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.<p>This petrochemical storage and separation technique is about as far as it gets from green hydrogen
This is a very stark misrepresentation of the research. The actual study is about reducing the energy consumption of natural gas refining:<p><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1369702122001614?dgcid=author" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13697...</a><p>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.<p>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".
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.<p>Not trying to knock this by any means, I hope it works wonderfully!
Oh goody, more paid for news about hydrogens bright future hitting the front page of hn.<p>When it’s a better ecosystem than battery-electric let’s see that as the number 1 spot.
There's no actual storage density information, is there? Nothing in KJ/m^3 units.<p>Ball milling to shove gas into nanoparticles seems counterintuitive, as ball milling is typically used to grind particles smaller.<p>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.)<p>I really want this or something similar to work.<p>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.
> the process consumes 76.8 KJ/s to store and separate 1000L of gases,<p>In which volume? The public abstract of the paper at <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1369702122001614?dgcid=author" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13697...</a> states<p>> 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.<p>I assume that is the volume of gas per cm3 of Boron Nitrate.
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.
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.
> "<i>the process consumes 76.8 KJ/s to store and separate 1000L of gases</i>"<p>I have a feeling this reporter doesn't quite know what she's talking about.