Johnson Matthey will invest £80 million ($95.74m) to build a 3-gigawatt fuel cell components gigafactory on its existing site in Royston, Hertfordshire, UK, Kallanish reports.

The gigafactory is to be operational by H1 2024, helping supply domestic demand from fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs). In the future, JM plans to nearly triple this capacity using its decommissioned Clean Air production facility to manufacture both fuel cell and green hydrogen components.

The APC forecasts the UK will need 14 GW of fuel cell stack production annually by 2035 – the equivalent to 140,000 FCEVs.

“For more than two decades, JM has been at the forefront of fuel cell innovation. The fuel cell market has now reached a pivotal moment with the increasing urgency to decarbonise transportation, and today marks the next step of the journey to a low-carbon future in the UK,” comments JM’s ceo Liam Condon.

Earlier this year, the company announced its strategy to exit battery materials and focus on hydrogen “to become a market leader in performance components for fuel cells and electrolysers.” It’s targeting over £200m sales in hydrogen technologies by end of 2024-25.

APC estimates JM’s UK gigafactory will enable a “significant step change in the cost of reduction of fuel cell stacks, bringing the cost of a whole hydrogen fuel cell system closer to cost parity with battery packs.

It forecasts initial economies of scale from 0.1 GW to 2 GW production to be massive, resulting in a 77% reduction on stack costs. Such scale is also estimated to cut costs for a light duty PEM fuel cell system with hydrogen storage cost included to $120/kilowatt-hour, from $288/kWh. A 50-GW gigafactory would enable these costs to decline to $86/kWh.

Battery pack costs for EVs are expected at around $80/kWh in 2030.