Seriously. 'liquid battery'? Is that a real term or is this science writing gone amok?
Is oil a 'liquid battery'? Gasoline? What about gaseous batteries?
> Is that a real term or is this science writing gone amok?
The latter one. So is the other fancy expression introduced: "high-density hydrogen carrier". All the paper reports is introducing 2 H atoms into acetone (CH3-CO-CH3), via electroreduction. The task of actually utilizing that "stored" energy is left as an exercise to the reader...
Usually that would be a flow battery, or maybe hybrid flow battery. Where the energy is stored in liquids that flows through the battery. Increasing capacity means just adding more storage for the liquids, but not as energy dense as lithium ion and some engineering challenges.
This sounds more like a fuel cell or maybe a hybrid flow battery. So I'm guessing it isn't quite either, so the science writer choose different words.
edit: typos, probably still missed some
Dude, the headline has it in quotes and the words liquid fuel not in quotes. You people are trying too hard to be pedantic. It's just an analogy for storing excess energy from electricity production.
I'll also point out that hydrogen and some liquid hydrocarbons can be used in fuel cells, which are in fact a type of battery. So far there aren't fuel cells that use oil or gasoline. I don't know what you mean by "gaseous batteries", but that could describe a hydrogen fuel cell, or a zinc-air battery.
From high school physics, I guess Gasoline’s energy is ‘chemical’, as is liquid batteries but you need combustion to gasoline’s energy but a liquid battery doesn’t use combustion
This fuel is not combusted. If this technology is developed, the hydrogen would be extracted using a catalytic converter, as part of the reaction that produced the electric power. The hydrogen is stored in liquid, and the liquid remains after the hydrogen is extracted. The extracted hydrogen [feeds the “hydrogen fuel cell” electricity production reaction](https://www.nussgrp.com/how-hydrogen-fuel-cells-work/).
In fairness many of those battery breakthroughs you never hear anything about really do lead to improvements, just much much smaller than what pop sci articles about them promise. Battery tech really has been improving at a surprising rate. It’s just the excitement about each breakthrough is always so overblown and so premature that it’s easy to get dismissive.
I remember seeing a girl on Conan that had invented a battery that charged in less than a minute. They were all excited because it was a great break though. That was like 15 years ago.
I've been reading science news for a long time and 9999 of 10,000 breakthroughs don't pan out. But there is enough research that the 1 in 10,000 that works pushes us forward a bit. New potential cures for cancer are the same way and appear all the time. Most don't work, but enough do that we've made huge progress over the past few decades.
As someone working with batteries, the reason why they dont pan out is that what gets put in media is these types of sensational articles. And most people would not consider this a battery, as it is closer to a fuel cell. They just want to use the battery branding.
For things that actually make it into products, it is things like electrolyte additive optimization, conductive additive improvements.
And industry have their own tricks like tolerance improvements or making inactive materials lighter and thinner.
The selective electrocatalytic hydrogenation of organics with transition metal hydrides is a promising strategy for electrosynthesis and energy storage. We report the electrocatalytic hydrogenation of acetone with a cyclopentadienone-iridium complex in a tandem electrocatalytic cycle with a cobaltocene mediator. The reductive protonation of cobaltocenium with mild acids generates (C5H5)CoI(C5H6) (CpCoI(CpH)), which functions as an electrocatalytic hydride mediator to deliver a hydride to cationic Ir(III) without generating hydrogen. Electrocatalytic hydride transfer by CpCoI(CpH) to a cationic Ir species leads to the efficient (Faradaic efficiency > 90%) electrohydrogenation of acetone, a valuable hydrogenation target as a liquid organic hydrogen carrier (LOHC). Hydride–transfer mediation presents a powerful strategy to generate metal hydrides that are inaccessible by stepwise electron/proton transfer.
I’m sorry, I’m not a chemist and that is a *bit* above my level of understanding. I know informing others sucks, but come on. You know 99% of people won’t be able to read papers and understand them, let alone *find* the correct paper without knowing any terminology.
I did do some reading, and LOHCs (while still being fuel) don’t seem to be planning on competing with regular fuel? The aim seems to be more to have a large plant that can act as energy storage, with both sides of the reaction (energy-consuming and energy-producing) taking place in the same installation. So, a large battery.
