Innovative Supramolecular Crystals Unlock High-Capacity Hydrogen Storage

[NNadir]

1. Usually, the hydrogen hype here in service to the fossil fuel industry is uninteresting but this case differs.

I suppose the point of the post was to make another scammy claim that the horrible physical properties of hydrogen that make it dangerous as a consumer product can be overcome.

However, this said, the chemistry found in the reference from the news item can be found here:

Zuo, J., Wang, H. & Gao, H. Engineered supramolecular crystals for high-capacity hydrogen storage. Front. Energy (2025) (ASAP, On Line July 10, 2025)

This is triptycene chemistry. The structure of the monomers is given in the paper as follows:



This isn't a simple triptycene, of course; the phenyl moieties are benzoimidazoles. Obviously they have been synthesized, but probably not at a meaningful scale subject to industrialization piloting.

Triptycenes are generally synthesized from 4+2 cycloadditions between anthracene - found in coal tar - and 2,3,4,5 cyclohexyldienes, somewhat problematic compounds prone to aromatization, but sometimes accessed through hydroquinone chemistry.

The fact that these molecules have as their basic source, dangerous fossil fuels is consistent of course, with the fact that marketing here of hydrogen is nothing more than an effort to greenwash fossil fuels.

No one is going to make 100 million tons of these triptycenes. The chemistry, on an industrial scale, would be awful.