Current Status and Future Prospects of Research on Hydrogen Storage Materials

Hydrogen is capable of providing highly stable, efficient and pollution-free power. Its potential application in onboard automotive industry and stationary power generation is promising. However, there are several challenging issues for contemporary hydrogen technologies, i.e., large-scale hydrogen production, hydrogen storage and delivery at near ambient conditions, etc. Hydrogen infrastructure and storage technologies play key roles in the incipient hydrogen economy. The existing storage technologies are physical storage, physical adsorption, hydrides of light metal alloys, complex chemical hydrides, etc.. The advantages and disadvan- tages of these technologies were briefly reviewed and the prospects of future research and development in this area were discussed. For hydrogen storage materials, future research efforts would focus on high reversibility, high capacity, efficient hydrogenation at a large scale, storage and delivery under near ambient conditions and controllable dehydrogenation under mild conditions.