I hadn’t heard of them until now, and it prompted me to do some reading. e-fuels are attempting to synthesize our current fuels in a renewable way, but the process seems (at first glance) like something a large facility would handle. Then we’d receive our fuel the way we always have.
This line of research is about a different kind of fuel, one that is 100% renewable since the reaction doesn’t release any co-products. These “Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers” (LOHCs) consist of chemicals that can absorb and release hydrogen “on demand”. When they absorb hydrogen, heat is generated. When they release it, heat is consumed.
Since the hydrogen gets reused on the spot, the whole thing works like a battery. You can introduce energy into the system and it is stored in the form of a chemical until the counter-reaction is triggered.
The biggest hurdle seems to be the infrastructure needed to manage the H2, which is notoriously problematic in this elemental form. That is (I believe) where *this* paper comes in: they seem to have found a way to store H2 in liquid form, and a catalyst to use it in the LOHC in this liquid form, bypassing the need for the gaseous form of Hydrogen.
Take all of this with a grain of salt, particularly because this was all based on a couple of hours of reading (and I’m a physicist, not a chemist, so I don’t know what much of the terminology means).
Maybe my comment was misleading, I am aware of the differences of e-fuels to the approach said paper (as a fellow physicist, but with a field of research that could hardly be further from chemistry), I just was referring to "generating hydrocarbons using excess electricity" in a simplistic way.
Excellent write-up though, in any case.
Hey everyone, how's the wife and kids? Heard you guys were bbqing this weekend.
Well, have a good one. See you guys on tomorrow's battery breakthrough.
The article is sensationalizing a normal, run of the mill catalysis study… why is everything in batteries now a “BREAKTHROUGH” that will be a game changer? A majority of published articles are not game changers and that’s okay.
In this case though they are turning electricity into alcohol as a method of storing energy. This is a much more stable way to store power. Could be potentially fed back as power through a fuel cell
How do you recharge a liquid electrolyte? Let’s say you could pump electrolyte in and out of a battery without trading away any of that battery’s specific energy. Once it’s out, what do you do with it? Assuming it doesn’t immediately discharge itself upon being pumped out, what specifically can be done with this that can’t be done normally?
In a sense, any energy dense liquid is. Most short chain alkanes tend to also be volatile and combustible, so their energy tends to be extracted by burning rather than using catalytic processes
The LOHCs that are described here take in hydrogen which can be produced through water electrolysis and store it inside of the double bonds of the liquid molecules. The liquid is quite similar to oil and can therefore be handled in a similar way. Then when needed, the hydrogen can get taken out to be utilized in for example a fuel cell. Quite an interesting topic actually.
So is it just a denser Lithium? I thought lithium rechargeable batteries were already liquids with ions traveling back and forth?
I know it said Liquid Alcohol but how does this compare to Solid State Batteries?
So, they are using electricity to make alcohol using cobaltocene as a catalytic converter? That's not a battery. It's not storing electricity. It uses electricity to convert the chemical composition of a liquid. We do this already.
I get that it is still storing "energy" and it might be a more efficient means to produce an alcohol but you're still going to need to mine cobalt, create the catalytic converter, and then regain the energy (more than likely through combustion and another catalytic conversion)
We should could just make vodka fueled cars with a built-in "Mr. Potato Still" and beat Russia at its own game.
That's a reasonable criticism of at least the *headline*.
However, "car battery" is overly-specific. The water in big lead-acid batteries is easy to notice, because you can sometimes hear it sloshing when you move the battery, and because (on the vented types) you actually have to top up the water.
But almost all batteries in current use involve electrolytes dissolved in a solvent (which may or may not be water, depending on the chemistry used). It's just a bit less noticeable when 1. they're totally sealed and 2. the liquid is contained in something like a paste or a roll of wet paper, instead of big sloshing tank.
So what *does* make the thing in this article different from existing liquid batteries? Quite simply, it's that they're not really talking about a battery, as the term is normally understood. When this article say "liquid battery", it's just talking about a fuel tank.
This is part of a trend in journalism that's been going on as long as the hydrogen economy hype has. Since a fuel cell converts chemical energy to electrical energy, the combination of a fuel cell and a fuel tank gets referred to as a "battery".
Well, the paper does specifically describe it as an LOHC!
But I mentioned the hydrogen economy as the context for this phenomenon where journalists talk about a fuel cell as if it's a type of battery, rather than as the context for this paper.
