Liquefied Hydrogen Fuel

An article recently published in Nature describes advances in the potential use of Hydrogen as a fuel in liquid form. The feasibility of the hydrogen fuel cell, which uses hydrogen and oxygen and produces only water as a byproduct, has been plagued by storage issues in both handling and distributing of the potentially dangerous, high-pressure gas. Previous research has looked to metal hydrides or metal-organic-frameworks (MOFs) for the solution, but using liquid hydrogen would seem to circumvent the issue completely.

Researchers are considering a system which would allow the use of a standard gas tank containing an organic liquid. "This liquid would be passed through a heated module containing a catalyst, which would unlock hydrogen and release it a little at a time to be used as fuel. The remaining dehydrogenated liquid would then be removed at a filling station and whisked away to be reprocessed — the liquid can be hydrogenated and re-hydrogenated repeatedly, making it suitable for reuse. Meanwhile the tank would be quickly refilled with fresh, hydrogenated liquid." Unlocking the hydrogen from such liquids usually requires an extremely high temperature increase, but researchers have proposed incorporating nitrogen to bring this number down to reasonable levels (a temperature increase of 50 degrees Celsius instead of 600).