Coal’s Green Potential as Hydrogen Storage: Hydrogen – Coal Interactions

主講人 : Prof. Shimin Liu

A full-scale hydrogen economy requires a bulk energy storage system to store the excess energy as a buffer and to fulfill the demand constantly. The talk starts with the general hydrogen economy and the role of coal as energy storage formation. Then I will discuss the hydrogen sorption capacity and diffusion behaviors. In this talk, the sorption and diffusion behaviors of eight coals across the major coalfields in the United States were measured and analyzed. The sorption data shown that all eight coals have considerable sorption capacities. The fixed carbon content and typically the O/C ratio are obviously correlated with the maximum hydrogen adsorption capacity in coals, which may be attributed to the oxygen-containing functional groups. Hydrogen has superior diffusive gas deliverability defined by hydrogen effective diffusivity. This is a vantage for a promising field candidate of hydrogen storage in coal with maximized injectivity. The results reveal that the sorption and diffusion behaviors of hydrogen in different rank coals towards the depleted coalbed methane formation with injected hydrogen can serve as a geological “H2-Battery”.

主講人簡介：

Shimin Liu is a Professor of Energy and Mineral Engineering and Professor of Mining Engineering at Penn State University and he holds Ph.D. degree in Engineering Sciences from Southern Illinois University. His research interests include coalbed methane, carbon sequestration, geomechanics, flow of fluids in porous media, health and safety. As PI, he has successfully secured funding from various US federal agencies, including US Department of Energy, US National Science Foundation, CDC-NIOSH, Alpha Foundation, SME Foundation and industrial partners. He is editor-in-chief for International Journal of Coal Science and Technology.