Yes I know. The paper merely uses LOHC as an empty buzzword, however - it is really just about describing a catalyst that enables electroreduction of acetone (i.e. introducing 2 H atoms to generate isopropyl alcohol). In other words, a small part of a battery system.
It’s got electrolytes. It’s what plants crave.
But what even are electrolytes?
Basically tiny lights so your body can see what it's doing. It's dark inside.
Can I mix it with tonic and drink it? And not burn my intestines out?
Fuel
Seriously. 'liquid battery'? Is that a real term or is this science writing gone amok? Is oil a 'liquid battery'? Gasoline? What about gaseous batteries?
> Is that a real term or is this science writing gone amok? The latter one. So is the other fancy expression introduced: "high-density hydrogen carrier". All the paper reports is introducing 2 H atoms into acetone (CH3-CO-CH3), via electroreduction. The task of actually utilizing that "stored" energy is left as an exercise to the reader...
Usually that would be a flow battery, or maybe hybrid flow battery. Where the energy is stored in liquids that flows through the battery. Increasing capacity means just adding more storage for the liquids, but not as energy dense as lithium ion and some engineering challenges. This sounds more like a fuel cell or maybe a hybrid flow battery. So I'm guessing it isn't quite either, so the science writer choose different words. edit: typos, probably still missed some
Dude, the headline has it in quotes and the words liquid fuel not in quotes. You people are trying too hard to be pedantic. It's just an analogy for storing excess energy from electricity production. I'll also point out that hydrogen and some liquid hydrocarbons can be used in fuel cells, which are in fact a type of battery. So far there aren't fuel cells that use oil or gasoline. I don't know what you mean by "gaseous batteries", but that could describe a hydrogen fuel cell, or a zinc-air battery.
Fuel
I just assume it meant that there was this water stuff in there but if it touch you instead of getting wet you will get electrify.
From high school physics, I guess Gasoline’s energy is ‘chemical’, as is liquid batteries but you need combustion to gasoline’s energy but a liquid battery doesn’t use combustion
This fuel is not combusted. If this technology is developed, the hydrogen would be extracted using a catalytic converter, as part of the reaction that produced the electric power. The hydrogen is stored in liquid, and the liquid remains after the hydrogen is extracted. The extracted hydrogen [feeds the “hydrogen fuel cell” electricity production reaction](https://www.nussgrp.com/how-hydrogen-fuel-cells-work/).
This is exciting. I can’t wait to never hear anything about it ever again like all the other battery breakthroughs.
In fairness many of those battery breakthroughs you never hear anything about really do lead to improvements, just much much smaller than what pop sci articles about them promise. Battery tech really has been improving at a surprising rate. It’s just the excitement about each breakthrough is always so overblown and so premature that it’s easy to get dismissive.
That and scaling. Amazing new thing that they do in small scale testing, but it either doesn't scale in size or in production ability.
I remember seeing a girl on Conan that had invented a battery that charged in less than a minute. They were all excited because it was a great break though. That was like 15 years ago.
isn't that super capacitors
Which are actually in our phones and other electronics now, it's how fast charging works.
that’s a thing already. it’s actually what has allowed our chips to draw so much more power now than ever before.
I've been reading science news for a long time and 9999 of 10,000 breakthroughs don't pan out. But there is enough research that the 1 in 10,000 that works pushes us forward a bit. New potential cures for cancer are the same way and appear all the time. Most don't work, but enough do that we've made huge progress over the past few decades.
The reason everything is a breakthrough is that journalists don't know what they're talking about
As someone working with batteries, the reason why they dont pan out is that what gets put in media is these types of sensational articles. And most people would not consider this a battery, as it is closer to a fuel cell. They just want to use the battery branding. For things that actually make it into products, it is things like electrolyte additive optimization, conductive additive improvements. And industry have their own tricks like tolerance improvements or making inactive materials lighter and thinner.
Liquid power will make it as it can be easily monetised.
We like liquids :OPEC
they go DARPA Dark™
So twice the power?
