Hydrogen is the clean fuel of the future, but the infrastructure to refuel hydrogen vehicles isn't widely available yet. Producing your own hydrogen is a simple alternative that will enable you to access this remarkable clean fuel anywhere there is electricity and water. In the past hydrogen has typically been stored at very high pressures, and these high pressures have made it challenging and expensive to make hydrogen refueling equipment that is small, safe, and affordable enough to use as a home appliance. Croft's Base Station uses a breakthrough solid state storage technology to make hydrogen equipment simpler, safer, and much more efficient. As a result, installing a Base Station is similar to installing a washer/dryer unit, and the resulting hydrogen is on track to be cost-competitive with fossil fuels.

Croft's Base Station offers two methods to refuel a hydrogen vehicle: A familiar fueling hose and hand-portable cartridges. Cartridges enable very quick swapping, and they can be carried to a camp site or in the back of a vehicle if you need more hydrogen to extend your journey.

The standard Base Station produces 2 kg of hydrogen every 24 hours. With an additional electrolyzer module, each Base Station can produce up to 5 kg every 24 hours.

Legacy hydrogen storage systems compress hydrogen gas to extremely high pressures (700x atmospheric pressure) or liquify it by cooling it to extremely low temperatures (-253° Celsius or -423° Fahrenheit). Compression and cryogenic liquefaction are energy intensive processes that require expensive equipment, which has been a major barrier to the build-out of hydrogen fueling infrastructure.  

By contrast, Croft’s products adhere hydrogen molecules to the surface of a solid particle – a process known as physical adsorption. Specifically, we use a proprietary nanoparticle that is made of graphite, the same abundant material used in battery anodes and pencil cores.  

When hydrogen flows into a tank that has been filled with this proprietary material, hydrogen molecules adhere to the solid material in a manner that allows for very dense packing of hydrogen, even at ambient temperature and relatively low pressure. In practical terms, this means that Croft’s hydrogen cartridges can store significantly more hydrogen than a 700 bar compressed gas storage system of the same size, yet our tanks operate at 90% lower pressure. At the system level, this low-pressure storage breakthrough makes hydrogen equipment simpler, safer, more modular, and more affordable.