Abstract
Jules Verne stated more than 145 years ago that water will be the coal of the future [1]. Indeed, hydrogen, a highly abundant substance on Earth in the form of water, is a promising energy carrier for producing zero-emission electricity upon reaction with oxygen using fuel cell technology. There are still many scientific and engineering challenges that need to be addressed before Jules Verne's dream can become true, however. Two of these challenges include hydrogen production from water and hydrogen storage. In this talk, I will present our work on direct hydrogen generation by hydrolysis of nanoporous aluminum in pure water to feed a 2.4 kW PEM fuel cell stack, which in turn can be used to power a low speed electric vehicle. The possibility to make nanoporous aluminum from secondary aluminum and the advent of carbon-free primary aluminum from Elysis [2,3] could make hydrogen production by hydrolysis of aluminum with pure water a promising alternative to hydrogen production by electrolysis of water.
References:
[1] Ryabchuk, V. K., Kuznetsov, V. N., Emeline, A. V., Artem'ev, Y. M., Kataeva, G. V., Horikoshi, S., & Serpone, N. (2016). Waterwill be the coal of the future-the untamed dream of Jules Verne for a solar fuel. Molecules, 21(12), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules21121638
[2] Corsi, J. S., Fu, J., Wang, Z., Lee, T., Ng, A. K., & Detsi, E. (2019). Hierarchical Bulk Nanoporous Aluminum for On-Site Generation of Hydrogen by Hydrolysis in Pure Water and Combustion of Solid Fuels. ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, 7, 11194–11204. https://doi.org/10.1021/acssuschemeng.9b00481
[3] ELYSIS. Retrieved from https://www.alcoa.com/global/en/what-we-do/elysis/.