The accelerated hydrogen revolution thanks to easier storage?
In recent months, all indicators have been in the same direction: hydrogen will have a key role to play in the global energy transition.Mobility, heat, electricity storage: there are many applications, and make it possible to enhance an energy produced by renewable sources.Large brakes remain, the most important being that of its storage and its transport.But a French start-up may have found the solution to raise it.
Hydrogen is on the rise!For a long time, using this gas to store energy has appeared as a theoretically viable solution, but difficult to put into practice, because of technical and financial constraints.But the situation is changing, on the one hand because the technology is more and more mature, on the other hand because the need to give up fossil fuels make hydrogen an economically profitable solution in the medium term.
Hydrogen: an energy storage method, not primary energy
Let us once again remember that hydrogen is not a source of energy proper.It is a way to store an energy reserve that can be released on demand, with particularly low losses.The principle is simple: energy is used to produce dihydrogen (H2), most often under pressure.Then this dihydrogen can either power a fuel cell, releasing electricity or being burned directly, producing calorific and/or kinetic energy.
Hydrogen is therefore a green and durable solution only in the event that it is produced from a renewable energy source.With a view to a frank development of intermittent renewable energies, the production of dihydrogen can be a response to the peaks of production of these energies.
Electricity storage and potential cogeneration
Applications are oriented on two axes.The first is to use hydrogen to store electricity.Many experiments are underway, such as in Guyana, where the largest storage unit in the world is built on this principle.
Theoretically, used in a residential framework, hydrogen could be a source of cogeneration, since its combustion produces both electricity and heat.If no practical application of this cogeneration has yet been presented, researchers actively work on the subject.
Mobility: with a fuel cell, or directly as fuel
The second axis is that of mobility, undoubtedly the one where the future of hydrogen promises the greatest upheavals.Associated with an electric motor, it can offer higher yields than a lithium-ion battery, explaining the research frenzy in this technology, especially for the automobile and rail transport.
Used as main fuel, it seems the best (if not the only) fuel of renewable origin capable of deliver enough power to operate a cargo or a line.
Storage and transport problems
But many brakes remain the industrial development of these solutions.Hydrogen remains dangerous, especially in its gas pressure in pressure, and its storage as its transport pose serious logistical problems.
On this front, a French start-up, Hysilabs, put into practice a technology that could solve all these problems.Ten years ago, Vincent Lôme, doctoral student in biotechnology at the University of Aix-Marseille, discovers by chance a catalytic reaction of hydrogen extraction from hydrides of silicon silicon.They press that it can transform our relationship to dihydrogen.
Hysilabs invents a liquid and stable vector of hydrogen
In 2015 he created with his friend Pierre-Emmanuel Casanova Hysilabs.Continuing their research, they end up inventing the "miracle" compound, a silicon hydride (a polymer made up of silicon atoms each linked to two hydrogen atoms) and his method of extraction from silica.This compound is liquid and stable.They baptize it hydrosil.
Hysilabs therefore proposes to create this hydrosil with the energy usually used to create pressure dihydrogen.This compound indeed presents a crowd of advantage over dihydrogen: it frees itself from the dangers of high pressure storage and, above all, allows to transport and store seven times more hydrogen in liquid form than in gaseous form!Either considerable gains in terms of logistics and transport, decorated with increased security.
An industrializable solution immediately
Another strong point of this solution: it is not experimental or in demonstration.It works.Immediately: "It is a process directly applicable in factories.We are in the pre-industrial phase and have identified possible production sites, ”explains Pierre-Emmanuel Casanova.The first applications should be presented in 2019.
The potential of hydrosil far exceeding France, the start-up should open very quickly internationally.It is also supported by the European Commission, managed a fundraising of 2 million euros last year, and won numerous awards and competitions.
The missing piece of the puzzle?
The latest is the EDF Pulse 2018 Prize in the Smart City category (smart city), which will offer Hysilabs the strike force of a large international group for its communication and its development.
Because a generalization of this solution offers properly extraordinary perspectives, both for the storage of electricity, which would be simplified, for mobility, from the individual vehicle to the cargo plane.
Dividing by seven the congestion of a fuel by securing its storage, this is an innovation that will quickly change the face of this sector, and to accelerate the solutions from hydrogen.It remains to continue to develop renewable energies, so that this hydrosil is produced thanks to green energy, and that it becomes a solid support for the energy transition.