Novel carbon materials can store and sieve hydrogen

Carbon-based nanostructures are potential H2 storage devices for au-tomotive applications due to their light weight and useful mechanical and chemical properties. Global warming and the shortage of fossil fuels provide motiva-tion for the replacement of traditional combustion engines. The electrochemical oxidation of molecular hydrogen is an efficient, sustainable, and environmentally friendly alternative for auto-motive applications. When implemented with modern fuel cells, this technology offers high energy efficiency in an effectively pollution-free process. Given a hydrogen economy, the biggest challenge for this technology is H2 gas storage. At ambient con-ditions, a liter of hydrogen gas contains less than 0.1 % of the energy in the same volume of n-octane or gasoline. The current prototype H2 tanks are high-pressure (700bar) bottles and liquid hydrogen cryodevices. Both solutions are