Introducing automated controls will shift focus from managing the test setup to analyzing the data and expediting time to market for the Company’s first commercial pilot plant

SANTA CLARITA, CA, July 07, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NewHydrogen, Inc. (OTCQB: NEWH), the developer of ThermoLoop^™, a breakthrough technology that uses water and heat instead of electricity to produce the world’s cheapest clean hydrogen, today announced plans to automate its ThermoLoop^™ engineering test unit (ETU), a move designed to accelerate the Company’s path toward its first commercial pilot plant.

Using results from an ETU is the standard, industry-accepted pathway for designing a commercial pilot plant. The Company’s ETU will serve as the bridge between its bench-scale laboratory experiments and the pilot plant, specifically built to prove the fundamental physics, chemistry, and kinetics of ThermoLoop.

The plan builds on the Company’s recent announcement that it successfully passed Stage Gate One and transitioned from the research phase into the engineering phase of its development program, as well as its strategic collaboration with NuCube Energy to explore nuclear-powered hydrogen production.

NewHydrogen is now focused on building a dedicated ThermoLoop^™ ETU, and automating its controls is intended to give the Company’s engineering team continuous, around-the-clock testing capability with greater precision and repeatability from run to run. By reducing the time engineers spend manually managing the test setup, automation is expected to let the team focus more on analyzing results, shortening the time required to generate the data needed to determine commercial pilot plant specifications.

“Manual testing demands constant attention from our engineers just to keep a run on track. Automating that work frees them to spend more of their time interpreting the data and refining the engineering decisions that get us to a pilot plant,” said Steve Hill, CEO of NewHydrogen.

For more information about NewHydrogen, please visit www.newhydrogen.com.

About NewHydrogen, Inc.

NewHydrogen is developing ThermoLoop^™ – a breakthrough technology that uses water and heat rather than electricity to produce the world’s lowest cost clean hydrogen. Hydrogen is the cleanest and most abundant element in the universe, and we can’t live without it. Hydrogen is the key ingredient in making fertilizers needed to grow food for the world. It is also used for transportation, refining oil and making steel, glass, pharmaceuticals and more. Nearly all the hydrogen today is made from hydrocarbons like coal, oil, and natural gas, which are dirty and limited resources. Water, on the other hand, is an infinite and renewable worldwide resource. Currently, the most common method of making clean hydrogen is to split water into oxygen and hydrogen with an electrolyzer using green electricity produced from solar or wind. However, green electricity is and always will be very expensive. It currently accounts for 73% of the cost of clean hydrogen. By using heat directly, we can skip the expensive process of making electricity, and fundamentally lower the cost of clean hydrogen. Inexpensive heat can be obtained from concentrated solar, geothermal, nuclear reactors and industrial waste heat for use in our novel low-cost thermochemical water splitting process. Working with a world class research team at UC Santa Barbara, our goal is to help usher in the clean hydrogen economy that Goldman Sachs estimated to have a future market value of $12 trillion.

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Investor Relations Contact: NewHydrogen, Inc. ir@newhydrogen.com