Breathing New Life Into the Hydrogen Economy of the Future: Researchers Make A Leap Forward

Not sure when exactly the so-called hydrogen economy fell seemingly irredeemably out of fashion. Hydrogen fuel cells, that carbon-free/clean/efficient fuel source to save the universe, seems now like such a ’90s puppies and cotton candy idea. Maybe George W. Bush, who was boosting hydrogen fuel cell research right about the time he was starting a war in Iraq in 2003, sucked away any enthusiasm simply out of association.

Coincidentally enough, last week’s news of a breakthrough in hydrogen fuel cells that could bring the concept back to hype-life, came right about the time they were installing electric car charging stations in the parking garage I get my Zipcars from. Point being, plug-in cars are where much of the green-car enthusiasm has gone. That’s not so much a matter of fashion. Plug-in cars are a tech that’s ready and available now, while hydrogen fuel cells have been stymied by basic barriers such as the difficulty in storing hydrogen (needs to be in high-pressure of cryogenic storage tanks) and that there’s no hydrogen fuel infrastructure, no hydrogen stations.

Which brings us to our recent discovery, brought forth by a group of researchers at the University of Southern California working on a U.S. Department of Energy initiative. Maybe we don’t have to store hydrogen in unwieldy, dangerous tanks, nor do we need a network of hydrogen filling stations along our roads. Instead, hydrogen is produced on the fly from a solid, stable substance called ammonia borane. It’s from ammonia borane that USC researchers have devised a method for releasing hydrogen—via a chemical catalyst. It’s a thing that could take place in the guts of a car.

Or, for that matter, the guts of a computer.

“It could power something the size of your laptop for a long time and be a lot less heavy than the battery because it is boron and nitrogen, not heavy metals,” USC’s Travis Williams tells msnbc.com. “It works at a mild temperature, the catalyst is reusable, it is air stable, you get a pretty good portion of the hydrogen out and it makes an innocuous byproduct which is intrinsic to the ammonia borane itself.” What’s more, the spent fuel can be recharged, in a process devised at Los Alamos National Laboratory and announced last March.

One block of ammonia borane should be able to deliver about 300 driving miles.

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Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.