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The story
The University of Tokyo’s Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, Aisin, and battery storage startup ARM Technologies announced they succeeded in a demonstration experiment transporting hydrogen at room temperature and normal pressure, using a liquid mixed with hydrogen-absorbing alloy powder.
On 5ch, some were surprised the method falls outside regulations for high-pressure gas and hazardous materials, while others questioned its efficiency (“if it can’t exceed what the absorbing alloy itself can hold, the transportable amount must be tiny”), and discussion also turned to the cost of producing the hydrogen itself, whether via nuclear power or solar.
Hydrogen Transported at Room Temperature and Pressure — University of Tokyo, Aisin, and Others Succeed in Demonstration Experiment
The University of Tokyo’s Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, battery storage startup ARM Technologies (Sagamihara City), and Aisin announced they succeeded in a demonstration experiment with a liquid capable of transporting hydrogen at room temperature and normal pressure.
Hydrogen generated from solar panel electricity was stored in a special liquid, which could then be safely transported.
Source: nikkei.com / Original article here
What people said
If that's really the punchline, I'll subscribe to the Nikkei lol
I was like 'is this really safe?' so I looked it up, and turns out it's exempt from regulation:
・Liquid state at room temp and pressure
・Water-based and non-flammable
・Not classified as high-pressure gas, hazardous material, or deleterious substance
Nah, there's no regulation because the technology didn't exist yet — if it turns out this could fill a tunnel with hydrogen or something dangerous, they'll just amend the law, right?
The issue is that the liquid itself becomes a huge dead weight, but handling gets easier and costs go down, so the question is how much that offsets it.
If room temp/pressure works, you could use water pipes for short-to-medium distances.
Build large storage facilities, ship it in bulk by tanker, then supply it via pipe to the actual point of use — that should cut transport costs a lot.
Kind of like how city gas works.
Making it with nuclear reactors is the cheapest and most stable supply.
Right now there's no way to store it, so some operators are actually told to stop generating more power during the day.
It'd be great if they could just store the excess instead.
If we started using it at the same scale as gasoline today, that wouldn't be nearly enough.
Pour water on it and it releases hydrogen that can power a car.
Once you've extracted the hydrogen from the liquid with the dissolved powder, can you actually get the leftover material back out of an FCEV or hydrogen engine car's tank cleanly?
If you carry it as a normal-pressure gas instead of high-pressure gas, you wouldn't need reinforced containers, right?
Though there'd still be a fire risk.
💡 What if you dissolved it in gasoline — could you use it as-is!?
https://www.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ja/news/report/page_00446.html
Looking at Re: #21, seems like hydrogen-absorbing alloys can hit about 40% capacity at room temp and pressure.
Looked into it — turns out there are hydrogen-absorbing alloys with plenty of performance at room temp and pressure, like this one:
https://www.ostec.or.jp/nmc/ndb/cgi-bin/HYD/GIF/F1413.html
The table linked in Re: #21 doesn't spell that out properly.
I was wondering why a battery startup was doing something unrelated to batteries, but I guess it's a battery that uses this liquid.
But then —
>The liquid used in the experiment was made by powdering a 'hydrogen-absorbing alloy,' which stores hydrogen by adsorbing it onto metal, and dispersing it in the liquid
— that's not exceeding the performance of hydrogen-absorbing alloys, so at normal pressure the amount of hydrogen it can actually hold would be tiny. Isn't this pointless?
You might not know this, but hydrogen is a gas at room temperature and pressure.
And of course it increases the country's CO2 emissions.
This research center just wants to ride the trend to get funding. What idiots.
Right?
Re: #11
If you ignore the risk of a large-scale meltdown disaster and the cost of processing high-level radioactive waste, sure, that's true.
Re: #5
The table linked in Re: #21 doesn't even compare that either — even though MCH (methylcyclohexane, a common liquid hydrogen carrier) has a much lower specific gravity.
For fixed-point delivery, city gas pipelines are already enough.
I just can't picture the actual use case.
What's with the 'it increases environmental impact' complaints lol
Uh, this IS a hydrogen-absorbing alloy though.
Things like that use hydrogen-absorbing alloy as a component, but nowadays the goal is practical implementation as a more user-friendly system, so it doesn't come up as a topic on its own anymore.
Using a hydrogen-absorbing alloy that works at room temperature and pressure instead of a 10-atmosphere tank is exactly what nickel-metal hydride batteries — like Sanyo's Eneloop — do.
Background and Key Points
Japan has spent nearly a decade building policy around hydrogen as a strategic energy carrier, formalized in the 2017 Basic Hydrogen Strategy and visible in things like Toyota’s Mirai fuel-cell car. The bottleneck has always been transport: compressed hydrogen gas falls under the High Pressure Gas Safety Act, requiring reinforced tanks and licensed handling, while liquefied hydrogen needs cryogenic cooling to -253°C. Japan already has a commercial workaround — Chiyoda Corporation’s “SPERA Hydrogen” system, which binds hydrogen to toluene as methylcyclohexane (MCH) for tanker shipping, referenced obliquely by one poster. This University of Tokyo/Aisin/ARM Technologies method is different: hydrogen-absorbing alloy, a decades-old material also used in nickel-metal hydride batteries like Sanyo’s Eneloop, is powdered and suspended in liquid rather than packed into a solid tank, so it can be pumped and handled like a fluid.
The thread’s real disagreement wasn’t about safety but about scale. One camp treated regulatory exemption (not classified as high-pressure gas or hazardous material) as the headline win, since it could cut compliance costs. The other camp pointed out that suspending the alloy in liquid doesn’t increase how much hydrogen per unit weight it can hold beyond the alloy’s own absorption limit — commenters cited a rough 40% figure — so the actual transportable volume may be too small to matter at industrial scale, a capacity question the article itself never quantifies.
What the thread never addresses is that “room temperature and pressure” solves handling logistics, not the energy cost of producing or later re-extracting the hydrogen — a separate, unresolved expense regardless of carrier method.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Science News+) thread: Hydrogen Transported at Room Temperature and Pressure — University of Tokyo, Aisin, and Others Succeed in Demonstration Experiment.
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