Clean Energy · Green Chemistry
820 hours. No shutdown. No purification.
Just biomass, a catalyst, and a steady stream of hydrogen.
German researchers have solved a stubborn second half of a problem chemists have chased for years: not just making formic acid from biomass, but reliably pulling clean hydrogen back out of it, continuously, without pausing to purify the raw material first. A new ruthenium catalyst, developed by LIKAT for the Bavarian company OxFA, ran for over 820 hours straight at a pilot plant, producing roughly 30 cubic meters of hydrogen along the way.
Formic acid packs hydrogen safely into a liquid — the hard part has always been getting it back out reliably.
Hydrogen From a Chemical You've Never Heard Of
Formic acid isn't glamorous. It's the chemical behind that sharp, stinging smell in ant venom.
Industrially, it's mostly known as an animal feed preservative, produced at a scale of roughly one million metric tons every year.
But formic acid has a second identity, one attracting serious attention lately: it's a genuinely capable hydrogen carrier.
Researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Catalysis, known as LIKAT, in Rostock, Germany, just made real progress on exploiting that second identity.
Working on behalf of OxFA, a Bavarian company producing formic acid from biomass, LIKAT developed a new catalyst system.
Its job: pull hydrogen back out of bio-based formic acid, continuously, at relatively mild temperatures.
A patent application has already been filed for the jointly developed process.
This work represents the second step in a larger sustainable hydrogen pathway, one the researchers call the BFH process — Biomass, Formic Acid, Hydrogen.
Step one, turning biomass into formic acid, was already solved. Step two, reliably getting the hydrogen back out again, is what this new work finally cracks.
Why Formic Acid Is a Surprisingly Good Hydrogen Carrier
Hydrogen itself is a frustrating fuel to work with directly.
It's extremely light, which means storing meaningful amounts requires either high-pressure tanks or brutally cold liquefaction.
Both options are expensive, energy-intensive, and genuinely inconvenient for widespread, everyday use.
Formic acid sidesteps that problem entirely. It's a liquid at room temperature, easy to store, transport, and handle safely.
Chemically, it carries about 4.4% hydrogen by weight, locked inside a simple, stable molecular structure.
Release that hydrogen on demand, using the right catalyst, and you effectively get without ever needing a pressurized tank.
That's the appeal driving formic acid's growing reputation as a hydrogen carrier, rather than just an industrial commodity chemical.
There's just one catch worth naming upfront: almost all formic acid today still comes from fossil raw materials.
Using it as a "clean" hydrogen source only makes sense if the formic acid itself starts out clean too.
That's exactly the gap OxFA has been working to close.
How This Formic Acid Gets Made From Biomass
OxFA is currently the only company producing formic acid from biomass at any real scale.
Their process runs in three broad stages: pretreating raw biomass, oxidizing it, and isolating the finished bio-based formic acid.
OxFA's process converts raw biomass into formic acid using notably mild conditions — no harsh chemistry required.
What's genuinely notable is how gentle that process is. Reaction conditions stay below 6 bar of pressure, and under 140 degrees Celsius.
Water serves as the only solvent involved — no harsh organic chemicals, no exotic reagents.
Despite those mild conditions, the process reportedly achieves high yields, with 100% biogenic carbon content in the finished formic acid.
That last detail matters enormously for anyone tracking genuine climate impact, rather than just marketing language.
Carbon that originated in plants, not fossil deposits, changes the entire lifecycle accounting of whatever gets built from it downstream.
By some estimates, roughly 31 million tonnes of biomass go unused across Germany every year — agricultural residue, forestry byproducts, and similar organic waste.
That's a genuinely enormous, underused feedstock, sitting right there, waiting for a practical use.
Turning even a fraction of it into formic acid, and eventually hydrogen, is exactly the opportunity this research chases.
The Missing Piece: Getting the Hydrogen Back Out
Producing bio-based formic acid was never the whole story. It was only ever step one.
