STORAGE OF HYDROGEN AS GAS HYDRATES AND ITS NEAR-FUTURE IMPACT ON THE OIL, GAS, CHEMICAL AND AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY

L.J. ROVETTO; C.J. PETERS

Rio de Janeriro, Brazil

Congreso; 4th Mercosur Congress on Process Systems Engineering; 2nd Mercosur Congress on Chemical Engineering; 2005

At the time of the discovery of gas hydrates, they were just a laboratory curiosity. Later on, they turned out to be the cause of serious problems during transportation of oil and gas in pipelines. No surprise that research activities were mainly focused on solving these problems. By now it is known that at the ocean floor and in the permafrost regions huge amounts of methane hydrate are present. It is estimated that the total amount of energy stored in gas hydrates far most exceeds the total amount of energy present in all fossil fuels together, i.e., coal, oil and natural gas. Therefore, there is a rapidly increasing interest to develop technology to recover methane from these sources. For a number of reasons, it is expected that hydrogen will be the major source of fuel in the automotive sector. For that purpose, storage of hydrogen in sufficient amounts at acceptably safe conditions is a prerequisite. Recently, the gas hydrate of hydrogen has been discovered. However, this gas hydrate is stable only at extreme conditions, i.e., at temperatures below ambient the equilibrium pressure of the hydrogen hydrate is as high as 2300 bar. However, using so-called gas hydrate promoters, tetrahydrofuran in this case, it turned out to be possible to have hydrogen hydrate stable at pressures lower than 100 bar. This finding has been recognized as a major candidate solution for hydrogen storage. It also has been discovered that the accepted idea of single-occupancy of the cavities in the gas hydrate structure does not apply for hydrogen hydrate as double and even quadruple occupancy has been established, which means that the energy density of hydrogen hydrate is relatively high. In all, this novel finding may have a revolutionary impact on near-future goals in the oil, gas, chemical and automotive industry. In this presentation, additional results on this novel finding will be presented.