Hydrogen is ‘unequivocally safer than current fuels’, UC Irvine’s Dr. Jack Brouwer says

June 18, 2021

Hydrogen’s unique characteristics will enable us to achieve 100% zero emissions, Dr. Jack Brouwer told a California Hydrogen Business Council (CHBC) webinar Thursday (June 17).

As the Director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UC Irvine, Brouwer provided a high-level overview on hydrogen and debunked some of the hydrogen myths that are out there.

“We know a lot about hydrogen, we’ve been studying it for many decades, if not centuries,” Brouwer began.

“It’s a gaseous molecule, it has a boiling point of -252.8°C – so it wants to be a gas under typical atmospheric conditions, only when you get it to be very, very cold does it become a liquid.

“It’s colourless, odourless, tasteless, non-toxic – all good things for our use of hydrogen in society – and it’s flammable, which some people would suggest might not be desirable from a safety perspective, but that’s the whole point of an energy carrier; it’s something that can carry energy and as a result it’s flammable.”

Brouwer dispelled six myths about hydrogen, including that ‘hydrogen is not safe’.

“Any fuel or energy carrier risk scenario must consider: flammability, density, diffusivity, ignition energy and total energy available to understand how important and how devastating the risk is,” he explained.

Read more here.

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