Ecomembrane moves from biogas to hydrogen. US market in the crosshairs

From biogas storage to hydrogen storage. This is the leap that Ecomembrane, a company based in Gadesco Pieve Delmona (Cremona, Italy) and specialised in gasometers, gasometric domes and covers with PVC-coated fabric membranes, has made. It has recently completed the installation of the first hydrogen gasometer prototype in the Netherlands, specifically in Kootwigkerbroek, on behalf of customer Xintc Electrolysers: it will be inaugurated by the summer. It is a structure with a volume of 400 cubic metres, featuring a triple membrane designed for the storage of hydrogen gas at low pressure, a type of technology for which Ecomembrane registered a patent last year.

'It is a solution that was not yet on the market,' comments CEO Lorenzo Spedini. 'It represents an alternative to the currently existing storage systems, which put a lot of hydrogen into a cylinder at very high pressure, at 500-1,000 bar. With two kinds of problems: you need a lot of energy to compress it, and in addition a small volume can be dangerous, it can explode. Our solution, at low pressure, at 5-10 mBar, has very large volumes, costs much less, is less dangerous and is based on our experience with gasometers: flasks full of biogas produced by the fermentation of biological waste and agricultural or sewage slurry or industrial waste.

The applications of low-pressure hydrogen storage are numerous: 'It can be used in industry or next to power generation units, next to solar panels or wind farms. It is also a way of storing energy from renewable sources: if it is connected to a fuel cell it can produce water and electricity at the times when there is demand. In the system in the Netherlands, on the other hand, it is connected to a filling station for trucks running on hydrogen. One of the new frontiers is biomethane, a product of the refining of biogas, together with CO2: 'This is a technology that is taking off in Italy, also thanks to the incentives of the NRP to reconvert biogas plants,' Spedini goes on to explain: 'We already have sites that store CO2 for use. In general, we are planning bigger and bigger plants: the market is asking us to, it is a worldwide trend'.

Specialising in membranes for swimming pools since 1970 and then from 1982 devoted to gasometers, Ecomembrane went public last year. From a turnover of 5 million in 2020 to a consolidated turnover of 15 million in 2023, "this year we will continue to grow," says the CEO, "also with activities aimed at finding other companies to acquire in the field of green energy storage. We are looking to work as complete solution builders in cooperation with hydrogen specialists'.

The decision to join the H2 Technology Consortium, an initiative set up in 2022 in Houston (USA) with the aim of supporting Italian companies active in the hydrogen chain in accessing and developing their activities in the US market, is part of this direction. "We have had a company in the US since 2011. Initially commercial, it used a local partner for production, which we later acquired: we now have a production line in Little Rock, Arkansas, for plants mainly for biomethane and CO2 storage. In Italy, on the other hand, we have doubled our production capacity in Cremona to cope with growing orders from all over the world, which are bound to increase,' Spedini says. 'The important markets for us are Italy, with the biomethane sector opening up also thanks to the NRP, Europe, and the US. And we have received the first orders from Brazil'.