Home Fuel Cell Charging Station Could Help Power Hydrogen Economy

Solid state hydrogen storage, you couldn't be talking about lithium hydride could you? So to make hydrogen safe we turn it into the fuel of a hydrogen bomb.

that's lithium-6 deuteride, (deuteride being heavy hydrogen), so it's not the material needed for a hydrogen bomb, and do you really think if it was the material necessary that it would be allowed to be sold for commercial use????. it's close but not it, and by the way most hydrogen bombs use normal fission fuel like uranium as there main power source.

Why hasn't this been suffocated by car and oil companies yet? There's definitely a catch that makes this not worth covering up with lot's of money. Maybe it won't be very effective at all.

I just watched the CNN video and OMG OMG OMG I WANT OOOONE!!! Of course, really, I'm just going to wait until they scale it up to a full size model and the old one's come down in price and get an old one, 'cause I'm a po' folk.

Also, I looked through the "Contact Us" link, but I couldn't really find anything that would help me. I was just hoping to find someone who could help me find one of your old internet articles. One about green tech that the white house would be getting. Like adjustable shaded, bullet proof windows or something and an awesome portable wind turbine that was just plug and go. It had the programming in it to just be plugged into an outside outlet and help power your house. It cost $400 and was supposed to be released this year to consumers, but I haven't been able to find it.

@animemaster - Okay that was a great and funny question.

So what they really made was another way to store hydrogen, if this is for real it could be the invention of the century, for the rest of the century! Really it seems to good to be true.

Ok, I just looked at their site and here is the catch, it takes 60 watts to charge a hydrostick that will produce 15 watts.

When it scales up to car sized hydrosticks it will come with a solar panel installed on it and it can sit in your back yard where your neighbors won't complain about it. Just a hypothesis.

I know its a cleaner fuel source but does no one else see our water as an extremely valuable and finite resource? I'd rather see us focus more on capturing the suns energy than waste water on energy needs. We directly consume and require water to survive. This tech would be great for terraforming a planet or moon with ice caps for oxygen to create atmosphere and hydrogen for fuel but lets not bring it to households. We will end up wasting it as quickly as we have our oil.

Jono - When H2 is made from H2O, it releases O2. When it is used (burned or otherwise), it is returned to H2O, making it a clean fuel. A typical fuel is a hydrocarbon (having both H and C). When it burns, it releases both H2O and CO2 (or CO in a low O2 environment).

So, Hydrogen works cleanly, since there is never a stage where it is Carbon in the air.

And, I think it's the point to emphasize there, the water returns to the air and the natural water cycle, meaning that it ends up where you got it. There's literally no environmental cost in the process from electrolysis (which releases oxygen into the environment) to burning or chemical bonding in an engine or fuel cell (which reclaims the same amount of oxygen and returns the water to the environment.)

Hydrogen is only an energy carrier, not a primary source - you still need solar, nuclear, or some other source to produce it, and it's not a particularly efficient process to transform the electrical energy into chemical. But you can say the same things about rechargeable batteries, and as a carrier, hydrogen offers much, much denser storage of energy at no *extra* environmental cost. Basically, that solves the existing problems with electric cars, because you get the range and power of gasoline engines, and it promises to simplify power storage for mobile devices.

Clean primary sources are still in dispute - nuclear, solar, and wind being the big contenders - but for making that power *mobile,* there's nothing better than hydrogen fuel cells.

First off to animemaster, Hydrogen is not flammable. Next to Jono, once the Hydrogen mixes with the oxygen in the air guess what it make water (H2O).

Jono

Firstly, water covers 2/3 of the Earth. I doubt we'd run out in 100 years even if every single person on Earth was doing it.

Secondly, like Oakspaar said, when it's burned, it naturally goes back to H2O. So this means that it's not a finite source of fuel. It's NOT a fossil fuel.

I understand your concerns, but using H2 is NOT like burning oil, gasoline, kerosene or any other petroleum product.

But your comment was funny, I have to admit.

Admittedly this is a great step forward, but I'm still a bit worried about the effects of burning bucketloads of hydrogen everywhere. Have there been any studies to show it wont actually harm the environment? The only support I've heard so far is that it just makes water, and water is cool, because as somone said earlier its already in the air beacause of natural processes. However, if you look it objectively, you could make almost the exact same assumption for CO2 (respiration anyone?). Its more abundant in the atmosphere than water, its a relitively stable gas, and you can make more by just splitting up the carbon dioxide and burning it again. Nobody predicted coal's massively damaging effects when it was first used.
If everything switched to hydrogen there would be a hell of a lot more water in the atmosphere and who knows what this could cause? Massive rainstorms? corrosion of metal structures? Fogs? Spontaneous Human Combustion? Nobody can say for certain.
Im not saying any of this will actually happen, I just want to make sure we dont end up thinking were saving the world, but then realising were actually making it worse. After all, its taken people long enough to get the message about CO2 - It would be a right pain in the arse to start over again. ; )

sweet... i can turn a gallon of water into a highly explosive, highly awesome "fire cracker"
I WANT ONE!

plus..think about all the cool little things you could power with it..like a little battery that hopefully doesn't leak n_n

So why don't they just put this hydrogen generator straight into the car and hook it directly to the fuel cell? That way no hydrogen storage would be necessary since it would stream into the fuel cell as soon as it was created. Oh yeah, someone already did that. And yes chieffrankly, it has already been suppressed for years.

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