Making society independent of fossil fuels.

[Klizja]

Original here : http://www.everything-science.com/content/view/155/2/

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.


Dr. Tue Johannesen - one of the inventors of the Hydrogen Tablet - proves the safty of the most secure and efficient hydrogen storage in the world.
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 technolog

After reading this , a question sprung into my head : "Where are they going to get that much Hydrogen , to replace all the fossil fuels that are used today ?"

Any ideas ?

 

[H_man]

Hydrogen can be produced very simply via electrolysis.

You could even try this yourself. Just take a battery, a couple of wires and a cup of water... & hey presto, hydrogen and oxygen.

 

[brewnog]

Hydrogen can be produced very simply via electrolysis.

You could even try this yourself. Just take a battery, a couple of wires and a cup of water... & hey presto, hydrogen and oxygen.

If that's all it took we'd be winning. You forgot about the energy input needed.

 

[gschjetne]

Nuclear power.

 

[Klizja]

Hydrogen can be produced very simply via electrolysis.

You could even try this yourself. Just take a battery, a couple of wires and a cup of water... & hey presto, hydrogen and oxygen.

That's not a very good idea , since it would make fuel prices go up a lot , becouse electricity is the most expensive form of energy.

After looking at some figures , it seems to me that you'd waste more energy producing hydrogen , then you'd get from burning it.So electrolysis definatly isn't a good method.

 

[chronon]

Firstly, in order to get hydrogen from ammonia you need to put in energy, which rather defeats the point. I would say that hydrogen is just a buzzword here, the real reaction is

ammonia + oxygen -> nitrogen +water

As to where you get the ammonia from, well yes you have to manufacture it and that takes more energy that you'll get out. Such technologies are really a method of energy storage, not production. The idea is to use an environmentally friendly source of energy in the manufacture.

 

[chroot]

Although mass-production of hydrogen (via electrolysis from seawater, for example) is not 100% efficient, neither is the mass-production of fossil fuels. Besides, the increase in efficiency of fuel-cell vehicles offsets the efficiency hit incurred by electrolysis.

Keep in mind that the purpose of the hydrogen economy is not to boost overall system efficiency -- it's mainly just to wean us off fossil fuels and rampant pollution. You can generate energy much more cleanly at a centralized plant (even if it's still burning coal) than in a lightweight automobile burning gasoline. That's the point: push the pollution up the supply chain so that it can be better controlled.

- Warren

 

[The Ippster]

wouldnt alcohol be a good alternative source, i don't know the potential evergy of it, but i think ethanol has enough, not sure, tell me if I am wrong, but it burns cleanly, and we can produce it rather easily.

and i don't think getting hydrogen from water will ever be worth it.

how about nuclear power automobiles? i think that sounds safe...

 

[Astronuc]

how about nuclear power automobiles? i think that sounds safe...

No. Nuclear power would have to be limited to RTG's.

Making a small nuclear reactor requires high enrichment and the smaller the reactor the more difficult the control system. In addition to safety, there would be proliferation issues - cars would likely be stolen for the nuclear material. Plus the infrastructure to support a fleet of nuclear powered cars would be expensive. And most likley a nuclear power car would cost much more than an ordinary consumer could afford.