Today it was announced that Cella Energy, an offshoot of Rutherford Appelton Labs, has developed what some are saying could revolutionize the energy sector AND do it for around $1.50 a gallon – half of what traditional gasoline costs! Add to that the lack of greenhouse gas emissions and this sounds like a major discovery. More below the jump...
Cella is claiming they have developed what seems to be a stable way to store hydrides, found in things like nickel metal hydride batteries, within nano-porous micro polymer beads that looks like powder but flows like a fluid. According to their webpage:
Cella Energy uses the benefits of nano-structuring to encase hydrides using coaxial electrospinning. Hydrides are materials that contain hydrogen. Electrospinning is a proven low-cost method of producing micro-fibres by wet-spinning polymers. Once produced the fibres can be 30x smaller than a human hair, and together resemble white tissue paper. The fibres have a core-shell structure, where the core is a hydride and the outer shell a polymer. The outer shell polymer safely encapsulates the hydride: it acts as a filter that only allows hydrogen to pass and stops other molecules like oxygen to traverse, making the materials 100% safe.
This is a breakthrough in that they say the newly developed fuel has the ability to be used in vehicles without existing combustion engine modifications, nor does it require high pressure storage tank systems traditionally associated with hydrogen fuels of the past. In fact, the claim is that it can be delivered in the same fashion, and with the same infrastructure that current gasoline is dispensed. According to Hydrogen Fuel Cars & Vehicles:
The elegance of this method is that thousands of high pressure hydrogen fueling stations will not need to be built to accommodate hydrogen cars. Slight modifications of current fueling stations will be needed only, so this solution could accelerate the introduction and acceptance of hydrogen cars on a wide scale very quickly. Cella, however is working on further improving its fuel so that widespread commercialization is possible.
This seems to point to some exciting stuff, and may really make Big Oil nervous...unless they attempt to buy up the patents and bury the technology.
I guess we wait and see...
Quick addition:
I realized I forgot to add the link to the press release. It's PDF file entitled "Filling up at the pumps with hydrogen instead of petrol has become a real possibility".