UNSW turns to crowd-funding to develop hydrogen energy breakthrough

This seems like a pretty cool initiative - although it speaks to the intellectual vacuousness of Australia when it comes to supporting renewable R&D and manufacturing in this country (something we have a long and inglorious record on - for example, Suntech, the world's largest solar company started in Australia but moved to China because they couldn't get any industry support from a government completely in thrall of the Greenhouse Mafia).

Quote:

The dearth of government support for renewable energy in Australia has spawned yet another crowd funding effort, this time to support the development of a potentially game-changing hydrogen energy storage breakthrough. The campaign, called EnergyH, was launched this week by the University of New South Wales‘ Materials Energy Research Laboratory in nanoscale – or MERlin – to fund ongoing research and development of its groundbreaking method of storing hydrogen safely and with a 10,000 fold decrease in storage space required. It is the team’s second attempt to raise funds for the project, this time using their own platform. As MERlin team leader François Aguey-Zinsou said in a comment on an ABC Radio website, they are depending of the success of this crowd-funding campaign. “Because of current budget restrictions there are massive cuts in research funding so we will eventually have to stop working on this technology despite its potential,” he wrote.

I'm interested in what the smart people here think of the proposal as being able to efficiently store energy in hydrogen is pretty much the holy grail when it comes to transportation fuels.



Some background on the concept:

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But hydrogen is also voluminous and volatile, and therefore has proven difficult to store. The UNSW team has come up with an answer to this using sodium borohydride (NaBH4). The technology means it can store the equivalent of a 5 meter balloon-worth of hydrogen into just 50cm, and at room temperature. The team is currently working on reducing the amount of heat needed to release the stored hydrogen. To demonstrate its technology, the team has developed a hydrogen-powered bicycle – the HyCycle – which features a 738Wh hydrogen canister, a 518Wh lithium-ion battery, a 100W fuel cell and a 200W electric motor. As you can see in the picture (at right), the hydrogen canister is more compact than the battery, and can provide more energy.