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Chemical Energy Storage

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msuffidy:
I was wondering, like with regards to temporary energy storage that batteries have the problem of dying after a while. There is the solution of pumping a lot of water up a dam and then using turbines to output the gravity storage, later. So I was thinking. Maybe there is some chemical reaction that requires a lot of energy that can be reversed? So in that way it would not be an electrical battery, but would require steam driven power generation, as it outputs heat. The unit may be a lot smaller than the dam strategy.

IanB:
Since it is burning fuel that makes heat, the chemical reaction that needs to be reversed is to "unburn" stuff. This is rather difficult to do, as the only practical ways to unburn things are to use intense heat or to use electricity. Electricity is the most efficient and controllable way of doing it, for example by splitting water by electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen. Once you have hydrogen you can burn it to get the energy back, or you can feed it into a fuel cell to make electricity directly.

Overall, electrolysis and fuel cells is the direction most people are looking at.

There are possibilities using heat instead of electricity, but they have more technical challenges, especially because of the high temperatures required.

msuffidy:
Oh actually yes hydrolysis and hydrogen/oxygen fuel is a really good example of something that could do that.

Someone:
There has been plenty of work chasing that sort of idea, one example I know of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia#Fuel
or the more general:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas

SiliconWizard:
Nature does that pretty well by degrading organic stuff. The inconvenience is that it's rather slow, and we now tend to outrun it. ::)

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