Test: Li Hui Fuels China’s Green Hydrogen Future

On a late November evening in 2023, Li Hui’s phone buzzed with a message from her engineering team.

As the founder and CEO of BriHyNergy, she had been anxiously awaiting news on a crucial project. Now, reading the text on her screen, her heart leapt — the team had finally conquered the last technical hurdle, and their new production line was ready for launch.

That night, Li Hui was too excited to sleep. To celebrate the historic moment, she cracked open a bottle of red wine and savored a small glass, replaying the victory in her mind.

After more than a year of design and dozens of technical challenges, BriHyNergy had achieved mass production of a dual-enhanced proton exchange membrane (BriPEM) – an innovative material poised to revolutionize the water electrolysis industry.

Returning Home to Innovate

Li Hui’s journey to this breakthrough began decades earlier in academia.

A standout scientist from an early age, she earned degrees at Tsinghua University in Beijing and the University of British Columbia in Canada. But Li Hui was never content to stay in the lab; her academic path was always intertwined with real-world applications. “I’ve always felt that whatever you work on, you have to focus on its practical use,” she says, recalling how even her graduate research was closely tied to industry needs.

Many researchers chase cutting-edge theories yet struggle to turn laboratory results into viable products. Li Hui took a different approach. During her Ph.D., she often had to assemble heavy electrochemical reactors — equipment weighing tens of kilograms that had to be lifted upright by hand, a time-consuming and cumbersome task.

In just two days, she designed a small tool with foot pedals that could hoist the entire apparatus into position. It was a simple fix born of practical ingenuity, exactly the kind of solution that has defined her career.

Outside the lab, Li Hui also embraced challenges. In college she competed in the 400-meter dash and shot put, and even today she plays in a table tennis league at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), where she later became a professor.

“I love playing table tennis. But I’m not satisfied with just practice — I have to compete,” she laughs. “I enjoy activities that are competitive and challenging.”

This blend of hands-on problem-solving and competitive spirit ultimately propelled Li Hui out of a comfortable life in Canada and onto a new path. In 2015, after years abroad, she made the bold decision to return to China and launch her own company.

“Hydrogen energy has huge potential in the Chinese market, but the whole industry was still in its infancy,” she explains. Around the same time, her son was graduating college and Li Hui found herself at a personal crossroads. “I asked myself, do I continue living this predictable life in Canada where I can see all the way to retirement, or do I embrace a new challenge?”

Filled with passion and armed with years of ideas and expertise, she chose the challenge — moving back home to create more value through entrepreneurship.

China’s timing was perfect. In September 2020, the country announced ambitious climate targets (“Dual Carbon” goals to peak emissions by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2060), spurring a boom in renewable energy projects, from massive wind farms to sprawling solar arrays. But as wind and solar capacity surged, a new problem emerged: these intermittent sources often produced more electricity than the grid could absorb, leading to huge amounts of clean energy going to waste.

“That’s why energy storage became a must,” Li Hui explains. “If we want to cut carbon, we have to store surplus wind and solar power and then redistribute it efficiently.”

Backed by her deep theoretical knowledge and practical engineering experience, Li Hui stepped up to solve this challenge. She founded BriHyNergy (氢辉能源, meaning “Hydrogen Radiance”) in 2021, focusing on a solution to capture renewable energy at scale: hydrogen.

The Promise of Hydrogen Energy

So how do you store excess energy from wind and solar? Hydrogen could be the answer.

 By weight, hydrogen gas carries roughly 100 times more energy than a typical lithium battery, making it an exceptionally efficient option for large-scale energy storage. Unlike batteries, which handle both energy conversion and storage in one unit, a hydrogen system separates these functions — an electrolyzer uses electricity to produce hydrogen fuel, and the hydrogen is then stored in tanks.

One key advantage of hydrogen storage is that energy conversion and energy storage are separate. In a battery, these happen in the same device, but a hydrogen-based system splits the functions: an electrolyzer converts electricity into hydrogen fuel, and the hydrogen is then stored in tanks.

 Thanks to this separation, scaling up storage is far more flexible: to store more energy, you just add more hydrogen tanks instead of building an entirely new “big battery.” Hydrogen fuel can also be transported through pipelines and stored for long durations, offering a flexibility few other technologies can match.

Hydrogen’s potential doesn’t end at energy storage. It is also a critical feedstock in industry, used in producing everything from ammonia fertilizer to synthetic fuels. The downside is that most hydrogen is made from polluting processes like coal gasification or natural gas reforming, which emit large amounts of carbon.

 To fully realize hydrogen’s clean promise, it needs to be produced in a carbon-free way at scale — and that means green hydrogen, generated by splitting water with renewable electricity and emitting zero greenhouse gases.

