Hydrogen Storage by Hydrogen Storage Alloys – Fundamentals and Application

With the development of FC technology, hydrogen technology is spreading rapidly. The development and establishment of large-scale hydrogen generation, transportation and storage technology are very important issues. In the growing awareness of the global environment, clean hydrogen from renewable energy is attracting high attention. However, on the other hand, hydrogen production from fossil fuels such as LNG and lignite is also practical at present. For example, Japan, which aims to realize a hydrogen society, plans to produce a large amount of hydrogen from Uruguay’s LNG, and from Australian lignite and transport it to Japan using tankers. A large amount of hydrogen on land is mainly stored as liquid hydrogen or high-pressure hydrogen gas.
As a project of Japan’s Ministry of the Environment, we have developed a mass production technology of nanostructured FeFi hydrogen storage alloy and succeeded in reducing the price to one-third compared with those of conventional alloys. As a result, renewable energy such as wind or solar energy can be stored easily with hydrogen, and output/input fluctuation can be controlled well using the developed alloy.