Danish Researchers Reveal New Hydrogen Storage Technology

Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark have invented a technology which may be an important step towards the hydrogen economy: a hydrogen tablet that effectively stores hydrogen in an inexpensive and safe material.

With the new hydrogen tablet, it becomes much simpler to use the environmentally-friendly energy of hydrogen. Hydrogen is 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 world-wide for almost three decades. At the Technical University of Denmark, DTU, an interdisciplinary team has developed a hydrogen tablet which 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. In this respect it is different from most other hydrogen storage technologies. 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” says Professor Jens Nørskov, director of the Nanotechnology Center at DTU. He, Claus Hviid Christensen, Tue Johannessen, Ulrich Quaade and Rasmus Zink Sørensen 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. And we need new energy technologies – oil and gas will not last, and without energy, there is no modern society”, says Jens Nørskov.

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.

I was so sure I had read that during the hydrogen hype, that is when Bush jumped on it, to the euro-greens great surprise until that information was revealed, that the US was counting on its great sources of natural gas. That I always felt as much more viable solution than EU beurocrat way of creating the hydrogen with renevable energy.

First we do not have that renevable energy technology yeat, and with existing technologie there is to much land that needs to be spoiled, with dams, windmills and such things, plus it is in most cases uneconomical.

If we had those good sources of energy, we would not be in much trouble after all, as there would be lot of fossil fuels freed from beeing used to run our electrical grids, heat our homes and such.

Newsweek (I know they are sometimes to leftwinged) recently ran interesting articles about biofuels, where they pointed out increasing usage of it now during high oil costs, and how neccasery it is for the world´s energy prices, that special interests like farmers in the west could not take this market over with all the protections and subsidisions that would entail.

Creating biofuels out of all sorts of biomass, farm waists and specially grown harwests is in fact very efficient way of harnessing the energy of the sun, so we need to go down that road more. Weather that would make the hydrogen economy into a hype or just be a step into it, the future holds.

I am not familiar with the quote from Bush which you mention concerning natural gas supplies in the U.S. I do know that several of the major oil companies in the U.S. have been planning huge LNG vaporization facilities on the Gulf Coast and on the Southern California Coast.

My understanding is that there is a projected shortage of natural gas in the U.S. because it is now the preferred fuel for power plants.

Recently, there have been quite a few articles published in favor of building nuclear power plants in the U.S. The use of biomass and renewable energy sources cannot supply enough energy to feed all of the industrial and transportation consumers in the U.S. With world demand for oil going up rapidly, while supply has hit its peak, something has to give.

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