ACS Boston August 2007: hydrogen hiccups
I recently wrote a feature about storing hydrogen gas in incredibly porous materials (shameless bit of self promotion there, but one needs to keep the fans happy). But now I'm wondering whether I got it all wrong - a talk today by Bob Crabtree raised an interesting point - the motoring industry has an infrastructure that is all set up to revolve around liquid fuels, so why go after hydrogen as a fuel if one keeps it in the gaseous state?
Crabtree has a strategy to store hydrogen as a liquid, by using organic liquids that have readily-releasable hydrogen. In this case he has studied, both experimentally and computationally, nitrogen-containing cyclic molecules. The amount of nitrogen present can be changed so that the temperature at which hydrogen can be released is also changeable. There is much to say on this topic, I feel... but for now I must run - the monster-sized poster session is happening this evening and I'm hoping for a bit of excitement.