“Green hydrogen currently accounts for only about 3–5% of total hydrogen production,” Li Hui notes. “It might slowly rise to 10–20%, but with technological progress and greater market acceptance, that share could reach 70% in the coming years.”

In other words, as industries look to decarbonize, the demand for clean hydrogen could skyrocket — and Li Hui intends for BriHyNergy to help meet that need. Her company zeroed in on one of the most promising technologies to produce green hydrogen: proton exchange membrane (PEM) water electrolysis.

The PEM Game Changer for Green Hydrogen

Electrolysis, the process of using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, was once considered the stuff of science fiction. Today, it’s the foundation of green hydrogen production. There are a few ways to electrolyze water: alkaline electrolysis is the oldest and most established method; PEM (proton exchange membrane) electrolysis is a newer approach offering higher performance potential; and anion exchange membrane (AEM) electrolysis is an emerging, still-developing technique.

BriHyNergy chose to focus on PEM electrolysis, even though it was less mature than alkaline technology, because it promised superior performance — and Li Hui saw an opportunity for a breakthrough.

The biggest bottleneck in PEM systems lies at their core: the proton exchange membrane. TActing as the system’s heart, this thin material enables proton conduction while blocking gas crossover – its quality directly dictates efficiency.

In the past, Chinese companies trying to build PEM electrolyzers had to import these specialized membranes at exorbitant cost, if they could get them at all. “Before, anyone in China working in this field needed to import everything, at very high cost, and often you couldn’t even buy what you needed,” Li Hui recalls.

She experienced this challenge firsthand. When Li Hui returned to China in 2015, she helped build the country’s first production line for a key fuel cell component. At that time, lacking domestic suppliers, Chinese firms were paying around $500 per square meter for certain imported materials that cost only about $10 to produce — an enormous markup due to foreign tech monopolies. In recent years, however, China’s hydrogen industry has made huge strides, mastering core technologies and driving costs down. Now Li Hui and her team are contributing a breakthrough of their own.

“We’re very proud. We achieved a major technological breakthrough with our dual-enhanced proton exchange membrane (BriPEM),” she says excitedly.

Traditional PEMs (initially adapted from chlor-alkali industry designs) were thick and tended to swell in electrolyzers, which weakened them. BriHyNergy’s new membrane is about half the thickness of conventional ones yet significantly stronger. This “dual-enhanced” design — thinner for better efficiency and reinforced to handle high electrical currents — results in higher hydrogen output and much greater durability, a game-changer for the industry.

Crucially, the team also engineered the membrane to dramatically reduce hydrogen crossover. In tests, they cut the hydrogen content on the oxygen side of the cell from roughly 1.6% to just 0.3%, vastly improving safety.

This innovation lies at the heart of the company’s PEM electrolyzers, enabling higher efficiency and improved safety. It represents a significant step forward for domestic green hydrogen technology.

Buoyed by this success, Li Hui is confident her innovation can drive the industry forward. Early feedback from customers in China and abroad suggests BriHyNergy’s membrane technology is now among the best in the world.

“It used to take 100 membrane sheets to assemble one electrolyzer stack — now you only need 70,” she explains. “That’s one big reason the cost of electrolyzers has dropped by nearly half from last year to this year.”

Designing a membrane that looks simple yet delivers such high performance was a complex endeavor. Every aspect — the material formula, microstructure, mechanical strength, and manufacturing process — had to be perfected. And scaling up from a lab prototype to mass production posed another challenge. Here, Li Hui’s deep expertise and hands-on approach proved invaluable: she and her team spent over a year refining the design and building an automated production line, overcoming countless engineering problems along the way.

Building this production line was crucial for translating the new membrane technology into real-world impact. It signifies how far the company has come in bringing its innovation to market.

That effort culminated in late 2023 with BriHyNergy’s first major milestone: the successful launch of its BriPEM membrane mass production line. It was the achievement that left Li Hui sleepless with excitement. By then, her vision had also attracted strong backing from investors. In early 2023, HSG led BriHyNergy’s pre-Series A funding round.

Li Hui describes HSG as a truly supportive partner. The firm’s venture team didn’t just provide capital; they also helped with talent recruitment, legal and financial guidance, and made valuable introductions across the new-energy industry via HSG’s global network.

“I had been told by many people that investors only care about returns and will constantly push you,” Li Hui says. “But after actually working with HSG, I feel they are true partners — people who stand on the same side with us.”

In her view, building a startup from scratch isn’t easy — especially in a cutting-edge field like clean energy. She advises fellow founders to stay mentally strong and confident in their vision. “An entrepreneur’s mind has to be strong, and you must have enough confidence in yourself,” she says, emphasizing that one shouldn’t endlessly second-guess or torment oneself.

Instead, she suggests, focus on the big picture and don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s advice that Li Hui clearly lives by in her own journey — from scientist to entrepreneur, from lab experiments to assembly lines — all driven by a passion to make a difference.