Profile
Joris Proost is a professor in the Division of Materials and Process Engineering at UCLouvain in Belgium. He holds a master's degree and a doctorate in materials and process engineering from KU Leuven and spent three years at Harvard University before joining UCLouvain in 2003. He has been a tenured full professor since 2009.
His research focuses on electrochemical process intensification, especially new reactor and electrode technologies for renewable hydrogen production. He represents Belgium in the Hydrogen Technology Collaboration Programme of the International Energy Agency and is a subtask leader in Task 38 on power to hydrogen.
At the conference
His invited talk examined the production scale required for green electrolytic hydrogen to reach fossil parity. It compared the total cost of ownership of green hydrogen with grey hydrogen from steam methane reforming and considered the role of electrolyser efficiency, capital cost and lifetime.
The conclusion was encouraging for project developers: parity can already be reached in some conditions, and it can be achieved at a scale that matches the basic units of renewable electricity generation. The talk gave the conference a concrete way to think about the economics of electrolysis.
Read the other invited talks on the invited speakers page. The programme structure is on the conference programme page.