Hydrogen is a potential source of clean energy for future use in passenger vehicles powered by cheap and energy-efficient fuel cells.

Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a model that could help engineers and scientists speed up the development of hydrogen-fueled vehicles by identifying promising hydrogen-storage materials and predicting favored thermodynamic chemical reactions through which hydrogen can be reversibly stored and extracted.
Because of global environmental changes associated with man-made carbon dioxide emissions and the limited resources of fossil fuels, developing alternate and renewable energy sources is important for a sustainable future. Hydrogen is a potential source of clean energy for future use in passenger vehicles powered by cheap and energy-efficient fuel cells, but its widespread adoption has been hindered by the need to store it on-board at very high densities, Science Daily reported.
A promising solution to this problem involves storing hydrogen within a material in the form of a chemically bound hydride, for example lithium hydride (LiH). Unfortunately, simple binary hydrides, in which hydrogen combines with light elements such as lithium, sodium, magnesium or others, do not adequately satisfy the requirements for on-board storage, as the hydrogen-yielding reaction requires heating the material to impractically high temperatures.
Because of this, researchers have turned to multicomponent hydride mixtures with higher volumetric and gravimetric densities, better operating temperatures and improved reaction rates for practical hydrogen storage. However, this flexibility comes at the price of drastically increased complexity associated with the large number of competing reactions and possible end-products other than hydrogen.
Thus, predicting desirable hydrogen storage with multicomponent mixtures has proved difficult. For example, the recently studied lithium hydride compound Li4BN3H10 was found to have as many as 17 hydrogen-release reactions, of which only three were found to be feasible--and none were in the desired range of temperatures and hydrogen pressures for practical on-board storage in hydrogen-powered vehicles.
The research team used modern quantum mechanical theories and high-powered computers to develop an algorithm that can automatically and systematically pinpoint phases and reactions that have the most favored thermodynamic properties--that is, those that can release hydrogen at ambient temperatures using the waste heat from a proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell. The team tested the method on the well-studied Lithium-Magnesium-Nitrogen-Hydrogen system, predicting all experimentally observed pathways in the system. The researchers say this method can also be applied to other multicomponent hydrogen systems.
The new method, published in Advanced Materials, was developed by Alireza Akbarzadeh, a UCLA postdoctoral researcher in the department of materials science and engineering; Vidvuds Ozolins, UCLA associate professor of materials science and engineering; and Christopher Wolverton, professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University in Illinois.
“The development of an algorithm that goes beyond chemical intuition and finds all hydrogen storage reactions “in silico“ is crucial and will help the scientific and engineering community to develop revolutionary new hydrogen-storage materials,“ Akbarzadeh said. “This is a major achievement in the field, which can boost up the search for the best reversible solid-state hydrogen storage.“
“We are steadily approaching the moment when we will be able to theoretically design materials with desired properties, just like a tailor makes a suit to fit the customer’s needs,“ Ozolins said. “This will bring in a qualitatively new era of collaboration between theory and computation, experiment and technology development.“

A workman welds pipes in the boiler room of an ethanol plant under construction in Mead, Nebraska, in this Jan. 18 photo.

Eager to build a plant that would turn corn into 108 million gallons of ethanol a year, Chet Perry got all of his ducks in a row.
His ITEC Refining and Marketing Co. got a site near Princeton in north-central Illinois labeled an enterprise zone to accommodate his plant. After months of waiting, it finally snagged the crucial state air quality permit in July.
Like many other would-be ethanol plants in the Corn Belt, Perry’s venture is stalled at least for now, thanks to soaring construction costs compounded by high corn prices that have swelled operational expenses. The sliding price of ethanol sure hasn’t helped, AP reported.
When it comes to moving dirt for new ethanol sites, “almost everyone is on hold,“ Perry said, still hoping to break ground early next year. “We definitely are going ahead with the project. It’s a matter of timing.“
Similar stories are playing out elsewhere.
In Iowa, the nation’s top corn producer, there have been only two new plant construction starts this year--the lowest number at this time of year since at least 1999, said Monte Shaw of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association.
In Illinois, the state environmental department has doled out 38 construction permits on 53 applications it received since the beginning of last year, the agency’s Richard Breckenridge said. But just five of the plants are under construction, the Renewable Fuels Association trade group says.
On Oct. 1, VeraSun Energy Corp.--one of the nation’s largest ethanol producers--said it would halt construction of a 110-million-gallon-per-year biorefinery in Indiana.
The price of ethanol has slid by 30 percent in recent months and now stands at about $1.60 on the Chicago Board of Trade. At the same time, the price of corn--ethanol’s chief ingredient--remains high, squeezing margins.
And prospects of a glut loom: US ethanol demand now is less than 7 billion gallons, though the nation’s ethanol capacity by next year could reach 12.4 billion gallons, according to Eitan Bernstein, an energy analyst at Virginia-based Friedman, Billings, Ramsey and Co. That imbalance will hold down prices possibly through 2008, he said.
The slowdown isn’t likely to affect build-outs already under way and those with financing in place. But it raises questions of whether the fuel additive touted by President Bush and lawmakers as way to cut the nation’s dependence on foreign oil has been overhyped.
Across the country, the number of ethanol plants has ballooned to 129 today, up nearly 50 from 2005, the Renewable Fuels Association says.
US ethanol production has swelled 15 new refineries came online last year and, combined with other expansions, added more than a billion gallons of production capacity. More than 6 billion gallons of additional capacity could come online by 2009.
But Perry, whose company has had its hands in ethanol since the 1980s, said the climate for building new plants began souring last fall, when sometimes breathless attention to what many considered ethanol’s booming renaissance sent the price of corn spiking. Early this week, ethanol plants were paying about $3.30 per bushel of corn, down from last year’s even loftier levels.
Construction costs got “out of whack“ starting in the summer of last year, with plants that could be erected for $1.36 to $1.41 per gallon of ethanol lately costing $2.10 per production gallon, Perry said.
Combine that with the sliding price of ethanol, and any possible cash flow vaporizes, he said.
Initially put at $136 million last summer, the price tag of Perry’s project swelled to nearly $200 million until it recently began to drop.
Partly to blame was the cost of nickel and steel--key ingredients in stainless steel, a component needed for ethanol production. They shot up because of demand from China, inflating Perry’s budget for the product by $39 million. And the cost of dryers used to rip moisture from distiller grains--a byproduct of making ethanol, used to feed livestock--has doubled from the $1 million to $1.2 million the equipment was fetching last year.
Construction of at least nine ethanol plants in Nebraska will continue and by the end of next year should double the state’s capacity to about 2.25 billion gallons, said Todd Sneller of the Nebraska Ethanol Board.
But citing “uncertainty of the ethanol marketplace,“ Sneller said that moving the 45 other Nebraska ethanol projects beyond the blueprint stage will be achieved by those companies with experience in a “very cyclical“ industry.
Because of federal mandates requiring the use of ethanol--and prospects that Congress might significantly boost those demands--“it’s not the end of ethanol,“ said Bernstein, the energy analyst.
But “I think it’s the beginning of rationalization.

