New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) has been supporting the R&D activities on hydrogen energy technology in Japan in the projects of “WE-NET (World Energy Network)” and “Development of Safe Utilization Technology and an Infrastructure for Hydrogen Use”. Both of these projects have contained the subproject “Research on Innovative Technologies”, for the purpose of building the wide portfolio of technology by discovery and incubation of innovative technologies. Some of the results of this subproject are found hopeful for low carbon hydrogen technology. In this paper, the significant results achieved in this subproject together with the framework of the project will be reported.
In the exploratory research on the photocatalytic hydrogen production technology for direct solar energy utilization, some semiconductors were found to show high activities of hydrogen production by dissociation of water. In search of biological production method of hydrogen, a study on hydrogen production by bacterial fermentation showed significant progress in this field. The development of magnetic refrigeration and liquefaction of hydrogen has been under way with the finding of materials with feasible magneto-caloric properties.