“Eureka moment” as Australian researchers make hydrogen storage breakthrough

https://reneweconomy.com.au/eureka-moment-as-australian-researchers-make-hydrogen-storage-breakthrough/

by FairDune • 4 years ago

109 30 4 years ago

reneweconomy.com.au

s_Hogg• 4 years ago

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!

h0l0cube• 4 years ago

Anyone know what the catch is here?

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boron

noisy_boy• 4 years ago

Once the boron nitride powder is heated to release the captured hydrogen, can it be reused to capture again?

koverda• 4 years ago

It uses boron nitride which seems relatively easily available in large-ish quantities: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/nano-boron-nitride-po...

causality02• 4 years ago

The catch is that hydrogen storage is the smallest of the problems facing the nascent hydrogen economy. Energy losses in electrolysis and in the conversion from hydrogen to electricity are by far the biggest piece of the efficiency-loss pie.

cbmuser• 4 years ago

Electrolysis is only one method to make hydrogen. Another one is using high-temperature reactors which have a much higher efficiency and don’t need as much energy.

Research on the matter is being made in Japan, see:

https://www.jaea.go.jp/04/o-arai/en/research/research_03.htm...

jerome-jh• 4 years ago

Hydrogen storage is certainly not the smallest problem we face with hydrogen fuel. Di-hydrogen is a very small molecule that is hard to contain. It requires very tight seals. Not technically impossible, but very costly at large scale.

adrian_b2• 4 years ago

The catch is that the parent article is extremely confusing.

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).

dzhiurgis• 4 years ago

Probably to sell something to government, where NZ and AU is are still wasting tons of money on hydrogen feasibility projects.

donkarma• 4 years ago

Good, better density than batteries in any case.

marcosdumay• 4 years ago

How in the world does a process for hydrocarbon separation becomes an article about green hydrogen storage?

defrost2• 4 years ago

reneweconomy.com.au is more of a greenwishing alternative energy uptalking site than a scientific site.

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"

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwBceIbh5qc

jokoon• 4 years ago

There is hydrogen in it!

aunty_helen• 4 years ago

Oh goody, more paid for news about hydrogens bright future hitting the front page of hn.

When it’s a better ecosystem than battery-electric let’s see that as the number 1 spot.

brutusborn• 4 years ago

It's not either/or. The methods have different tradeoffs so they are useful in different applications. E.g. methane reforming has the potential to turn natural gas resources into low emissions hydrogen.

xt00• 4 years ago

They do need to do a bit of heating to extract the hydrogen, but probably not a huge deal as compressed H2 gas when expanded out and burned would pull energy from the environment — so there is energy being used there as well.

gene-h• 4 years ago

This article is complete BS. The abstract of the publication does not mention hydrogen at all, and in fact concerns storage and separation of acetylene and ethylene gas, which are hydrocarbons, not hydrogen.

This petrochemical storage and separation technique is about as far as it gets from green hydrogen

pengaru• 4 years ago

Except the lead researcher is quoted as saying 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.

adrian_b2• 4 years ago

The absorption method described in the research article is dependent on the existence of pairs of carbon atoms with multiple bonds between them.

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.

pmontra• 4 years ago

the process consumes 76.8 KJ/s to store and separate 1000L of gases,

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.

Blammar• 4 years ago

There's no actual storage density information, is there? Nothing in KJ/m^3 units.

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.

mwt• 4 years ago

There's no actual storage density information, is there? Nothing in KJ/m^3 units.

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.

scythe• 4 years ago

This is a very stark misrepresentation of the research. The actual study is about reducing the energy consumption of natural gas refining:

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".

einpoklum• 4 years ago

So, the abstract says:

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?

praptak• 4 years ago

This seems a bit similar to how oxygen concentrators work. Zeolites absorb nitrogen under pressure, oxygen-rich mixture is pumped out, zeolites release the nitrogen, which is then pumped out, repeat cycle.

supernova87a2• 4 years ago

"the process consumes 76.8 KJ/s to store and separate 1000L of gases"

I have a feeling this reporter doesn't quite know what she's talking about.

lostlogin• 4 years ago

If correct, what would this mean? Storing requires energy input?

supernova87a2• 4 years ago

If the letters/words in the quote are correctly kilojoules, seconds, and liters, then it doesn't make sense.

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.

“Eureka moment” as Australian researchers make hydrogen storage breakthrough

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