The government-funded National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has joined five other national labs in a consortium to help develop commercially viable hydrogen fuel from renewables, NREL announced on Monday.

It will be funded with about $10 million per year from the Energy Department’s Fuel Cell Technologies Office in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).

Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Savannah River National Laboratory will pool their resources for the initiative, which has been named HydroGEN Advanced Water Splitting Consortium.

“HydroGEN brings together capabilities that can only be found in the national lab system and makes them easily available to material developers in academia and industry,” said Huyen N. Dinh, director of the program and a researcher at NREL’s Chemistry and Nanoscience Center. “Our research strategy integrates computational tools and modeling, material synthesis, process and manufacturing scale-up, characterization, system integration, data management, and analysis to accelerate advanced water splitting material development.”

They will work on addressing water splitting materials challenges, including opening national lab resources up to leading industry researchers and facilitating communication between researchers.

At present, there are three viable water-splitting materials that may be viable in terms of producing commercial hydrogen: advanced electrolysis, photoelectrochemical, and solar thermochemical production. The coalition aims to give more researchers access to the advanced materials needed to test these techniques and bring materials to market.

The HydroGEN initiative is part of EERE’s push to create more consortia as part of the Energy Materials Network, an Energy Department project started in February to encourage the commercialization of clean energy.