From the University of Southern California a parallel for Alfred Nobel’s design of a stable substrate for dynamite (which at the time used unstable nitro-glycerin). This solves the collision problem for automobile mounted fuel cells.
Breakthrough in hydrogen fuel cells
USC chemists develop way to safely store, extract hydrogen
A team of USC scientists has developed a robust, efficient method of using hydrogen as a fuel source.
Hydrogen makes a great fuel because of it can easily be converted to electricity in a fuel cell and because it is carbon free. The downside of hydrogen is that, because it is a gas, it can only be stored in high pressure or cryogenic tanks.
In a vehicle with a tank full of hydrogen, “if you got into a wreck, you’d have a problem,” said Travis Williams, assistant professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College.
A possible solution is to store hydrogen in a safe chemical form. Earlier this year, Williams and his team figured out a way to release hydrogen from an innocuous chemical material — a nitrogen-boron complex, ammonia borane — that can be stored as a stable solid.
Now the team has developed a catalyst system that releases enough hydrogen from its storage in ammonia borane to make it usable as a fuel source. Moreover, the system is air-stable and re-usable, unlike other systems for hydrogen storage on boron and metal hydrides.
The research was published this month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
“Ours is the first game in town for reusable, air stabile ammonia borane dehydrogenation,” Williams said, adding that the USC Stevens Institute is in the process of patenting the system.
The system is sufficiently lightweight and efficient to have potential fuel applications ranging from motor-driven cycles to small aircraft, he said.
The research was funded by the Hydrocarbon Research Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
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Exciting times! 🙂
Hydrogen itself may be carbon free. But all of the sources for hydrogen are not.
We still need to know what the energy storage density is (by both mass and volume), and how that compares to gasoline or diesel fuel. How does the cost of this storage and the fuel cells compare to battery storage?
Then there is the issue of the method of producing the H2 gas to be stored. How do the economics of hydrolysis using electricity for this system compare to battery electric on a per-kWh basis? Or reformation of natural gas versus CNG engine cars?
As my kids would say….’Oh snap this is huge!’
Thank God they will not need any electricity to produce that hydrogen. Hydrogen for nothing and your watts are free I guess. We will have a surplus of generation facilities when the EPA forces 8% (wsj figure) of our fleet offline because they can’t put the mandated scrubbers in place fast enough.
Fuel cost? Didn’t see how much a block of ammonia borane goes for nowadays.
I’ll be interested to see if this gets beyond the test tube stage.
“Hydrogen makes a great fuel because of it can easily be converted to electricity in a fuel cell and because it is carbon free.”
Is it?
Most hydrogen is manufactured from natural gas (CH4 + H2O → CO + 3 H2).
The ammonia used to create the salt is manufactured from hydrogen from the above reaction.
The diborane used to create the salt is also manufactured using hydrogen from the above reaction (reaction between hydrogen and liquid sodium).
Not so carbon free me think!
The entire scheme is similar to how a Belgians replace a light bulb in a lamp.
First they place a round table right under the lamp.
One Belgian climbs on the table and holds the lamp.
Four other Belgians turn the table.
Do you get the picture?
Next scheme…
They need to heat the salt in order for the hydrogen to evolve. The efficiency of the system will certainly go down.
We could also have hydrogen bound with carbon at the molecular level, for example:
C8H18
This compound would then react with O2 from the atmosphere, and the end result from combustion would be harmless CO2 and H2O.
According to my calculations, this compound would be liquid at all human-safe temperature ranges, and thus it could be easily stored at fuel stations and in small tanks contained in the vehicle. Since it’s liquid, added safety for transport could be obtained by filling a sturdy metal container with a “foamed rubber” insert that would prevent all of the liquid from spilling out in the event of a tank rupture.
Actually, think about it: safe, economical Hydrogen power, the holy grail of alternative fuel inventors. The magic key formula is C8H18, although in practical use it may be more advantageous to mix anywhere from C4-C12 with varying numbers of H atoms. Since it’s liquid, various other compounds could be blended in to alter the behavior of this liquid fuel to better suit warmer or colder conditions.
I should patent this.
I have a great idea, let’s burn petrolium. We have lots more of that than ammonia borane and all you need to do is distill and filter it!
Will it be cheaper than oil?
Had we not had a half dozen ‘breakthoughs’ in hydrogen storage already, this could be interesting. Issues of density, cost, life cycle, etc. still remain. Ivory tower scientists rarely look at the real world.
Nuclear reactors can produce hydrogen, as the Japanese learned the hard way, but I don’t suppose we’ll have many of them in the future. Cheap hydrogen? Sure, like cheap ethanol, with massive taxpayer subsidy.
As even the AGW fanatics at Popular Science noted a few isues back, there still is nothing that can compete with good old liquid fuels like gasoline and diesel on a practical basis.
Of course isolating Hydrogen releases CO2 — using current technology. But if you believe that CO2 is a problem — and many people do rightly or wrongly — it is a lot easier to sequester CO2 from a fixed source than from an auto, boat, or aircraft engine. The waste product of hydrogen based power is water. And surely there is some possibility of making hydrogen with solar, fussion, fusion or geothermal power. Heck, maybe large numbers of windmills will be economically viable if they drive a hydrogen plant. (Wouldn’t be my bet, but it’s not impossible).