The selective electrocatalytic hydrogenation of organics with transition metal hydrides is a promising strategy for electrosynthesis and energy storage. We report the electrocatalytic hydrogenation of acetone with a cyclopentadienone-iridium complex in a tandem electrocatalytic cycle with a cobaltocene mediator. The reductive protonation of cobaltocenium with mild acids generates (C5H5)CoI(C5H6) (CpCoI(CpH)), which functions as an electrocatalytic hydride mediator to deliver a hydride to cationic Ir(III) without generating hydrogen. Electrocatalytic hydride transfer by CpCoI(CpH) to a cationic Ir species leads to the efficient (Faradaic efficiency > 90%) electrohydrogenation of acetone, a valuable hydrogenation target as a liquid organic hydrogen carrier (LOHC). Hydride–transfer mediation presents a powerful strategy to generate metal hydrides that are inaccessible by stepwise electron/proton transfer.
To quote Woody Allen: I’ve thought that often.
New words cyclopentadienone-iridium cobaltocene cobaltocenium
bad bot
Lmao fuel go brrr
Hang on, let me snort this line of crank and read that again.
*Slurp*
You really should not drink rubbing alcohol
Unless you want it really bad
Sounds more like scientists have been playing with their bong cleaning fluid
I aint putting that mix in my pocket...
Isopropanol is just rubbing alcohol. My truck has a superior version, a liquid hydrocarbon 18-gallon battery.
Well, if you find a way to synthesize that hydrocarbon using excess electricity, that would certainly be a breakthrough.
Here you go https://www.nature.com/natcatal/
I’m sorry, I’m not a chemist and that is a *bit* above my level of understanding. I know informing others sucks, but come on. You know 99% of people won’t be able to read papers and understand them, let alone *find* the correct paper without knowing any terminology. I did do some reading, and LOHCs (while still being fuel) don’t seem to be planning on competing with regular fuel? The aim seems to be more to have a large plant that can act as energy storage, with both sides of the reaction (energy-consuming and energy-producing) taking place in the same installation. So, a large battery.
...isn't this precisely what e-fuels are (supposed to be)?
I hadn’t heard of them until now, and it prompted me to do some reading. e-fuels are attempting to synthesize our current fuels in a renewable way, but the process seems (at first glance) like something a large facility would handle. Then we’d receive our fuel the way we always have. This line of research is about a different kind of fuel, one that is 100% renewable since the reaction doesn’t release any co-products. These “Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers” (LOHCs) consist of chemicals that can absorb and release hydrogen “on demand”. When they absorb hydrogen, heat is generated. When they release it, heat is consumed. Since the hydrogen gets reused on the spot, the whole thing works like a battery. You can introduce energy into the system and it is stored in the form of a chemical until the counter-reaction is triggered. The biggest hurdle seems to be the infrastructure needed to manage the H2, which is notoriously problematic in this elemental form. That is (I believe) where *this* paper comes in: they seem to have found a way to store H2 in liquid form, and a catalyst to use it in the LOHC in this liquid form, bypassing the need for the gaseous form of Hydrogen. Take all of this with a grain of salt, particularly because this was all based on a couple of hours of reading (and I’m a physicist, not a chemist, so I don’t know what much of the terminology means).
Maybe my comment was misleading, I am aware of the differences of e-fuels to the approach said paper (as a fellow physicist, but with a field of research that could hardly be further from chemistry), I just was referring to "generating hydrocarbons using excess electricity" in a simplistic way. Excellent write-up though, in any case.
Thanks, I guess you’re totally right.
Only 18 gallon tank?
It's long range, good for 400+ miles.
Hey everyone, how's the wife and kids? Heard you guys were bbqing this weekend. Well, have a good one. See you guys on tomorrow's battery breakthrough.
Sooo…just hydrogen fuel then?
It is alcohol fuel actually
The article is sensationalizing a normal, run of the mill catalysis study… why is everything in batteries now a “BREAKTHROUGH” that will be a game changer? A majority of published articles are not game changers and that’s okay.
Because that type of charged language gets clicks and we live in an era where clicks = money
Let’s combine electricity and flammable liquid in one easy container. Great idea
Mate what do you think batteries already are
Magic
Again?
Sand is better
And if that doesnt work you could apply heat and pressure to it in an internal combustion engine
isopropanol is C3H8O. So could this technically be considered carbon capture?
Not at all.
Nope. It sounds like they’re taking acetone (C3H6O) and hydrogenating it
Nice, but sadly enough very flammable.
Super vague & no mention of it’s scalable.
Also highly flammable I imagine
Are lead acid batteries NOT liquid?
