Low pressure, low cost hydrogen storage technology

Currently green hydrogen production and storage is focused primarily around electrolyser technology with high pressure storage. However, Electrolysers use rare earth metals such as Iridium. Material scarcity means there is only support for 3-7.5GW of electrolyser scale up annually.

This also goes against the government mandate to reduce scarce material utilisation. The storage element is geared towards transport applications, such as hydrogen refuelling for transportation, where high pressure compressed storage has dominated current technology to meet energy density requirements for vehicles. To compress hydrogen to 350 or 700bar for a refuelling station requires a lot of energy.

However, there are many uses for hydrogen aside from the transportation industry. There has been talk of adding Hydrogen to the gas supply system of up to 20%. HyDeploy has just concluded which was declared a "success" and trialed 20% H2 mix at Keele University.

The 5 gas network operators have all apparently declared they are ready for this transition. However, pressures to domestic premises can be between 75mBar and 2Bar, a big step down from the 350-700Bar of a high pressure system. It makes little sense to generate hydrogen and then compress this to high pressures if the subsequent usage is low pressure systems.

It makes more sense from an energy perspective to store the hydrogen at low pressures and avoid the round trip energy cost and the financial cost of the compressors and tanks. There is no low-pressure low-cost, hydrogen storage products on the market. Deliverables -Understanding the fundamental science behind low pressure hydrogen storage

-Designing low pressure hydrogen storage systems using sustainability principles -Small scale test rig and instrumentation produced for validating technology -Test results analysed to check suitability and durability