At Delphi Data Labs, the first industrial market we modeled in full was the global electrolyzer sector. We mapped manufacturers, their technology types, production capacities, supply chains, and the projects they serve. When people hear this, they ask the obvious question: of all the markets in the world, why start with something that sounds so specialized?
The answer is that electrolysis is one of the most cross-cutting technologies in industrial history — and understanding its value chain taught us how to build market intelligence for any industrial sector.
Electrolysis is everywhere
Most people associate electrolyzers with hydrogen production. That's the current headline application, but it's far from the only one — or even the largest.
The chlor-alkali process, which uses electrolysis to split brine into chlorine, sodium hydroxide, and hydrogen, has been an industrial cornerstone since the late 19th century. Chlorine goes into PVC, disinfectants, and countless chemical products. Sodium hydroxide is used across virtually every manufacturing sector. The hydrogen produced is often treated as a byproduct. Companies like thyssenkrupp nucera and Asahi Kasei built their electrolyzer expertise in chlor-alkali before pivoting to hydrogen.
In metallurgy, the Hall-Héroult process underpins all aluminum production. Copper, zinc, nickel, and magnesium are refined through electrowinning and electrorefining. These are enormous industries, and they all depend on electrochemical cells.
Water treatment uses electrolysis for on-site generation of disinfectants — in swimming pools, municipal water systems, and maritime ballast water treatment. Companies like De Nora and Evoqua (now part of Xylem) operate across both water treatment and hydrogen markets, using fundamentally similar electrode and membrane technologies.
Even emerging applications like direct CO₂ electrolysis, molten oxide electrolysis for zero-carbon steelmaking, and electrochemical lithium extraction from brine all share core competencies: cell design, power management, electrode optimization, membrane engineering.
Why this matters for market intelligence
The cross-cutting nature of electrolysis was precisely why it was the right starting point for building an industrial knowledge graph.
When we modeled the electrolyzer market, we weren't just tracking one sector — we were mapping a technology platform that connects to hydrogen production, chemical manufacturing, water treatment, metallurgy, carbon capture, and emerging industrial processes. Every company we identified in the electrolyzer space had relationships to adjacent sectors. Every supply chain link led to another industrial domain.
This gave us a natural expansion path. From electrolyzers, we moved to the hydrogen projects they supply. From hydrogen projects, we moved to the downstream applications: ammonia synthesis, methanol production, steel manufacturing, mobility. From there to the policy frameworks, financing structures, and competing technologies in each sector.
The knowledge graph grew organically because industrial markets are connected — and electrolysis sits at a particularly dense intersection of connections.
The deeper thesis
There's a broader argument here that shaped our company's direction. Over the past two centuries, industrial production has been dominated by thermochemistry — burning fuels to produce heat, mechanical force, and ultimately electricity, with enormous energy losses at each conversion step.
We believe the next industrial era will be electrochemical. Solar and wind power provide electricity directly. Batteries store and dispatch it. Electrolyzers convert it into chemical products — hydrogen, chlorine, metals, fuels — without the thermochemical losses that waste 60–65% of input energy in conventional processes.
If that thesis is correct, then the companies building electrochemical systems today — the electrode manufacturers, the membrane specialists, the power electronics firms, the cell stack designers — are the industrial infrastructure providers of the coming decades. Understanding their capabilities, supply chains, and market positions isn't a niche interest. It's foundational.
That's why we started with electrolyzers. Not because the market is small, but because it's the seed of something much larger — and mapping it properly required exactly the kind of structured, relationship-aware data architecture that we've since applied to 37 sectors.