Aug

PNNL scientists propose using hydrogen ‘pellets of potential’

Posted by admin Published in Emerging Technologies, Hydrogen

Lets get two pieces of commentary out of the way right off the bat. One, who else thought of the film Goonies when they read “pellets of power”? “Pinchers of peril, saved by my pinchers of peril”! - info, aka Jonathan Ke Quan. Two, how awesome is the name “The division of Energy’s Chemical Hydrogen Storage Center of Excellence”? possibly we should change our name from AutoblogGreen to “The Weblogs, Inc. Blog of Green Automotive News of Excellence”. I like the way that rolls out, kind of like Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius. I’ll pass that one on to the higher-ups. Now, on to the news at hand.

The aforementioned center of Excellence is hard at work researching a way to store hydrogen in a way that is less costly, easier to

transport and easier to refill than common high-pressure storage tanks. One method that they see promise in is with solid ammonia borane pellets. Apparently, these pellets can hold fairly a bit of hydrogen. They plus believe that they can manipulate the release of the hydrogen from these pellets, creating a “throttling” effect similar to what we are used to with gasoline engines. Unfortunately, the pellets must next be emptied from the vehicle and chemically processed and refilled. That doesn’t seem fairly as easy as just refilling a liquid fuel. At the very best, that sounds like a very long-term opportunity, something the DOE researchers seem to understand themselves.

[Source: DOE PNNL]

Original post by Jeremy Korzeniewski