Shipping Australia was honoured and privileged today to meet the team at Rux Energy, an award-winning Australian technology innovator in the clean energy sector.
Rux has developed advanced nano-porous materials (metal-organic frameworks) that can be infused with hydrogen, enabling much easier, safer, and more efficient storage and transport of the gas, which enables hydrogen to be used in hard-to-abate sectors like shipping, heavy manufacturing, and steel-making among others.
Hydrogen has a high energy density by weight (120 megajoules per kilogram), which is just under three times the energy density of gasoline, but it has a low energy density by volume. Traditional storage methods such as compression or liquefaction require a lot of energy and create safety risks. Meanwhile, chemical conversion (such as converting hydrogen to ammonia and back again) also costs energy, effort, and brings a different set of risks.
Rux Energy’s hydrogen storage technology however enables a low-pressure storage of hydrogen in a solid state as the gas seeps into the novel metal-organic framework. The inner surface area of the material is vast – football fields worth of internal surface area per gram of nano-porous material.
“It enables storage at high volumetric energy density, high energy efficiency, and significantly improved safety,” the company said in a statement, adding that it does not use toxic solvents and it uses waste materials from other industries as an input.
Commenting on the visit, Capt Noronha said: “as an industry and a society, we should be open to considering all forms of clean energy innovation. We would like to thank Bill Sayer & Dr Jehan Kanga, and all the team at Rux, for their time and their hospitality today. We would like to wish them every success in the future”.
