HYDROGEN seems the ideal fuel of the future – clean-burning, efficient and in potentially limitless supply. But to store it in liquid form requires expensive high-pressure tanks. Now researchers may have cracked the problem, with a way of storing hydrogen in blocks of ice.
Wendy Mao and her colleagues at the Carnegie Institution of Washington have found that at high enough pressure, hydrogen molecules can be trapped inside cages made of ice, known as clathrates. Unlike other gases such as methane that are known to get trapped in clathrates, hydrogen molecules were thought too small to remain imprisoned. But it turns…
