Fortescue Metals Group Ltd (ASX: FMG) shares are avoiding the market weakness today and are trading flat.
This outperformance may have been driven by the release of an announcement today.
What did Fortescue announce?
This morning Fortescue announced that it has taken the lead investor role in Electric Hydrogen's US$380 million Series C funding round.
This latest funding round means that Electric Hydrogen has now raised over US$600 million since it was founded in 2020. Fortescue is in good company, with the likes of Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Honeywell International (NASDAQ: HON) taking part in previous funding rounds.
According to Reuters, sources say that this latest funding round values Electric Hydrogen at US$1 billion, making it a green unicorn.
What is Electric Hydrogen?
Electric Hydrogen claims to manufacture and commission the world's most powerful electrolysers for critical industries to produce the lowest-cost green hydrogen.
Green hydrogen is seen as many as the key to decarbonising the industrial world. However, high electrolyser costs have been a stumbling block for users. Until now.
Electric Hydrogen's complete 100MW electrolyser systems produce green hydrogen from renewable electricity and water at a large scale. Each electrolyser system can make nearly 50 tons of green hydrogen per day at a transformational low cost.
Commenting on the news, Fortescue Energy's CEO, Mark Hutchinson, said:
Fortescue is committed and focused on supporting the rapid scaling of green technology to help heavy industry decarbonize and producing green hydrogen at scale is integral to that. Right now there are not enough electrolysers in the world to support the amount of green hydrogen we are set to produce. That is why we are partnering with other world leaders in this space to secure our green energy supply chain, and we're excited to invest and secure capacity with Electric Hydrogen to help us achieve our goals.
In addition to this investment, Fortescue and Electric Hydrogen have signed a framework procurement agreement. The latter will supply 1 gigawatt of electrolyser systems to Fortescue's green hydrogen projects in the US and globally.
Electric Hydrogen's CEO and co-founder, Raffi Garabedian, adds:
Electric Hydrogen and Fortescue share an ambition to achieve large scale, low-cost production of green hydrogen globally as soon as possible. We want to make fossil-free hydrogen an economic inevitability for fertilizer producers, steelmakers, chemical companies and other critical industries that have no other option to decarbonize.
