Nano-Structured Materials to Address Challenges of the Hydrogen Initiative
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Nano-Structured Materials to Address Challenges of the Hydrogen Initiative Vincent Berube1, and Mildred Dresselhaus2 1 Physics, MIT, 77 Massachusetts avenue room 7-008, Cambridge, MA, 02139 2 Physics and Electrical Engineering, MIT, 77 Massachusetts avenue room 13-3005, Cambridge, MA, 02139 ABSTRACT Since the publication of the 2003 report on Basic Energy Needs for the Hydrogen Economy, many important advances in hydrogen research have occurred, a cadre of enthusiastic researchers has entered the field with great interest shown by students, and private industry has made significant commitment to this technology and investment in its development worldwide. Concurrently, other energy technologies have made major strides forward. These technologies must be evaluated for their scalability, usability, cost and life cycle footprint on the environment. This overview discusses these topics and looks toward the role for the hydrogen economy into our energy future.
INTRODUCTION Along with food and water, energy availability for the masses is without a doubt a major challenge for the 21st century. Driven by increasing world populations, an even faster increase in the per capita energy demand, a decreasing availability of traditional sources of energy through fossil fuels and the increasing concern about the need to curb the increase of CO2 into the atmosphere, the need for a transformation to a sustainable energy supply from renewable sources has emerged as a dominant challenge of this century. President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union Message identified this as a major challenge for his administration, as have other national leaders worldwide. As a result of the Bush 2003 State of the Union Message, a hydrogen initiative was subsequently launched by the US Government Funding Agencies. As a first step, a workshop was held in the spring of 2003, followed by a committee study which resulted in a report [1] which emphasized, firstly the appeal of hydrogen as an energy carrier whose release of energy produces only water as a by product without other pollutants or greenhouse gases, and takes advantage of the high efficiency enabled by hydrogen fuel cells. The report also stressed the challenges for the implementation of the hydrogen economy in terms of the enormous technical challenges to be overcome for its implementation, emphasizing that fundamental breakthroughs would be needed in understanding the physical processes involved in the production, storage and use of hydrogen. Infrastructures to provide for the transportion and distribution of hydrogen would also need to be developed to support a hydrogen economy. Understanding the atomic and molecular processes that occur at the interfaces of materials with hydrogen were identified as crucial to producing the new materials that would be needed for these fundamental breakthroughs to occur. The report goes on to say that the discovery of the new materials, new chemical processes and new synthesis techniques that would be required could only be achieved by initiatin
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