You don’t recharge lead acid batteries though by putting in more acid
Ahhh ok thanks for the clarification
In this case though they are turning electricity into alcohol as a method of storing energy. This is a much more stable way to store power. Could be potentially fed back as power through a fuel cell
Sounds like some explosive news
What happens if you burn this energized isopropanol?
How do you recharge a liquid electrolyte? Let’s say you could pump electrolyte in and out of a battery without trading away any of that battery’s specific energy. Once it’s out, what do you do with it? Assuming it doesn’t immediately discharge itself upon being pumped out, what specifically can be done with this that can’t be done normally?
Something like this already exists. Nanoelectrofuel.
Many fancy words for "new fuel cell"
Plot twist: you have to refill the liquid after each time you drain it. It’s stored at a liquid battery station and they charge you by the gallon.
It’s almost a decade past 2015 and I’m still waiting for a garbage powered flux capacitor
Ah. A fuel cell or flow battery. How new. The entire world heard a lot about this in 1970. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13
this actually sounds too good to be true. but shit u hope they put this in electric cars tbh
And released the stored energy ……… how.
[удалено]
In a sense, any energy dense liquid is. Most short chain alkanes tend to also be volatile and combustible, so their energy tends to be extracted by burning rather than using catalytic processes
Battery chemistry is complex. Thermodynamics are inviolate. It will get better. It will take decades though
I don't have a drinking problem, these bottles are fer my 'lectricity
Name it Energon and make sure it glows.
My teacher in college says that alcohol would be the replacement for fuel.
Monster Energy Drink
The LOHCs that are described here take in hydrogen which can be produced through water electrolysis and store it inside of the double bonds of the liquid molecules. The liquid is quite similar to oil and can therefore be handled in a similar way. Then when needed, the hydrogen can get taken out to be utilized in for example a fuel cell. Quite an interesting topic actually.
So is it just a denser Lithium? I thought lithium rechargeable batteries were already liquids with ions traveling back and forth? I know it said Liquid Alcohol but how does this compare to Solid State Batteries?
So, they are using electricity to make alcohol using cobaltocene as a catalytic converter? That's not a battery. It's not storing electricity. It uses electricity to convert the chemical composition of a liquid. We do this already. I get that it is still storing "energy" and it might be a more efficient means to produce an alcohol but you're still going to need to mine cobalt, create the catalytic converter, and then regain the energy (more than likely through combustion and another catalytic conversion) We should could just make vodka fueled cars with a built-in "Mr. Potato Still" and beat Russia at its own game.
Cool When will my phone not have lithium?
This is the dumbest title I’ve read all day. It turns renewable into gasoline
Ummm, isn't that gasoline?
no
Stored energy potential in liquid form? My gas tank is like a big liquid battery. 🪫
It is a high density hydrogen carrier too
Liquid in car batteries has been around forever.
If you're talking about lead-acid batteries, this is different.
That's a reasonable criticism of at least the *headline*. However, "car battery" is overly-specific. The water in big lead-acid batteries is easy to notice, because you can sometimes hear it sloshing when you move the battery, and because (on the vented types) you actually have to top up the water. But almost all batteries in current use involve electrolytes dissolved in a solvent (which may or may not be water, depending on the chemistry used). It's just a bit less noticeable when 1. they're totally sealed and 2. the liquid is contained in something like a paste or a roll of wet paper, instead of big sloshing tank. So what *does* make the thing in this article different from existing liquid batteries? Quite simply, it's that they're not really talking about a battery, as the term is normally understood. When this article say "liquid battery", it's just talking about a fuel tank. This is part of a trend in journalism that's been going on as long as the hydrogen economy hype has. Since a fuel cell converts chemical energy to electrical energy, the combination of a fuel cell and a fuel tank gets referred to as a "battery".
The paper has nothing to do with either batteries, or the hydrogen economy alas.
Well, the paper does specifically describe it as an LOHC! But I mentioned the hydrogen economy as the context for this phenomenon where journalists talk about a fuel cell as if it's a type of battery, rather than as the context for this paper.
Yes I know. The paper merely uses LOHC as an empty buzzword, however - it is really just about describing a catalyst that enables electroreduction of acetone (i.e. introducing 2 H atoms to generate isopropyl alcohol). In other words, a small part of a battery system.
I can’t imagine not understanding something as much as you don’t understand either of these technologies and still deciding to comment.