The coal industry has become the “whipping boy“ of environmentalists who fail to come up with realistic alternatives for energy, the head of one of America’s biggest coal producers said.
Brett Harvey, chief executive of Consol Energy Inc also suggested a surcharge on electricity use to help pay for development of technology that makes coal burn off less carbon dioxide and converts the fossil fuel into liquids and gas.
“If you’re not going to use coal anymore what are you going to use?“ he said he asks anti-coal advocates. “Well, they respond to you: new technology, solar and wind.
“My response is: ’Well, how does that work? and they say: ’I don’t know but we need to study it,’“ Harvey said in an interview during this week’s Reuters Environment Summit.
“Well if it was really that easy, don’t you think we’d have already done this? Do you think we would already have avoided the Clean Air Act and everything we’ve done to clean up coal over the years and gone automatically to that?“ said Harvey, whose Pittsburgh-based company produces approximately 70 million tons of coal per year, according to Reuters.
“There is a direct relationship between the use of coal and a healthy economy,“ he said. “When you quit using 50 percent of your electricity then we can talk. If you throttle back the use of coal and drive your base power costs up, you make all the products we make more expensive.“
Asked how the industry viewed environmentalists’ efforts to stop construction of new coal-fired power plants, which they blame for increasing greenhouse gas emissions, Harvey said: “Well, it’s the whipping boy.
“I think the whole mantra of the environmental groups is: don’t waste energy and if you make everything more expensive the theory is you use less. That’s the underlying basis of their argument, but it’s not the nature of the American public or probably anyone in the world,“ Harvey said.
Coal fuels approximately 50 percent of America’s electricity generation, but environmentalists want to replace it with alternative sources, such as wind or solar, to meet future increased power demand.
Harvey said the problem lies also with the public’s perception of coal as an outdated, dirty, 19th Century fuel.
“People have disconnected the use of coal from what they do in their everyday lives. They think that’s what their grandparents used to do. They don’t realize when they hit the light switch they hit Consol Energy.“
Harvey said in the 1990’s America decided it wasn’t going to use coal any more. “The administration said coal would be done in 2005.
“Everybody believed it and natural gas went from a buck and a half a million (BTU) to $10 a million based on throttling back coal and, guess what, now we’re on short supply of natural gas, we overbuilt gas generation and you can’t replace it with limited fuel sources.“
Asked about clean-coal technology, he said: “Should we do something more with coal? Yes. Can we make it cleaner? Yes. But it’s going to cost us and it’s going to take time.

Manufacturers and governments have to make fuel cell technology more affordable, according to environment and industry experts.
Delegates at the opening of the tenth international Grove Fuel Cell Symposium in London on Oct. 5 heard that cost was the greatest challenge facing the industry.
However, speakers highlighted a growing need for the technology as an alternative to fossil fuels to help slow climate change and ensure secure energy supplies in the future, Fuelcellsworks.com said.
Jan van Dokkum, president of United Technologies Corporation (UTC) Power, told delegates that manufacturers had to provide a more cost-effective alternative to the internal combustion engine and develop mass production techniques.
He said: “We have been working for the last five years to cost-reduce our fuel cells so that we can bring these units commercially to the marketplace.
“I think that is one area that we as an industry have not concentrated hard on.“
Van Dokkum added that he believed it was possible to reduce the cost of fuel cells from an average of $5,000 per kilowatt to just $50.
He argued that one way to help the general public to see the benefits of fuel cells as an alternative energy source in transportation was to use them in public transport.
UTC Power is currently piloting a number of hybrid electric fuel cell buses in the US and Europe.
Jim Skea, research director for the UK Energy Research Centre, called for greater support from governments during the development and introduction of new technology such as fuel cells.
Skea added: “The challenge of environment and energy is huge, the needs are pressing, but the means to meet them are available.
“Many different communities are going to play their role and I think the fuel cell community has an especially important role to play.“