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Ancient New York Ocean Discovery Could Hold Secret of Hydrogen Storage

By November 24, 2022 2   min read  (379 words)

November 24, 2022 |

Fuel Cells Works,Ancient New York Ocean Discovery Could Hold Secret of Hydrogen Storage
  • Miniscule pockets of water from the ocean that covered New York state 390 million years ago have been discovered hidden inside rocks.

Researchers published findings in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters on November 17 that showed ancient water trapped inside an iron pyrite framboid, so-called for its resemblance to raspberries.

They were able to analyze what was inside the liquid pocket, allowing them to confirm that the water’s salt content matched the composition of the ancient ocean.

One far-reaching impact of this study could be gaining further knowledge on how to safely store hydrogen fuel or other explosive gasses underground or in rocks. Hydrogen can be stored as a compressed gas, but it is highly explosive. It can also be stored as a liquid, but due to its low boiling point, this requires incredibly low storage temperatures of −252.882 °C or −423.188 °F

“This work shows the existence of tiny defects in minerals at the nanometer scale,” Sandra Taylor, the lead author of the study and a scientist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, told Newsweek. “We see that they can trap water and in turn it’s likely that they could trap hydrogen as well. So with all the effort going into understanding the storage of hydrogen underground, it is important to consider what role these defects may have and we think we can apply this approach to do that.”

More effective hydrogen storage may then make a future using the cleaner fuel easier, including in hydrogen fuel cells and in nuclear fusion energy.

The researchers may also be able to use the ancient ocean pockets to find out more about the climate of the ancient Earth, and how it changed over time.

Daniel Gregory, a geologist at the University of Toronto and co-author of the study, told Newsweek: “We made this discovery analyzing the mineral pyrite, trying to understand whether pyrite’s trace element content can affect how fast it oxidizes, but we were using a very high resolution technique, atom probe tomography (gives nanometer scale 3-D reconstructions of the sample) and when we processed the data we found that things were more complicated than we’d anticipated.”

SOURCE: N

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