Danish Researchers Discover New Hydrogen Storage Method


Lyngby, Denmark [RenewableEnergyAccess.com] Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark have invented a technology they believe may be an important step towards the hydrogen economy: a hydrogen tablet they say effectively stores hydrogen in an inexpensive and safe material.

If manufactured through clean means, hydrogen can be a non-polluting fuel, but since it is a light gas it occupies too much volume, and it is flammable. Consequently, effective and safe storage of hydrogen has challenged researchers worldwide for almost three decades. At the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), an interdisciplinary team has developed a hydrogen tablet that enables storage and transport of hydrogen in solid form.

"Should you drive a car 600 km using gaseous hydrogen at normal pressure, it would require a fuel tank with a size of nine cars. With our technology, the same amount of hydrogen can be stored in a normal gasoline tank," says Professor Claus Hviid Christensen, Department of Chemistry at DTU.

The hydrogen tablet is safe and inexpensive, according to the researchers. You can literally carry the material in your pocket without any kind of safety precaution. The reason is that the tablet consists solely of ammonia absorbed efficiently in sea salt. Ammonia is produced by a combination of hydrogen with nitrogen from the surrounding air, and the DTU tablet therefore contains large amounts of hydrogen. Within the tablet, hydrogen is stored as long as desired, and when hydrogen is needed, ammonia is released through a catalyst that decomposes it back to free hydrogen. When the tablet is empty, you merely give it a "shot" of ammonia and it is ready for use again.

"The technology is a step towards making the society independent of fossil fuels," said Professor Jens Norskov, director of the Nanotechnology Center at DTU. He, Claus Hviid Christensen, Tue Johannessen, Ulrich Quaade and Rasmus Zink Soerensen are the five researchers behind the invention. The advantages of using hydrogen are numerous. It is CO2-free, and it can be produced by renewable energy sources, e.g., wind power.

"We have a new solution to one of the major obstacles to the use of hydrogen as a fuel," said Jens Norskov. "And we need new energy technologies -- oil and gas will not last, and without energy, there is no modern society."

Together with DTU and SeeD Capital Denmark, the researchers have founded the company Amminex A/S, which will focus on the further development and commercialization of the technology.



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Total Comments (9) reader comments on this story
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-- Roy Bauer, January 11, 2006
This sounds like the same thing as OVONIC's (Stan and Iris Ovshinsky) use in there Proprietary processs.
Also Milennium Cell has a simular process too.
This is good for I think that the Hydrogen industry is to go any where there should be many possable ways of manufacturing Hydrogen on demand. With the same simular tactics so there is no one set of fuel supply in demand.

-- Troy Helming, January 13, 2006
As long as the H2 is produced using renewable energy (wind, solar, geothermal, etc) I'm very much in favor of additional solid storage options such as this. I'll be closely following their progress. Our turnkey home hydrogen system uses highly compressed H2 since it is already commercially available (and space is not an issue for stationery applications), but as we begin doing more H2 vehicle conversions we'll want to explore this storage medium as another option. I wish Amminex the best!

-- Bill Kreamer, January 13, 2006
References to a future "hydrogen economy" ignore the horrendous efficiency hit one suffers in making hydrogen from an energy source (renewable, one would hope), rather than using that energy directly.
For instance, it will always be cheaper (and more environmentally benign) to use electricity in battery-driven cars than to use the electricity to make hydrogen for that purpose.
Just from the standpoint of the economics of various conversions, use of hydrogen as an energy carrier will always be limited to niche markets.

-- Michael Smith, January 13, 2006
Hydrogen can come from coal without burning it. Hydrogen can be made from splitting water...it just needs to use wind energy to split the water. Hydrogen will be the energy of the future, along with compressed air and batteries, count on it!We will use oil and coal to manufacture our plastic goods for as long as I live!

-- Thomas Cheney, January 13, 2006
How much energy would it take to produce the Ammonia?

-- Tim, January 13, 2006
The race is on! I've stopped using the term "hydrogen economy" and started using "carrier economy". I now think that ultra-capacitors will win because they have charge/discharge cycles measured in the 300,000+ range. Batteries are around 500+ and I don't know what this material would do (no reply to my email about this yet).

If we can store hydrogen (like the above article) or electricity (ultra-capacitors, batteries) then we can put up wind farms on places like the Aleutian and Kerguelen islands where no air traffic, people to be annoyed exist.

There is a big hit in converting any source and storing it. Evaporation, charge/discharge cycles before the substance doesn't hold much, equipment required for convertion, etc etc.



-- joe kozaczko, January 14, 2006
This technology shift problem from hydrogen storage and transport to ammonia with its own problems and additional effort for conversion.
Its not a solution.

-- Richard Gorman, January 14, 2006
Decomposing ammonia to hydrogen and nitrogen was used by the defense dept to power prototype fuel cells. Unfortunately you need to burn 1/3 of the hydrogen to provide the heat to do it. Also the system requires a lengthy warm-up of an expensive recuperative heat exchanger and the element that separates the hydrogen from the nitrogen-hydrogen mixture requires palladium-silver alloy (very expensive)

-- Richard Gorman, January 14, 2006
Decomposing ammonia to hydrogen and nitrogen was used by the defense dept to power prototype fuel cells. Unfortunately you need to burn 1/3 of the hydrogen to provide the heat to do it. Also the system requires a lengthy warm-up of an expensive recuperative heat exchanger and the element that separates the hydrogen from the nitrogen-hydrogen mixture requires palladium-silver alloy (very expensive)

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