Hydrogen future

Nowadays every house has a gas pipe and no one could imagine life during winter without it. But not for long as natural gas will be changed by hydrogen. Sounds unexpected? This is not true as such an idea has been developed for years and scientists were putting loads of effort to make this happen. In last year's technology improved really a lot and more research results are still coming. So it is possible to dream about future when all electricity in all private houses will be generated by hydrogen fuel cells, solar panels or wind turbines. Everyone will forget what means gas, coal or wood burner. There will be places to fill your car with hydrogen or sockets to charge it. All these ideas were inspired by an article from Brookhaven National Laboratory. Sadly scientists didn't improve efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells and even reduced it a little, but this didn't stop them to reach a very important goal: reduce the price of required equipment. Till now the most important catalyst in hydrogen industry was platinum as it achieved the best characteristics. Despite that platinum's price is enormous over 50 000 dollars per kilo. For this price you could easily get two very good cars! It is very hard to believe but the new method uses nickel and molybdenum, which are totally opposite to platinum- enormously cheap. For 50 dollars you can get a kilogram of each. This is 1000 times cheaper for a twice bigger quantity! Hydrogen should be rediscovered again especially when using new materials efficiency was reduced only slightly. So what allowed achieving these characteristics? Firstly it was decided to change platinum with nickel. But due to unsatisfying reactivity it was mixed with molybdenum. New material also didn't satisfy scientists so they introduced nitrogen to form sphere like nanoparticles. Results were much better as nanosheet was formed. The door to the future was opened, now we just need to wait what is going to happen.

Article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120511122232.htm