Anyone know what the catch is here? Very exciting if real, but sometimes these things don't scale/aren't commercial/something else I'm ill-equipped to perceive.
Not trying to knock this by any means, I hope it works wonderfully!
Not trying to knock this by any means, I hope it works wonderfully!
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).
Research on the matter is being made in Japan, see:
> https://www.jaea.go.jp/04/o-arai/en/research/research_03.htm...
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.