LIVE IN THE
HYDROGEN
FUTURE
Imagine a world where you can have the long driving ranges and low costs of fossil fuels with zero carbon emissions and without the bothers of constantly recharging batteries on the power grid? Imagine this and you are imagining the future of hydrogen as a mass market fuel now enabled by Kubagen.
VISION
• Our plan is to refine, scale, and implement research from our Kubagen-owned US and international patents on thermodynamically neutral hydrogen storage to create a commercially scalable demo device by 2024. In this regard, Kubagen entered into a formal partnership with a multinational company in January 2022 and work is currently ungoing to meet this target.
• Kubagen's step-changing material uses Kubas binding to its patented transition metal-based Kubas Hydrogen Sponge (KHS-1) to give hydrogen storage systems which project four times the volumetric density of 700 bar incumbents at five times lower costs, making hydrogen fuel cells an attractive alternative to lithium battery technologies, especially for long haul and off grid applications.
• KHS-1 possesses a unique internal heat-sinking mechanism called the enthalpy spring which uses endothermic structural deformations on the nanoscale to absorb the heat released upon exothermic H2 binding without increasing pressure.
• In 2019 Kubagen filed a patent for the KHS family of hydrogen storage materials (which includes KMH-1 from the Whitepaper below). This enables for the first time commercial scale up of KMH-1 and new KHS-1 compositions with greater mechanical stability for on-board energy storage solutions. The previous IP was hampered with issues surrounding small sample sizes, excessive reaction times, and sample degradation. This new patent was published in April 2021 and entered the PCT international phase in June 2022. (download full newsletter).
• The applications in all areas of hydrogen fuel cell power sources will be explored, from small scale portable devices and home power systems through vehicle applications all the way to large scale transportation methods and grid storage.
• See Kubagen CEO David Antonelli in this November 2020 CNBC news feature video talking about hydrogen and Kubagen (at 5:45 and 10:05).
• Click here to listen to this April 2021 Hydrogen Podcast featuring CEO/CTO David Atonelli talking about the impact of Kubagen's new game-changing patent on the every area of the hydrogen infrastructure.
TECHNOLOGY
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.
TEAM
Prof. David Antonelli (CEO/CTO, Chairman of the Board)
Christopher Stone (Angel Investor)
Professor Lancaster University (2017-), PhD Inorganic Chemistry U of Alberta; Postdoc Oxford, Caltech, MIT 1992-95. 2005 CSC Medal winner for Best Inorganic Chemist in Canada under 40. Published over 100 papers in materials science and hydrogen storage with 5 patent groups. Funded by Hydro Quebec since 1998, Chrysler and G.M. on hydrogen storage research. UK representative for EU Hydrogen Storage (COST MP 1103) steer group with close connection to US DOE hydrogen storage tech team members.
15 years in the City, including 10 years at a subsidiary of the UK’s leading merchant bank, where he was one of three directors who set policy; 24 years founded and ran the Family Office of Lord Sainsbury of Turville. Founded with Penelope Cassell an Office of Sir James Dyson in Switzerland. Now an independent adviser to 5 UHNW families. Trustee and Committee Chair of the Carnegie Institution of Washington; a NED of The Ink Factory since it was a start-up. Has been a director of numerous small companies, including several technology-based start-ups, one of which went public.
PRESS
Clean hydrogen: smoke screen or the future of energy?
The race to the hydrogen economy is on and in the next decade, production should become cheaper and storage and use easier. But not everyone is convinced green hydrogen is the fuel of the future.
Fri, Sep 03 2021 • 6:15 PM EST / Goda Naujokaitytė