described in detail in our report, which is published on our project homepage. These AST-protocols are intended to support a harmonized and reproducible approach to durability testing in alkaline electrolysis. The protocols now need to be experimentally validated. First results, applying a Raney nickel cathode in a half cell, indicate that excessive current densities above 2 A cm⁻² and reverse-current operation lead to pronounced electrode degradation.

Altogether, the developed protocols represent an important step toward more consistent and comparable durability testing in alkaline electrolysis.

An important paper is out for the ENDURE consortium: Anna Müller from IFAM Dresden conducted this study on highly active coatings for alkaline electrolysis.

Summary:

In our recent paper, we demonstrate a highly active Ni–Mo catalyst for alkaline HER (−89 mV at −1 A cm⁻²) and show that the true active phase consists of Ni-rich Ni₁₀Mo nanoparticles anchored on MoO₂ rather than the frequently assumed Ni₄Mo phase. By clarifying the active species and the role of the Ni₁₀Mo/MoO₂ interface, this work provides valuable insights into the design of efficient, PGM-free cathodes for alkaline water electrolysis under industrial conditions. This improved understanding of the structure–property relationship is essential for scaling up non-PGM catalysts for AEL and enable the transfer of this concept to related technologies such as AEM water electrolysis and, potentially, beyond.

This paper can be direclty downloaded from our website.

Good news for the ENDURE project: two of our innovations have been detected by the European Commission Innovation Radar!

The first innovation is literally at the core of the alkaline electrolysis technology:
🔹Innovation Title: High-Performance, Durable, Zero-Gap Alkaline Stack Design for Cost-Competitive Green Hydrogen Production.
🔹Market Maturity of the Innovation: Tech Ready.
🔹Market Creation Potential of the innovation: Noteworthy.
🔹Key Innovators: Stargate Hydrogen, Université catholique de Louvain and Fraunhofer IFAM Dresden.

The second innovation brings the necessary modeling tools for advanced cell and stack design:
🔹Innovation  Title: Validated multi-level CFD modelling coupled with advanced X-ray  tomography for electrolyser cell- and stack-level optimisation.
🔹Market Maturity of the Innovation: Exploring.
🔹Market Creation Potential of the innovation: High.
🔹Key Innovators: Stargate Hydrogen and Université catholique de Louvain.

This information will soon be accessible on the European Commission's Innovation Radar platform.

Here ends another crazy week for the ENDURE consortium: after our positive online mid-term review on Tuesday with the European Commission, we gathered together in Stuttgart at ZSW for another of our special 2-day general assembly marathons on Thursday and Friday.

In short – and although not much about this gathering can really be called short – nothing could stop our technical discussions. Neither the coffee breaks, the lunch breaks, the toilet breaks, the local lab tour, the common dinner and the short walks in between those events; nor the management, dissemination and communication discussions, which had to be postponed to our regular online meetings.

The electrode development team is wrapping up its most promising candidates and preparing its first scientific publication drafts. The electrodes developed in the first half of ENDURE are already being tested in their upscaled versions in various types of demonstrators, while the baseline stack is running and the design of the prototype stack is undergoing subtle refinements; all of these elements converging towards intensification of alkaline electrolysis on a term that could not possibly be made shorter.

Thank you, Ben Haugk and Tobias Ludwig, for your warm welcome and the perfect organization of this assembly. Soon, the ENDURE project will enter its final year, and given how much energy we have put so far in our developments, we can safely assume that we have not seen yet all the fruits of our work.

ENDURE will be well represented next week at the ICE 2025 conference in Freiburg. Two posters and one talk, all of them will take place on the first day, Monday 25.08.25.

First, during the AEL: Catalysts and Electrodes session at 11:20, Anna Katharina Müller will present her talk: “Ni-Mo nanoparticles supported on MoO2 as highly active electrocatalyst for hydrogen production in alkaline water electrolysis”, highlighting electrode development advances within the project.

Then, during the poster session between 15:20 and 16:50, feel free to pass by our posters! Lidia Martínez Izquierdo will answer your questions about the “Validation of ENDURE testing protocols using a 10 kW baseline stack with Ni foam electrodes”, a crucial step towards the upscaling of the technology developed at the electrode level.

And during the same poster session, Renaud Delmelle will discuss the “Interplay between structure and electrocatalytic activity in flow-engineered three-dimensional porous transport electrodes for alkaline electrolysis”, focusing on novel electrode structures for efficient bubble evacuation.

See you there!