Breaking the Green Hydrogen Frontier with Matt Bird and Luke Tan | Conversations in Cleantech | Season four, Episode Seven

Matt Bird and Luke Tan are on a super-critical mission to break the green hydrogen frontier. Along with their other two co-founders and the rest of the Supercritical team, Matt and Luke are pioneering an electrolyser which produces green hydrogen that is cost-competitive with its grey hydrogen counterparts. To do this, they are developing technology which changes the state of a high-pressure liquid through heat to a supercritical fluid to reap the benefits of high-pressure efficiencies. 

Created during the pandemic, Supercritical and its fab four co-founders have been on quite a journey over the last few years. Through building strong foundations in the lab with their fantastic team and great partners, the organisation is now at the exciting phase of proving commercial viability with their first out-of-lab demonstrator being erected in Teeside over the next three to six months. 

With their purpose-driven mentality pushing them forward there is no doubt that the Supercritical team will succeed in their mission. Read on to find out about the journey so far and what the next few years look like for the organisation. If you would like to check out the full episode, take a listen here. 

What has Supercritical’s trajectory looked like?

Luke: An electrolyser is built of building blocks called cells. I compare them to batteries as people tend to be more familiar with them - you can increase the electricity output from batteries by adding more batteries to the system, the same is true for electrolysers. The single cell is multiplied to produce more hydrogen, which is the most important thing to get right. If you get this right, the rest follows much easier. 

You wouldn’t want to build a bridge from matchsticks, you want something strong that you can have confidence in before starting to expand. The last two years have been all about getting our base right and building our first-generation electrolyser. Midway through 2021, we built our generation one and now we’re developing our generation two. We have learnt so much over this journey - what to do, and in some cases, what not to do.

Over the next three to six months, we’re building our first out-of-lab demonstrator, which will see a number of cells put together, demonstrating that we’re able to scale output linearly. This is a huge milestone for us to be able to prove that we can scale this technology. 

We have been incredibly lab-focused over the last two years, which has been absolutely appropriate for what we have been developing. It has given us the confidence to scale knowing that we have the building blocks to underpin the work as we move forward. 

Matt: I think you’ve said that so succinctly, you make the journey sound almost easy. The process of scaling those different generations of cells represents a lot of hard work from the team.

Our electrolyser is pioneering so the fundamental data either doesn’t exist or if it does exist it can be quite contradictory in terms of how we do things. We’ve had to do a lot of the fundamental science in our lab and create empirical data to benchmark against. From here, we’ve had to enhance and improve things. 

We’ve had a really strong team that’s helped us do this, along with some excellent partnerships, from leading partners in academia to government-backed manufacturing catapults. 

What we’re building up to is the ability to scale our cells and to do this we need to create a cell that is as powerful and predictable as possible. By then adding them together, we can actually build bigger electrolysers confidently and safely. 

Each generation of cell hasn’t just had an incremental change, they have big changes and improvements. It has definitely not been an easy journey but we’ve achieved everything we have through the strength of our team and partners. 

How has the Supercritical team helped you to push the organisation to where it is today and what will your team look like moving forward?

Matt: There are 15 of us, as of early 2023 and we’ve gone through significant growth over the last year. The team is predominately made up of scientists, every single person in the labs has got a PhD in a respective field plus research experience. 

I literally feel like the most stupid person in the room when I enter the lab in the morning. But in all seriousness, we’ve got some incredibly bright minds within the mechanical and process engineering fields. As a startup, we have to be quite frugal in terms of where our money is spent so it tends to be spent on our equipment and our people. 

We genuinely believe in the power of diverse teams. What we are doing is not easy, it hasn’t been done before so by definition, we are constantly problem-solving. The team we have created to try to solve the problem is very unique and I am always so proud of the people we have. 

It is vital we have different opinions from different people with different backgrounds and experiences. Diversity is many different things and creating true diversity is something that we are trying to foster during the recruitment process. 

Luke: The nature of what we do means I’m not sure where we will be in a year’s time as things change. However, we are looking to build out the team and bring in a couple of more senior-level people to manage the wider breadth of the team that we have created over the last 12 months. 

We’ve grown from a team of six to 15 in the last year so it has been quite a big jump in terms of management, ensuring everyone feels engaged and their purpose is being met. We identified a couple of leadership roles, one was Head of Electrochemistry which has just been filled and another, Head of Engineering, which is live as of February 2023. There will be more roles to follow as we encounter more gaps in our experience. 

The most enjoyable part of my day is working with people to overcome the challenges we identify. We are the only people working in this space so we are genuinely at the frontier of the development of hydrogen technologies in the supercritical regime. Whilst it is really exciting, it can also be frustrating when there is nowhere to go for support. 

However, we are now wide enough to look sideways and debate with one another about the direction in which we can go and frankly, who doesn’t like breaking boundaries? 

The climate problem provides the optimal environment for innovation - the funding is there, the industry support is there, the government support is there and the brightest minds genuinely want to put their efforts and energy into solving these problems. Getting all of these elements in the right place at the right time is going to be what it takes to overcome these problems. 

Personally, I’m really excited to see the growth of the team and I see it as a really important element of our job to select the right people for the role. We do not take hiring lightly. We don’t just want people to bring in technical expertise, we also want different perspectives. We’re carefully curating an environment which is technically capable and where people feel comfortable challenging the status quo. If we all thought in the same way, we wouldn’t be able to generate the right solutions to the abstract problems we’re facing. 

Enjoyed this article? Listen to the full podcast here, and connect with Matt and Luke on LinkedIn to follow the Supercritical journey.