Archives: Hydrogen Fuel Production

Electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) are building artificial nanotrees that mimic real life plants to take in sunlight, water and CO2 and produce hydrogen fuel. Now, I’ve talked about the artificial leaf being developed several times before for the same purposes. The engineers at UCSD, however, are using cheap materials • Read More »

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has developed a technique to produce hydrogen from acidic water. What the researchers there have done is create a molecule that is structurally and chemically similar to the industrial catalyst molybdenite. The new molecule will replace platinum as the catalyst of choice for creating • Read More »

The last time I had talked about the Town of Hempstead (part of Long Island, NY) was back in February, 2009. At that point they were installing their first hydrogen fueling station and fueling up a GM Equinox Fuel Cell vehicle which was part of the automaker’s Project Driveway program. But, now the Town of • Read More »

The Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) has recently made great strides in cheaply and efficiently producing hydrogen. One of the long standing problems of creating hydrogen from water has been energy consumption. According to ANL, “Easier routes to the generation of hydrogen have long been a target of scientists and engineers, principally because the process to • Read More »

Chemists at the University of Oregon have come up with a combination of elements that may serve to be the fuel of the future. Using boron and nitrogen as chemical carriers for hydrogen the liquid that the researchers have developed is safe and stable at room temperature and it is also stable in regard to • Read More »

During World War I, the UK and Germany were sworn enemies. Today, however, they are no longer enemies, but they do have a friendly competition going regarding the use of renewable resources to create clean hydrogen fuel. In the UK, ITM Power is teaming up with several different partners in an EcoIsland project. According to • Read More »

Now, I’ve talked before about using microbes to treat wastewater and create hydrogen. There have usually been some complications with this process such as the need to add electricity in order to start and maintain the process. Penn State researchers have solved this issue by introducing fresh water and seawater into the process. According to • Read More »

One of the advantages of using a photocatalyst for creating hydrogen is that the only things needed are sunlight, water and the photocatalyst itself. And, if created correctly, the photocatalyst won’t degrade over time. On August 31, 2011 I wrote about how the University of Kentucky had created a cheap semiconductor photocatalyst that uses sunlight • Read More »

Scientists at the University of Louisville and University of Kentucky have discovered that a common semiconductor along with a cheap metal alloy can use sunlight to split water to create hydrogen. According to the University of Kentucky, “Using state-of-the-art theoretical computations, the UK-UofL team demonstrated that an alloy formed by a 2 percent substitution of • Read More »

I’ve talked a handful of times in the past about using a chemical carrier for hydrogen such as ammonia borane (AB) as perhaps an easier method in which to build an infrastructure around and get the needed H2 gas to fuel cells. Apparently a group of researchers at USC in California had the same thought • Read More »