​Storing and moving energy is essential to modern life.  Examples range from gasoline/diesel for cars to the batteries in so many of the things we use daily.

A source of energy needs to be safe.  It also must be compact and easy to use; getting the energy in and out of the storage material must be straightforward.  With cars, the energy has been stored in gasoline/diesel by Nature, we fill our tanks and the car engines release the energy.  With batteries, the manufacturer puts the energy in and our appliances extract it as they need it.

There are major drawbacks to our current stores of energy.  Gasoline and diesel cause global warming and other pollution.  Batteries run out too rapidly and re-charging takes too long; replacing them is wasteful and polluting.  But we use them despite their inefficiency because they are convenient and safe and we do not have anything better at affordable cost.  While some improvements to batteries may be on the horizon, by and large these are a long way from market and represent incremental, rather than step-changing advances.  

For these reasons, major efforts are under way to find better and cleaner ways of storing and releasing the energy we need.

Hydrogen potentially is promising; it has the largest energy per gram of any chemical substanceand can be burned in the engines of motor vehicles with the exhaust putting out only water. Hydrogen can be converted to electricity by fuel cells, which could replace batteries for many applications.  

The principle of using hydrogen as fuel for motor vehicles has been accepted – BMW developed a hydrogen-burning car and many companies have launched vehicles powered by fuel-cells.  The main problem has been finding safe and economically-viable ways of getting the hydrogen into the vehicles and then released for the engines/fuel cells to use. Current methods to store hydrogen in its pure form are inefficient, expensive, inconvenient and potentially hazardous, because they involve high pressures (up to 700 times atmospheric pressure) &/or temperatures below - 196 °C or as high as 300°C.  

Kubagen Limited (“Kubagen”) offers new hydrogen-storing materials that are massively superior to previous methods and uses novel base-metal compounds that are cheap and easy to synthesise, while storing hydrogen at moderate pressures (about half those used in scuba tanks) and at room temperature, using internal pressure as the trigger for release.  This gives 12 times the volumetric performance of currently-used hydrogen tube trailers and 5 times the volumetric performance of 700-bar tanks, yet at drastically lower pressures. In the case of batteries, Kubagen’s materials promise fuel-cell system performance of 10 to 15 times the energy storage of a standard Lithium-based battery at one-tenth the cost (based on lithium iron phosphate batteries), making them 50 to 100 times cheaper in terms of KWh/kg than batteries.