The Company greenlights construction of a ThermoLoop engineering test unit to define commercial pilot plant specifications
SANTA CLARITA, Calif., April 21, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NewHydrogen, Inc. (OTCQB: NEWH), the developer of ThermoLoop™, a breakthrough technology that uses water and heat instead of electricity to produce the world’s cheapest clean hydrogen, today announced that ThermoLoop has successfully completed a critical pre-pilot plant technical validation milestone. The Company will now proceed with construction of a dedicated ThermoLoop engineering test unit to determine commercial pilot plant specifications.
“We are thrilled to have completed the research phase of our development program and are now advancing into the engineering phase required for commercialization,” said NewHydrogen CEO Steve Hill. “To do so, ThermoLoop was required to pass ‘Stage Gate One,’ a very rigorous pre-pilot plant test. Based on our internal review and published literature, we are not aware of any other heat-based water-splitting technology that has met this combination of performance and engineering criteria."
Stage Gate One required ThermoLoop to meet the following engineering and performance criteria:
- Maximum operating temperature below 1,000°C
- Demonstrated operation over more than 10 cycles
- Hydrogen production efficiency exceeding 75% of theoretical yield
- Defined industrial heat-integration strategy
- Formal process control and management-of-change framework in place
- All non-core balance-of-plant equipment utilizes commercially proven technologies
- Manageable separations
- Acceptable safety and toxicity profile
- No identified economic barriers to pilot-scale development
These benchmarks are explained by Chief Technology Officer Dr. Eric McFarland in a Special Report Video.
The ThermoLoop engineering test unit will be constructed by a University of California, Santa Barbara (“UCSB”) team led by Ryan Patrick, NewHydrogen Senior Chemical Engineer. The UCSB program is directed by Dr. Eric McFarland, NewHydrogen’s Chief Technology Officer, in collaboration with UCSB lead investigator Dr. Phil Christopher.
“Think of this next step as the transition from a scientific breakthrough to an industrial reality,” said Dr. McFarland. “Our previous lab unit demonstrated continuous flow, the fundamental requirement for a commercial plant. The objective of our engineering test unit is to validate around-the-clock performance and generate the data necessary to design our first commercial pilot plant.”
Mr. Hill concluded, “We not only expect that this next phase will generate the engineering data necessary to support pilot plant design but may also lead to the sale or license of our technology.”
About NewHydrogen, Inc.
NewHydrogen is developing ThermoLoop™ — a breakthrough technology that uses water and heat instead of electricity to produce the world's cheapest clean hydrogen. Hydrogen is important to modern life, and we can't live without it. Hydrogen is the key ingredient in making fertilizers needed to grow food for the world. It is also used for transportation, refining oil and making steel, glass, pharmaceuticals and more. Nearly all the hydrogen today is made from hydrocarbons like coal, oil, and natural gas, which are dirty and limited resources. Water, on the other hand, is an infinite and renewable worldwide resource. Currently, the most common way of making clean hydrogen is to split water into oxygen and hydrogen with electricity using an electrolyzer, a very expensive process. By using heat directly, we can dramatically reduce the use of expensive electricity. A massive source of inexpensive heat can be obtained from current and future power plants, especially small modular nuclear reactors. Working with a world class research team at UC Santa Barbara, our goal is to help usher in the clean hydrogen economy that Goldman Sachs estimated to have a future market value of $12 trillion.
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