[s_Hogg]

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.

Not trying to knock this by any means, I hope it works wonderfully!

[adrian_b]

The catch is that the parent article is extremely confusing.

The real research article

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13697...

has nothing about the storage of pure hydrogen (a.k.a. dihydrogen), which would be very surprising if achieved, but about a better method for the separation and storage of certain unsaturated hydrocarbon gases, e.g. acetylene or ethylene (which can be absorbed by boron nitride powder and released later).

[causality0]

The catch is that hydrogen storage is the smallest of the problems facing the nascent hydrogen economy. Energy losses in electrolysis and in the conversion from hydrogen to electricity are by far the biggest piece of the efficiency-loss pie.

[cbmuser]

Electrolysis is only one method to make hydrogen. Another one is using high-temperature reactors which have a much higher efficiency and don’t need as much energy.

Research on the matter is being made in Japan, see:

> https://www.jaea.go.jp/04/o-arai/en/research/research_03.htm...

[causality0]

Electrolysis efficiency is 76%. What sort of numbers are they getting with this high-temp reactor doohickey?

[jerome-jh]

Hydrogen storage is certainly not the smallest problem we face with hydrogen fuel. Di-hydrogen is a very small molecule that is hard to contain. It requires very tight seals. Not technically impossible, but very costly at large scale.

[h0l0cube]

> Anyone know what the catch is here?

Scaling up could be limited by the availability of Boron:

> Boron is synthesized entirely by cosmic ray spallation and supernovae and not by stellar nucleosynthesis, so it is a low-abundance element in the Solar System and in the Earth's crust.[12] It constitutes about 0.001 percent by weight of Earth's crust.[13]

> Global proven boron mineral mining reserves exceed one billion metric tonnes, against a yearly production of about four million tonnes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boron

[koverda]

It uses boron nitride which seems relatively easily available in large-ish quantities: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/nano-boron-nitride-po...

[noisy_boy]

Once the boron nitride powder is heated to release the captured hydrogen, can it be reused to capture again?

[defrost]

Yes.

Of note:

> All up, the process consumes 76.8 KJ/s to store and separate 1000L of gases, which means it uses at least 90 per cent less than the current gas separation process commonly used in the petroluem industry.

> Even more significantly, once the gas is absorbed into the powder it gas can be transported safely and easily. When the gas is needed, the powder can be simply heated in a vacuum to release the gas unchanged.

Sadly, this doesn't put much of a dent in the larger issues around blue hydrogen.

[dzhiurgis]

Probably to sell something to government, where NZ and AU is are still wasting tons of money on hydrogen feasibility projects.