In 2022, a chemistry researcher from the University of Alberta was searching for a better way to convert bitumen to synthetic crude oil.
During his research, Dr. Robin Hamilton unintentionally stumbled upon a chemical reaction that astonished him: a common material placed in water caused hydrogen to bubble to the surface at room temperature.
The discovery led to the launch of Applied Quantum Materials, which Hamilton co-founded alongside Dr. David Antoniuk and University of Alberta professors Drs. Jeff Stryker and Jonathan Veinot to further investigate the compound.
From Applied Quantum Materials came the spinoff Dark Matter Materials, which can produce the hydrogen even from non-fresh sources such as greywater, seawater, and even agricultural wastewater.
“We’re amazed at what this material can do,” says Antoniuk, whose team is working on patenting their technology and readying demonstration pilots.
The technology has several breakthrough applications, according to Antoniuk, from supporting the environmentally friendly production of hydrogen and ammonia to efficiently powering solid state batteries and breaking down all types of plastics, including PVC and nylon.
“We’ve gone through plastic by plastic, and we haven’t discovered any that it doesn’t work against,” Antoniuk noted. “We simply put the plastic in a container, heat it up to a couple of hundred degrees, add the catalyst and it turns into usable liquid hydrocarbons, with no emissions at all.”
It can turn cooking oil into unstable diesel fuel and could possibly even convert oilsands tailings ponds into clean water with hydrogen gas as a byproduct.
“It’s breaking all the boundaries and limitations of thermocatalytic water splitting that have been around for decades,” Antoniuk says, “and the real beauty is there’s no need for expensive critical minerals or high energy, and no release of harmful greenhouse gas emissions in any of our processes.”
What sets Dark Matter Materials’ catalyst apart, Antoniuk believes, is its ability to produce hydrogen without requiring light, electricity, or high temperatures, while working with any type of water.
This innovation involves “nanomaterials that are not easily understood,” however, which demands “access to very complicated and expensive equipment that only the university has.”
The University has helped, as has Mitacs, an organization which connects businesses and researchers to drive collaboration and productivity.
“Mitacs places top-tier talent in Canadian firms, especially SMEs, to support industry-academia collaboration,” explains chief executive officer Stephen Lucas. “This helps unlock innovation potential, de-risk R&D for firms, and build lasting academic-industry relationships.”
Through Mitacs, the team is tapping into the expertise of post-doctoral researcher and chemist Dr. Mariana Vieira, who received her PhD in chemistry at Federal University of Espirito Santo in Brazil and now works as a researcher for Dark Matter.
Earlier this year, Dark Matter Materials was won the National Research Council Canadian Midstream Battery Materials Innovation Challenge, receiving funding to advance its catalyst as a material to develop batteries for electric vehicles and storage grids.
“The reality is, we have multiple viable paths to commercialization and they’re all showing promise,” Antoniuk says.
The next step, then, “is to do the engineering required to put this discovery into a commercial system.”
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