An Enzymatic Route to H2 Storage

Feedstock, Feedstocks, Germany, Not Agriculture, Portugal, Process, R & D Focus, Sustainability

December 13, 2013

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by Inês A. C. Pereira (Science Magazine) Electricity is increasingly produced from renewable sources, but it remains difficult to store electric power at a large scale. Hydrogen is a strong candidate for energy storage, but there is still no safe, economically viable, and reasonably sized solution to store and transport it. The use of a liquid chemical hydrogen carrier with a high H₂ content per unit of mass and a good safety profile may solve this problem (1). For example, hydrogen may be safely stored by reducing carbon dioxide (CO₂) to formic acid (2), a liquid with a much higher energy density than H₂. Biological systems also use formate as a chemical equivalent of H₂ (3, 4). On page 1382 of this issue, Schuchmann and Müller (5) report a single-enzyme system that efficiently hydrogenates CO₂ without the need of cofactors. READ MORE and MORE Abstract

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