John Andrews

Professor John Andrews is one of the foremost renewable-energy hydrogen researchers internationally. In particular, he is a world-leading expert in his special technological foci: reversible hydrogen fuel cells, and proton battery and proton flow reactor technologies.

He is a primary developer of Unitised Regenerative Fuel Cells (URFCs), and inventor of proton battery/flow reactor technologies (patented by Andrews and his team in 2021). These innovative technologies revolutionise hydrogen energy systems by integrating hydrogen production and usage into a single unit, and in the proton battery take the additional step of storing hydrogen in atomic form rather than hydrogen gas.
These technologies are important since they address some of the features of conventional hydrogen energy systems that have held them back from widescale deployment: multiple separate components (electrolysers, fuel cells, compressed gas storages), low energy efficiency, high costs, and safety concerns.

Professor Andrews has taken URFCs and proton batteries from fundamental research concepts through now to prototypes prior to commercial manufacture, that is, from Technology Readiness Level 1 through to TRL5/6. He is currently leading two major projects at RMIT University aimed at prototyping these novel hydrogen technologies: a portable power supply based on a reversible hydrogen fuel cell ($3.2 million, Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator, Australian Department of Defence); and proton batteries ($2.1 million, Eldor Corporation, Italy). 

Firstly, the RMIT renewable-hydrogen group lead by Professor Andrews developed innovative ‘Unitised Regenerative Fuel Cells’ with much improved performance and combining both electrolyser and fuel cell functions in a single optimised unit. This led to a major Defence contract to demonstrate the technology at the kW scale for the first practical time ($1.6 million, 2014 – 2017), paving the way for the current Defence prototyping project. The attraction for Defence is a portable power supply with very low acoustic, infrared and electromagnetic signatures that is rechargeable from solar or any DC power source in the field, as an alternative to diesel and petrol generators without the high cost and vulnerability of supplying petroleum fuels.

Secondly, this work led to Andrews’ invention of the ‘proton battery’, first published in 2014 in International Journal of Hydrogen Energy. A proton battery combines the best features of hydrogen and battery storage to enable continuous power at high energy density from intermittent solar and wind power. He gained Australian Renewable Energy Agency funding – $1 million with international partners, Institute of Carbon Neutral Energy Research (Japan) and Eldor Corporation (Italy) – to extend this concept into a ‘proton flow reactor system’ for bulk electrical energy storage and export of hydrogenated carbon fuel. The successful proof of concept led to a patent, and another seminal journal paper (Journal of Power Sources, 2022). Subsequently, Eldor Corporation invested directly in this technology, engaging with RMIT under Professor Andrews’ leadership in the current $2.1 m prototyping project. The markets they have in mind are solar home batteries and back-up and remote power supplies.

Since returning to academia in the mid-1990s, Professor Andrews has published some 80 peer-reviewed works, including over 50 papers and four book chapters dedicated to renewable hydrogen systems. These have received about 3000 citations, an average of 38 per publication, corresponding to an h-index of 28 (Scopus). See his CV for a list of selected key publications. He has emphasised papers reporting on significant innovations or critically analysing hydrogen-energy strategic policy. For example, his paper, “Re-envisioning the role of hydrogen energy in a global sustainable energy strategy” (International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, 2012, with B. Shabani) advocated a shift away from the all-embracing ‘hydrogen economy’ concept introduced in the early 1970s, to a more targeted role for hydrogen in the particular sectors and applications where it has unique advantages. The paper helped stimulate international academic and political debate on the future role of hydrogen, and indeed a shift to a more targeted role has actually evolved over the past decade. Following its release, this paper soon became within the top 20 of downloaded papers from this journal, and received considerable international publicity. The research for this paper was conducted while Prof. Andrews was a Distinguished Academic Visitor at Queens’ College, Cambridge, UK. He has played a strategic intellectual role over the past two decades in articulating the contribution hydrogen in national and global sustainable energy strategies, both through his publications and as a founding director and board member of the Australian Association of Hydrogen (2009-2017). 

In a series of papers with members of his research group (2014, 2018, 2022 and 2023), he introduced the concept of a proton battery based on a reversible PEM fuel cell, and then reported on the crucial shift to porous carbon electrodes and other enhancements in performance that have made this technology a safe and competitive alternative to lithium ion batteries in the future.

He was invited last year by the prestigious international physics journal, Journal of Physics D, to publish a paper on the role of proton battery technologies in future global energy storage (released January 2025).