MOVE OVER HYDROGEN, MAKE WAY FOR MAGNESIUM POWER

Magnesium burns as a white hot flame in fireworks.

•      Magnesium could work better than hydrogen in fuel cells.

•      There's enough magnesium in seawater to provide energy for 300,000 years.

 "When people talk about alternative energy, hydrogen often comes up. How about magnesium? We’ll see. Today, on Engineering Works! Listen to the podcast."

 

Magnesium is nifty stuff. Pure magnesium is a silvery metal, and you probably remember from high school chemistry that it burns with a hot white flame.

 

While a lot of research has already gone into using hydrogen to store energy, either directly as a fuel or as part of fuel cell systems, some researchers think we should be looking at magnesium as a way to store energy. Magnesium stores about 10 times as much energy as hydrogen. And there’s enough magnesium in seawater to provide energy for 300,000 years

 

Engineers at a Canadian company are working on a fuel cell that uses magnesium, air and water to produce electricity. An Israeli researcher has come up with a magnesium-based battery sort of like the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries we all know about. And a California researcher is working on a way to use magnesium to produce hydrogen for fuel.

All of this sounds good, but there’s a problem. It takes a lot of energy to purify magnesium to a form we can use. Maybe more than we’d get back. One researcher in Japan thinks he has the answer: solar energy to power a laser that would give us the almost 6,700° F. heat needed. We’ll see how that turns out.

Our magnesium power is somewhere in the future, so we’re done. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station.