“Eureka moment” as Australian researchers make hydrogen storage breakthrough
reneweconomy.com.au
reneweconomy.com.au
This petrochemical storage and separation technique is about as far as it gets from green hydrogen
“We were so surprised to see this happen, but each time we kept getting the exact same result, it was a eureka moment,” said lead researcher Dr Srikanth Mateti.
“There is no waste, the process requires no harsh chemicals and creates no by-products. …This means you could store hydrogen anywhere and use it whenever it’s needed.”
“The current way of storing hydrogen is in a high-pressure tank, or by cooling the gas down to a liquid form. Both require large amounts of energy, as well as dangerous processes and chemicals,” said Professor Chen.
It is clearly stated that the gases with simple bonds between carbon and hydrogen or carbon and carbon are not absorbed. The 2 atoms in dihydrogen have a simple bond very similar to that between hydrogen and carbon.
So everything said in the research article is consistent with pure hydrogen not being absorbed by their powder.
Therefore it is quite certain that the reporter has misunderstood and distorted the quotation from the researcher.
Also, there are well known methods of storing pure hydrogen by absorption in solids, e.g. using palladium or rare-earth intermetallic compounds, like in the NiMH rechargeable batteries, but those methods are not suited for large-scale storage due to high cost or other limitations.
So the quotation from the researcher would have been wrong anyway, because high pressures or low temperatures are not the only ways to store dihydrogen, so a comparison of advantages and disadvantages with all methods would have been needed.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13697...
Apparently this process accounts for a large fraction of energy consumed in the overall petrochemical economy, but it's got little to do with hydrogen storage.
In fact, boron nitride, the key material here, has been extensively considered for hydrogen storage due to the stability of the compound NH3BH3, hence attempts to perform the reaction BN + 3 H2 >> NH3BH3, but these are very difficult and it's unlikely a simple technique would have been missed. The use of BN to adsorb ethylene is much less "obvious".
> Light hydrocarbon olefin and paraffin gas mixtures are produced during natural gas or petrochemical processing.
You seem to be a bit more knowledgeable about the subject matter, so - can you tell use what exactly are those gas mixtures used for? What industrial process will benefit from these energy savings and transport safety?
Not trying to knock this by any means, I hope it works wonderfully!
Scaling up could be limited by the availability of Boron:
> Boron is synthesized entirely by cosmic ray spallation and supernovae and not by stellar nucleosynthesis, so it is a low-abundance element in the Solar System and in the Earth's crust.[12] It constitutes about 0.001 percent by weight of Earth's crust.[13]
> Global proven boron mineral mining reserves exceed one billion metric tonnes, against a yearly production of about four million tonnes
Of note:
> All up, the process consumes 76.8 KJ/s to store and separate 1000L of gases, which means it uses at least 90 per cent less than the current gas separation process commonly used in the petroluem industry.
> Even more significantly, once the gas is absorbed into the powder it gas can be transported safely and easily. When the gas is needed, the powder can be simply heated in a vacuum to release the gas unchanged.
Sadly, this doesn't put much of a dent in the larger issues around blue hydrogen.
Research on the matter is being made in Japan, see:
> https://www.jaea.go.jp/04/o-arai/en/research/research_03.htm...
The real research article
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13697...
has nothing about the storage of pure hydrogen (a.k.a. dihydrogen), which would be very surprising if achieved, but about a better method for the separation and storage of certain unsaturated hydrocarbon gases, e.g. acetylene or ethylene (which can be absorbed by boron nitride powder and released later).
It's a good catch, they're essentially using the hydrocarbon gas article from Materials Today to waffle into "a glass and a half of milk makes this relate to hydrogen"
When it’s a better ecosystem than battery-electric let’s see that as the number 1 spot.
Ball milling to shove gas into nanoparticles seems counterintuitive, as ball milling is typically used to grind particles smaller.
I could imagine if we really had nanodust of BN+20H2 (or whatever) that it'd be (a) potentially very combustible (b) potentially dangerous to lungs when inhaled. (Presumably, at some temperature, hydrogen begins to be released, and if you then ignite that hydrogen, I could imagine a runaway reaction.)
I really want this or something similar to work.
Maybe the simpler thing to do is to develop a solar cell that produces methanol (or ethanol) directly from sunlight, CO2, and water, and then just have a methanol engine. Should be able to burn methanol and produce CO2/water exhaust only.
Even if there was (to be honest, didn't read the journal article) this is something that can easily be hacked. Energy storage research papers regularly hack energy density numbers by reporting the kJ/cc values of a tiny (like order 1 g) fleck of nanoparticle dust, which totally misrepresents the physics that matters are scale (i.e. in an EV).
Scaling up stuff is hard, including when you're moving from micron scale to cm scale.
In which volume? The public abstract of the paper at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13697... states
> The mechanochemical process produces extremely high uptake capacities of alkyne and olefin gases in the BN (708 cm3/g for acetylene (C2H2) and 1048 cm3/g for ethylene (C2H4)) respectively.
I assume that is the volume of gas per cm3 of Boron Nitrate.
I have a feeling this reporter doesn't quite know what she's talking about.
You would want to know how much energy (J) it takes to separate a given volume of gas. The quoted statement talks about power (rate, J/s), not energy. It doesn't make sense. I don't know the experiment in detail, but even I can see that mismatch.