this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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The impact of real, clean, cheap hydrogen would be substantial. I hope they can scale this quickly and it doesn’t remain vaporware like everything else hydrogen related.
Storing hydrogen is a bitch. It readily ionizes and the H+ ion is just a single proton. It gets inside metal lattices easily, finds a stray atom to combine there and boom - suddenly it's 100 times the size it was. That's what's called hydrogen pitting.
So right now, if hydrogen storage was good and cheap, we could use hydrogen as a battery for supply regulated energy sources (solar, wind) and burn it in a turbine to generate electricity and water. You don't even need the storage to be mobile or miniaturized for that. And even that isn't a reality.
So I'll perk up when news of a cheap reliable hydrogen storage technology comes around.
Just leave it as water, then drop small pellets of lithium in as necessary. Sodium works, too, and is more abundant/available than lithium, but maybe tougher to control safely. (The rest of that group is just too reactive, unless you can find a way to use the exothermic reaction for something other than an uncontrolled fire or even explosion.)
Mostly kidding, but only because I can't imagine smarter people than I haven't ruled it out for very good reasons. And while I'm on the topic, running a condenser on the exhaust will capture the water vapour, which is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas.
Hmmm. I've seen a few references to Toyota supposedly having a prototype system for generating hydrogen from water on board cars. I've dismissed that as just the latest water powered flavour of the month. You don't suppose...