A ‘liquid battery’ advance

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By Stanford Report. 

Excerpt: ...Robert Waymouth, ...is leading a Stanford team to explore an emerging technology for renewable energy storage: liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs). Hydrogen is already used as fuel or a means for generating electricity, but containing and transporting it is tricky. “We are developing a new strategy for selectively converting and long-term storing of electrical energy in liquid fuels,” said Waymouth, senior author of a study detailing this work in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. “We also discovered a novel, selective catalytic system for storing electrical energy in a liquid fuel without generating gaseous hydrogen.” ...Daniel Marron, lead author of this study ...developed a catalyst system to combine two protons and two electrons with acetone to generate the LOHC isopropanol selectively, without generating hydrogen gas. He did this using iridium as the catalyst. A key surprise was that cobaltocene was the magic additive. ...a chemical compound of cobalt, a non-precious metal, has long been used as a simple reducing agent and is relatively inexpensive. The researchers found that cobaltocene is unusually efficient when used as a co-catalyst in this reaction, directly delivering protons and electrons to the iridium catalyst rather than liberating hydrogen gas, as was previously expected. Cobalt is already a common material in batteries and in high demand, so the Stanford team is hoping their new understanding of cobaltocene’s properties could help scientists develop other catalysts for this process. For example, the researchers are exploring more abundant, non-precious earth metal catalysts, such as iron, to make future LOHC systems more affordable and scalable.... 

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