It is an often heard statement that hydrogen is the fuel of the future; some people add, “and will always be.” Why is the first element in the periodic table so important to our future? Its combustion produces energy with no release of CO2, since it does not contain carbon. Its use in fuel cells does not emit NOx. It can be produced from water, which is available widely and more abundantly than fossil fuels. How do we make its generation, storage, and distribution affordable? These precisely are the issues discussed comprehensively in the 12 chapters of this book.
In Section I, Klebanoff and co-authors provide two introductory articles for a general audience. They discuss the need for hydrogen-based energy technologies, hydrogen conversion devices, and automotive applications, including a very readable introduction to fuel cells. Section II offers six articles devoted to hydrogen storage materials with an emphasis on solid-state storage. Materials science, physics, and engineering aspects are dealt with fully. Section III, containing four articles, takes the engineering approach in discussing storage materials, refueling, codes, and standards.
Many of the contributors in this multi-author volume participated in three hydrogen storage centers of excellence set up by the US Department of Energy, which accounts for the uniformity of style and quality in this book. Contributions come from four countries: the United States, Canada, China, and the United Kingdom, reflecting international concerns. The book as a whole will be a good reference in a graduate level course on energy systems and will also be useful to scientists and engineers in fundamental and industrial research. Policymakers will especially be interested in Section I.
The publication of this book is timely. Materials tend to be closer to commercialization when they have more than one application. Metal hydrides, for example, originally developed for hydrogen storage, and discussed in depth in Chapters 5 and 6, are now used in concentrating solar power plants to store power produced from intermittent solar radiation. New catalysts are being discovered for generating hydrogen from water using sunlight: porous silicon with pore size 8–15 nm; nontoxic, cheap, and abundant materials like tin oxides for water-splitting reactions using visible light; and cobalt-containing molecules grafted to semiconductors and subnanometer gold clusters, to name a few.
Recently, it was found that a combination of aluminum oxide, water, and olivine subjected to 2 kbar pressure at 200–300°C liberates hydrogen from water while the remaining oxygen converts olivine to serpentine. Automobile companies are turning to hydrogen in order to meet the exacting standards for emissions and fuel economy.
The future is closer than we think.
Reviewer: N. Balasubramanianis a consultant in Bangalore, India, working on materials for energy generation and for storage and materials genomics.
