Magnesium Stores 10 Times More Energy than Hydrogen

According to some researchers, magnesium could be a new way to store energy. This silvery metal is able to store 10 times more energy than hydrogen and there’s enough magnesium in seawater to generate electricity for 300,000 years.

Scientists at a Canadian company are working on a fuel cell that uses air, water and magnesium to produce energy. In the meanwhile, an Israeli researcher has developed a magnesium-based battery that could replace conventional lithium-ion batteries (used in most electronic devices). Besides this, a California researcher is working to develop a new way to use magnesium to generate hydrogen.

All of these experiments sound great but there’s a problem. To purify magnesium to a form we can use we need a lot of energy, even more than we’d get back. So, a Japanese researcher claims he found a solution to combat this problem by creating a laser powered by solar energy to purify magnesium by heating it to 6.700 ºF.

[Source: Discovery News]