Re:Sodium Borohydride to the rescue (Score 1)

From my college-level organic chemistry II class, I can tell you that NaBH4 is frequently used as a cheap method to hydrogenate compounds, especially ones with carbonyl groups (>C=O). You take some unsaturated compound, add NaBH4, cook it up a little bit and you get the corresponding saturated compound. A compound often used in a similar way is LiAlH4 (Lithium Aluminum Hydride or LAH). Both of these compounds are widely used in the chemical industry as reagents in hydrogenation because they provide an inexpensive source of densely packed hydrogen in a form that is easy to store and use. In order to hydrogenate a compound using H2, one must apply intense heat/pressure and use a catalyst, usually nickel or platinum. This direct method is rather expensive (gotta have a well-built reaction vessel to withstand the reaction conditions). Anyway, my point is that NaBH4/LiAlH4 are both rather widely available to the chemical industry and could conceivably be used as sources of romm temperature hydrogen to power fuel cells provided someone can come up with a method to efficiently extract the hydrogen directly in the fuel cell for use as fuel without going through the whole process of
NaBH4 + unsat'd organic => sat'd organic
and then extracting the H2 from the resulting saturated compound. Currently, most research into fuel cells involve extracting H2 from some hydrocarbon (such as CH3OH - methanol or CH3CH2OH - ethanol), and so there would be no benefit to creating the saturated hydrocarbon in the fuel cell only to react it later, which is why there must be a method to extract the H from NaBH4/LiAlH4 directly in order for those compounds to be useful as sources of hydrogen. If this could be found, though, potentially there could be a huge shift in the balance of power (so to speak) in the fuel cell industry.