The genuinely hard part has always been step two: reliably releasing usable hydrogen from that formic acid, on demand, without the process degrading or stalling out.
Chemists have studied formic acid dehydrogenation for years, using various metal catalysts to trigger the reaction.
Most of that work, though, has focused on pure, commercially manufactured formic acid — clean, consistent, easy to work with.
Biogenic formic acid, straight from a process like OxFA's, isn't nearly so tidy.
It arrives as a highly diluted aqueous solution, with water content that can vary noticeably from batch to batch.
That variability is exactly the kind of thing that trips up sensitive catalysts, causing inconsistent performance, or worse, deactivation over time.
Purifying the formic acid first, before feeding it into a catalyst, is one obvious fix. It's also expensive, energy-intensive, and adds an entire extra processing step.
Skipping purification entirely, while still keeping the catalyst working reliably, was the real target LIKAT set out to hit.
Building a Catalyst on 15 Years of Groundwork
This breakthrough didn't appear out of nowhere. It sits on top of roughly 15 years of accumulated catalyst research at LIKAT.
Dr. Henrik Junge and his team have spent that time steadily building expertise specifically around formic acid chemistry.
That long track record is exactly why OxFA approached LIKAT in the first place, through a project funded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Economic Affairs, Regional Development, and Energy.
The stated goal of that funding: producing sustainable hydrogen to help ensure energy security.
For this specific project, the LIKAT team modified ruthenium complexes already known from earlier publications, some originating from their own institute's prior work.
The LIKAT–OxFA research team: Florian Kohler, Hendrik Kempf, Alexander Heidenreich, and Henrik Junge.
Dr. Hendrik Kempf, then a doctoral student in Junge's research group, took on the hands-on testing.
He systematically evaluated new catalyst variants across a range of different reaction conditions.
That's not glamorous work. It's methodical, iterative testing, the kind that rarely makes headlines on its own, but consistently underpins the breakthroughs that eventually do.
This particular round of testing produced the specific ruthenium system that made the final pilot demonstration possible.
The Amine Trick That Made the Difference
One specific addition turned out to matter enormously: an amine additive, mixed directly into the reaction.
Amines increased the reactivity between the formic acid substrate and the ruthenium catalyst itself.
This wasn't a lucky accident. Junge's team had already observed a version of this effect in earlier, separate research.
"We had already recognized in earlier work that amines can positively influence hydrogen production from formic acid," Junge explained.
That prior insight gave the team a real head start, rather than starting the amine experimentation completely from scratch.
Applied here, to biogenic formic acid specifically, the amine additive helped the catalyst push through exactly the inconsistency that had made continuous operation so difficult before.
It's a modest-sounding ingredient for such an outsized effect.
But that's often how catalysis research actually progresses — not through one dramatic new molecule, but through carefully tuned combinations of known components.
Ruthenium catalyst, amine additive, biogenic formic acid. Three known ingredients, combined in exactly the right way.
820 Hours, No Purification, No Shutdown
Lab success is one thing. Pilot-scale success is another entirely.
The catalyst system was tested at OxFA's pilot plant in Bavaria, under the direction of Dr.-Ing. Florian Kohler.
The result: a stable runtime of more than 820 hours, in genuinely continuous operation.
That's over 34 days, running without interruption — a serious, industrially meaningful timeframe, not a brief proof-of-concept demo.
Total output across that run: approximately 30 cubic meters of hydrogen.
Junge is candid about where the system currently stands relative to alternatives. "Although our catalyst exhibits slightly lower activity than other known systems, it can easily handle a wide range of water contents in biogenic formic acid," he said.
That's a genuinely honest trade-off, not an oversold breakthrough claim.
Kohler adds the detail that matters most for real-world deployment: in the continuous trials, biogenic formic acid was used exactly "as produced," with no further purification step at all.
That's the whole point, achieved. Messy, inconsistent, real-world feedstock, running steadily for over a month straight.
