Hydrogen, diesel and petrol are all highly flammable fuels, but hydrogen is more difficult to store because it is a gas and the other fuels are liquids. As there are far fewer hydrogen filling stations, it may be more difficult to travel long distances in a fuel cell vehicle.

How do you store hydrogen? Hydrogen is difficult to store because has very low volumetric energy density. It is the simplest and lightest element–it’s lighter than helium. Hydrogen is 3.2 times less energy dense than natural gas and 2700 times less energy dense than gasoline.

Challenges to the Hydrogen Economy These include, but are not limited to, hydrogen storage issues, the purity requirement for hydrogen (when used in fuel cells), the infrastructure required, safety and environmental concerns.

Hydrogen is difficult to store due to its low volumetric energy density. Storing hydrogen as a gas also has its challenges as it typically requires the use of high pressure tanks (350-700 bar or 5000-10,000 psi).

To use hydrogen as a fuel possesses many challenges because of its high flammability, high diffusivity and very low density as a gas. Hydrogen can be transported as a pressurized gas or adsorbed on a substrate, etc. Another serious drawback faced in the usage of Hydrogen today is the storage issue.

Disadvantage: The Use of Fossil Fuels in Hydrogen Production In fact, hydrogen power is nearly energy-neutral – which means that it takes almost as much energy to produce as what it produces.

The key challenges include:

• Weight and Volume. The weight and volume of hydrogen storage systems are presently too high, resulting in inadequate vehicle range compared to conventional petroleum fueled vehicles.
• Efficiency.
• Durability.
• Refueling Time.
• Cost.
• Codes and Standards.
• Life-Cycle and Efficiency Analyses.

The leakage of hydrogen from high-pressure (5000–10,000 psi) tanks to the atmosphere can be essentially treated as an unrestrained, free expansion (called the Joule–Thompson expansion. The immediate consequence of a gas leak is then an overall increase in the ambient temperature.

Cost, durability, and reliability are the main challenges in the commercialization of fuel cells.

-There’s no risk that we’ll ever run out of hydrogen, it’s by far the most plentiful element in the universe. On Earth, however, it exists naturally only in chemical compounds, not as hydrogen gas. Water and the main components of coal, oil and natural gas are prime examples of these compounds.

Issues include operating pressure and temperature; the life span of the storage material (stability); the requirements for hydrogen purity imposed by the fuel cell; the reversibility of hydrogen uptake and release; the refueling conditions of rate and time; the hydrogen delivery pressure; overall safety, toxicity, and system-efficiency and cost.

Storage of hydrogen as a gas typically requires high-pressure tanks (350–700 bar [5,000–10,000 psi] tank pressure). Storage of hydrogen as a liquid requires cryogenic temperatures because the boiling point of hydrogen at one atmosphere pressure is −252.8°C.

Here’s a few pictures from the study, try and guess which car is fueled with H2 and which car with gasoline: Very similar to the aerospace studies, when a hydrogen storage tank ruptures and assuming a leak ignites, a hydrogen flame tends to burn out, and up and away from the structure, very quickly.

In fact, some of the requirements for onboard hydrogen storage seem unattainable especially with gaseous or liquid methods. Storage of hydrogen in chemical compounds offers a much wider range of possibilities to meet the transportation requirements, but no single material investigated to date exhibits all the necessary properties.