Stanford Researchers Developing Advanced ‘Liquid Battery’

But what will become of ME?
A research team at Stanford University is working on advanced sustainable energy storage that uses liquid organic hydrogen carriers, or LOHCs.
Hydrogen in several forms is already used as fuel or a means for generating electricity, but containing and transporting it is a problem. The Stanford team believes it may have solved the puzzle.
“We are developing a new strategy for selectively converting and long-term storing of electrical energy in liquid fuels,” said Robert Waymouth, the Robert Eckles Swain Professor in Chemistry in the School of Humanities and Sciences and senior editor of a new peer-reviewed study entitled “Cobaltocene-mediated catalytic hydride transfer: strategies for electrocatalytic hydrogenation.”
The study was published on June 12, 2024 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
“We also discovered a novel, selective catalytic system for storing electrical energy in a liquid fuel without generating gaseous hydrogen,” Waymouth  said in a statement.
If successfully developed, this form of energy storage could supplant the prevalent method of storage for electricity for the grid as well as for smart phones and electric-vehicle batteries, namely lithium-ion technologies.
Simply put, LOHCs could widely function as “liquid batteries,” storing energy and efficiently returning it as usable fuel or electricity when needed.
This outcome was made likely if not possible when the research team discovered that cobaltocene is unusually efficient when used as a co-catalyst.
The lead author of the study, Daniel Marron, developed a catalyst system to combine two protons and two electrons with acetone to generate the LOHC isopropanol selectively, without generating hydrogen gas. He did this using iridium as the catalyst. The team then added cobaltocene, which they had assumed would liberate hydrogen gas, Instead, they found it directly delivered protons and electrons to the iridium catalyst and that it was unusually efficient in doing so.
While this does not a liquid battery make, it is a major advance in the development of a technology that could eventually supplant lithium-ion power cells.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)