CLASSIFICATION AND TOPOLOGY OF HYDROGEN ENVIRONMENTS IN HYDROUS MINERALS

The purpose of this project is to create a body of understanding on how Nature stores hydrogen in solids. One of the challenges facing society is alternative energy sources. The federal government has identified hydrogen fuel as a potentially clean and cheap solution. However, the practical aspects are hindered by the simple problem of how to store hydrogen safely and in concentration. The explosion of the Hindenburg, and more recently the explosion at the hydrogen plant of the Reliance Petroleum Jamnagar refinery, illustrates how difficult this can be. This project will identify the ways that nature stores hydrogen in minerals, and then explore the response of these systems to concentrating the hydrogen though compression and increase in density. This study examines hydrous minerals, determines the environment of the hydrogen atoms in them, and creates a natural classification based upon the hydrogen environments, which are characterized by the structural and atomic interactions of the hydrogen atom. Mineral names and structural data are obtained from the International Mineralogical Association Mineral List Database and the American Mineralogist Crystal Structure Database. There are about 4300 known minerals, 2503 of which contain the element hydrogen (57%). Aside from those minerals that contain ammonia or hydronium, 2487 minerals contain OH either as H₂O or isolated OH groups. Of these, 1592 have experimentally determined crystal structures with 600 that contain only OH without H₂O. The other 992 contain H₂O with or without additional OH. There are 450 known mineral species that contain OH without H₂O and have crystal structure determinations that include the location of the H atom. Seventeen unique classes of OH sites were determined.