NewHydrogen, Inc. provided an important update on the progress of its green hydrogen technology development under a sponsored research agreement with the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). The company’s sponsored research program at UCLA is currently focused on replacing iridium, a precious metal found only in asteroids, with earth abundant materials that meet or exceed the performance characteristics of iridium. The objective is to develop inexpensive and robust materials with an outstanding ability to catalyze the electrochemical oxygen evolution reaction (OER) while achieving overall high performance water electrolysis for hydrogen production. The company previously reported that a baseline non-precious metal based OER catalyst was selected and successfully synthesized upon adjusting its physical parameters and conditions to exhibit the best material characteristics. The researchers have recently created a non-precious metal based catalyst that demonstrated significant improvement of OER in acidic conditions by substituting part of the existing metal element in the aforementioned catalyst material structure. Though the intrinsic activity and OER kinetics of the new catalyst may be somewhat lower than those of precious metal based catalysts, its low cost and high durability make it a good candidate toward the commercial water electrolysis systems operating at high current densities. The researchers plan on scaling up the process for studies in electrolyzers in a later phase. Eventually, a fully functional hydrogen-producing electrolyzer will serve as a reference prototype to help electrolyzer manufacturers worldwide to assess NewHydrogen’s breakthrough technology to produce low-cost green hydrogen.