Oh, you guys. You’re just so negative!
At best, hydrogen as a fuel source is only a storage battery. The electricity required to get it from water by electrolysis still has to be produced by conventional means. Such as coal, natural gas, petroleum, or nuclear. So, unless someone can figure out a clean way to produce hydrogen that doesn’t use more energy to make it than you can get back by burning it as fuel, there is no net gain for the environment.
Whatever happened to Billings’ technology for his hydrogen powered cars? As I recall it was something similar, using stable hydrogen pellets. That was years ago – late 70’s early 80’s?
So someone explain to me how hydrogen is so much more dangerous that a gas tank full of gasoline or a CNG car’s tank full of methane?? I don’t get this solution to a non-problem. In a collision, all of these fuels need to be released from their tank, they need oxygen in the proper ratio (somewhere between the UEL and the LEL) and they need an ignition source. If those conditions are met, they are all extremely dangerous.
Looks like a nice technolgy advance. However, it doesn’t make much difference for CO2. The bulk of H2 now is produced by steam reforming of natural gas, which, by my estimate (assuming natural gas is mostly methane) results in about 5.5 ton of CO2 for every ton of hydrogen from the reaction alone, which, if you believe Wiki, would amount to at least 600 million tons CO2 in 2004 alone. However, the first step of the reaction, which produces CO and H2 is strongly endothermic while the final stage conversion of CO to CO2 is only weakly exothermic. It’s my understanding that the required energy usually comes from the combustion of natural gas, which results in still more CO2.
However, this may be a sensible way to use wind power. Generate hydrogen from wind power by hydrolysis. Accumulate it and use it to generate electricity from fuel cells during peak hours or during periods of calm winds. Not sure what efficiencies can be achieved now with hydrolysis.
The ultimate source of hydrogen is from hydrolysis. The oceans, lakes, and groundwater are the reusable and inexaustible natural supply. The energy source to split the water is geothermal, solar, wind, and even off-peak nuclear power among many others. Not only will this give us all the energy we need in a convenient form, but we’ll get the water as the combustion product.
Hydrogen serves as a convenient energy storage material that allows for the continued use of internal combustion technology. Even natural gas power plants could use hydrogen or even a methane-hydrogen mixture with very little modification.
We need to quit burning coal, natural gas, and petroleum for a varieity of reasons–the most important of which is the need for this natural resource for making stuff.
Hydrogen as a fuel, once safely storable, is an important fuel for our future that would allow for the continued use of internal combustion engines while fuel cell and batter technology continues to develop.
The advantage of a gas vs. liquid in an accident is, the gas will explode ONCE. A liquid will not only combust, but while burning will soak into things like a car seat, tires, any permeable surface which prolongs the danger of a burning gas.
I think most people would take an explosion which knocks them silly over the chance of burning to death…
So someone explain to me how hydrogen is so much more dangerous that a gas tank full of gasoline or a CNG car’s tank full of methane??
Hydrogen gas is immensely more explosive than methane when used in cars.
It is a much smaller molecule is most of the reason. It has to be stored at much higher pressure as a result,and disperses much more quickly anyway. So in a crash will expand very quickly, providing a highly explosive mix of H2 and O2.
Hydrogen even provides quite a satisfying explosion in a test-tube, whereas bunsen burners show how unexplosive methane is, burning with quite a steady flame (H2 would burn too fast to do this).
Hydrogen itself may be carbon free. But all of the sources for hydrogen are not.
Hydrogen is a fairly simply produced from electrolysis of water, so any produced from nuclear or hydroelectric is totally carbon free.
Industry produces it from hydrocarbons for a variety of reasons — cheapness of the material (which is often the surplus to fuel production), ability to produce on site an amount that would be highly dangerous to store (think zeppelin explosions) and the need to produce it hot. The situation is quite different.
It would be mental to use petrol to produce H2 when we could just burn the petrol in the first place. I think the scientists have thought this through just a little bit.
Say we could fill up on cheap environmentally friendly H2. Why bother with the fuel cell? Why not use the tried and true internal combustion engine?
Jason Joice M.D. says: “So someone explain to me how hydrogen is so much more dangerous that a gas tank full of gasoline or a CNG car’s tank full of methane??”
When gasoline or methane burn, you can see the flame. When hydrogen burns, you cannot see the flame.
Gasoline and methane are fairly large molecules, and thus are relatively easy to contain. Hydrogen is very very small, and difficult to contain. It is possible that a tank to contain hydrogen would have to be very thick-walled (in comparison to a gasoline tank) just to slow down the leak rate.
Doc Stephens says:
August 30, 2011 at 2:46 pm
“We need to quit burning coal, natural gas, and petroleum for a varieity of reasons–the most important of which is the need for this natural resource for making stuff.”
The peak oilers and greens also constantly say this but that doesn’t make it true. When you have enough energy but you ran out of hydrocarbons for “making stuff”, you can very easily expend some plant oil for “making stuff” or just synthesize hydrocarbons from scratch.