Hydrogen is an important energy-carrier because of its potential merits on storage and transportation in contrast to electricity, notwithstanding explosive reactiveties of molecular hydrogen in air. Renewable energies are congenial to chemicals in order to overcome their weak points of diffusiveness and unsteadiness. Organic-hydride carriers are suited especially to oversea-transport of large-scale wind energy, which is blessed, for example, in Patagonia or Alaska. Since organic hydrides can provide hydrogen catalytically at the temperatures of waste heats, the blast furnace in ironworks or ICE automobile on-boarded would economize cokes or car-fuels through hydrogen-added combustion. Chemical recuperation of waste heats, accompanying CO₂ reduction, would open a way toward the low-carbon society.

Chiyoda Corporation has been proposed a vision of the global hydrogen supply chain. It is considered the vision will great service to the reduction of CO₂ emission. We are also developing the hydrogen storage and transportation system for the huge amount and a long distance by the organic chemical hydride (OCH) method. We had reported the status of the development of the dehydrogenation catalyst for the fix bed reactor in the laboratory scale. In this report, the global hydrogen supply chain and the feature of the system are introduced.

Liquid chemical hydrides like cyclohexane etc. are considered to be suitable for hydrogen storage and transport, in which the efficient hydrogen production by dehydrogenation is the most important step. The membrane reactors can realize enhancing the equilibrium-limited reactions as well as recovering the purified hydrogen.

Ammonia NH₃ has a number of favorable attributes, the primary one being its high capacity for hydrogen storage, 18 mass% on its molecular weight. And it is easily liquefied by compression of about 1 MPa at room temperature, which leads an easy handling for the practical use. In this review, general properties, syntheses and present decomposition methods of ammonia are briefly described. And new concept of ammonia decomposition, reaction with alkali metal hydrides is demonstrated. Furthermore, combination of the ammonia-absorbing metal ammine and the metal hydride, composite systems are investigated.

The organic hydride system is one of the important hydrogen transportation methods. This paper describes our study of the hydrogen generation and the efficiency of a vehicle with an on-board hydrogen supply system based on a micro reactor that reforms organic hydride. In order to achieve a compact hydrogen supply system able to generate sufficient quantities of hydrogen, we have developed a membrane reactor combined with a chlorine-free catalyst. The 10-15 mode test cycle simulation results show that the micro reactor can generate hydrogen with high responsiveness. Life cycle assessment (well-to-wheel) of the fuel supply for vehicles using organic hydride shows that, using a micro reactor and by recovering the engine’s waste heat, the efficiency of on-board systems improves. Consequently, the authors conclude that vehicles using organic hydride with micro reactor systems can be as efficient as vehicles using high-pressure hydrogen.

Hydrogen ignites by a small energy that is almost one tenth of that for methane which is the main substance of town gas. The combustion range of the hydrogen-air mixture is very wide as between 4 to 74 %. Also hydrogen is leaky and the combustion speed is very high. Therefore, the knowledge of the safety of hydrogen is indispensable for the broad usage of hydrogen energy in our civil life.

The purpose of this study is to increase the safety in a space where hydrogen is really used. A series of experiments was carried out using a model to understand the hydrogen dispersion behavior when hydrogen leaked in a partially open space such as a room, a basement car park, and a passage. It was found how the hydrogen flows from its source to outside and how the concentration changes with height and time. The effects of the inclination of the ceiling were also observed.

There was another purpose in the experiments. Recently, CFD analysis method is widely used to examine the behavior of leaked hydrogen. However it seems that many of them were not examined the accuracy itself comparing with the reliable actual data. The reason is thought that there are few reliable experimental results which can be used to validate the accuracy. A lot of effort was paid to get accurate hydrogen concentration data from the experiments to provide the reliable results.

Oxidative reforming of n-butane is triggered rapidly and repeatedly on reduced CeO₂ supported Rh catalysts from ambient temperature without heating the catalyst externally. The auto ignition is enabled by the heat produced by spontaneous oxidation of the catalytic support, i.e., CeO_2-x to CeO₂. The highly localized heat produced by oxidation of CeO_2-x starts combustion and subsequent reforming of n-butane.

The fuel tanks for the fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) are large compared to those for gasoline vehicles. It is the biggest hurdle to FCVs and the downsizing is required for a new hydrogen storage system. Hydrogen can be stored in many different forms as compressed or liquefied hydrogen, or hydrogen storage materials. In this paper, I reviewed hydrogen storage properties of hydrogen-absorbing alloys with high dissociation pressure, light weight non-metallic hydrogen storage materials and carbon materials.