A Trade-Off Worth Making
It's worth sitting with that trade-off Junge described, because it's the actual heart of this achievement.
Plenty of catalysts can extract hydrogen from formic acid faster than this one, under ideal lab conditions.
Very few of them can do it reliably, for over 800 hours, using unpurified, variable, biomass-derived feedstock.
Raw activity numbers make for impressive lab papers. Robustness under messy, real-world conditions is what actually gets a process built at industrial scale.
Purification isn't free, either. Every added processing step consumes energy, adds cost, and introduces another point where a plant can slow down or fail.
A catalyst that tolerates variable water content directly sidesteps that entire added burden.
Slightly lower peak activity, in exchange for skipping an entire purification stage and running unattended for over a month, is a genuinely favorable trade for industrial deployment.
That's the kind of practical compromise that tends to separate lab curiosities from technologies that actually reach a factory floor.
Why This Matters for Energy Security
Zoom out, and this project sits inside a much larger, more urgent conversation.
A domestically producible hydrogen pathway, built from biomass rather than imported fossil fuel or gas.
The funding behind this project came explicitly tied to energy security, not just environmental research for its own sake.
A hydrogen supply chain built on domestic biomass, rather than imported fossil fuels or shipped-in hydrogen, is inherently more resilient to global supply disruptions.
That's a genuinely strategic consideration, beyond the purely chemical achievement.
Germany, like much of Europe, has spent recent years reassessing exactly how exposed its energy supply is to external shocks.
A process that turns agricultural and forestry waste, sitting unused in the tens of millions of tonnes, into a usable domestic hydrogen source fits squarely into that broader push.
It's also worth noting formic acid's existing industrial role. As an established, million-ton-scale commodity chemical, it already has infrastructure, transport networks, and handling expertise built around it.
Repurposing an existing, well-understood chemical as a hydrogen carrier is often far more practical than building an entirely new supply chain from zero.
What Still Has to Happen
A successful 820-hour pilot run is a genuine milestone. It's still not the finish line.
Scaling this process up, from a pilot plant to genuinely industrial volumes, is the obvious next hurdle.
That transition tends to surface new challenges that don't show up at smaller scale — heat management, catalyst lifetime under sustained heavy use, and overall system economics all need fresh scrutiny.
There's also the activity gap Junge mentioned directly. Closing at least part of that difference, without sacrificing the catalyst's tolerance for variable feedstock, is a natural next research target.
The pending patent application suggests the team is actively protecting this specific approach, likely with commercialization in mind.
That's usually a meaningful signal. Patents tend to follow results people genuinely intend to build a business around, not just publish and move past.
There's also a broader question worth watching: does this specific ruthenium-and-amine approach generalize to other biomass-derived feedstocks, beyond formic acid alone?
If it does, this project could end up being a template, not just a single successful case.
Manohar Insight
What I find most compelling here is how unglamorous the actual breakthrough is.
No exotic new material. No dramatic new physics. Just a catalyst tuned carefully enough to tolerate mess.
That's an easy kind of progress to overlook, precisely because it doesn't sound revolutionary on the surface.
But "tolerates real-world mess" is often the exact difference between a technology that stays in a lab forever, and one that actually gets built.
There's also something worth noticing in Junge's own honesty about the trade-off. Lower activity, openly stated, rather than buried or spun.
That kind of transparency tends to be a good sign in applied research — a team solving the actual problem in front of them, rather than chasing a more impressive-sounding headline number.
Fifteen years of patient groundwork, culminating in 820 unglamorous, uninterrupted hours. That's usually what real progress actually looks like.
The real achievement here isn't a faster reaction. It's a reaction finally sturdy enough to trust.
Join the Signal
If hydrogen can now be reliably pulled from formic acid made out of unused agricultural waste, how big a piece of the clean energy puzzle do you think biomass-derived hydrogen could realistically become? Share your take in the comments.
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