H2MOF comes out of stealth with hydrogen storage material

Hydrogen enthusiasts talk about H₂ as a central currency in the nascent sustainable economy. But, it’s not so straightforward. Among several challenges is the difficulty of storing and transporting hydrogen. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) could offer a way forward, according to the just emerged start-up H2MOF, by storing hydrogen at mild pressure and ambient temperature.

The academic chemistry heavyweights Fraser Stoddart and Omar Yaghi cofounded H2MOF in 2021 along with CEO Samer Taha. Taha is also executive chairman of Revonence Technologies, the private equity firm that owns H2MOF. That structure has allowed the firm to operate in stealth mode until now, focusing on R&D instead of chasing venture capital.

“We are fully financed until commercialization a few years down the road,” says Magnus Bach, H2MOF’s vice president for business development.

Because of its low density, hydrogen is usually stored at 300 to 700 times atmospheric pressure or at temperatures around –253 °C. Compressing or liquefying hydrogen takes a lot of energy, and the tiny molecules are prone to leaking. Those factors mean 15–40% of the value of hydrogen is lost between synthesis and use, Bach says.

H2MOF’s material, a gray powder, adsorbs hydrogen onto billions of molecule-scale surfaces. Bach says prototype tanks loaded with the MOFs hold as much room-temperature gas as conventional systems, or more, at just 20-100 times atmospheric pressure.

The MOFs incorporate research from both Stoddart and Yaghi, Bach says. “When you put these two guys together and give them one job—resolve the hydrogen storage challenge—you really have quite an opportunity to make serious advancement.”

MOFs have attracted intense research interest ever since Yaghi and peers reported the first examples in the 1990s. Commercialization has been slow, but gas processing and storage are emerging as early applications. NuMat Technologies, one of C&EN’s 10 Start-Ups to Watch in 2016, started by using MOFs to store methane and hydrogen, though it has since shifted its focus toward hazardous gas handling and gas separations. BASF recently agreed to manufacture MOFs at commercial scale for the carbon capture start-up Svante.

Because hydrogen is hard to move or store, companies generally make and use it on-site, according to Bo Sears, CEO of the helium and hydrogen exploration firm Helix Exploration. In the US, hydrogen infrastructure is concentrated on the Gulf Coast.

That system works when the goal is to feed hydrogen into an oil refinery, Sears says, but not for the widespread hydrogen infrastructure that futurists envision. “If you have storage, you can open up a market; you can actually start trading,” Sears says.

Helix is drilling into geological formations in Montana that contain hydrogen and helium. “Any on-site storage would be perfect,” Sears says, and a solution like what H2MOF describes could help ship product to far-flung customers. “And if it works for hydrogen,” he says, “it would work for helium as well, I would imagine.”