The winds of change are blowing through the Straits of Hormuz – a narrow stretch of water, which the world has discovered is a key gateway to more than 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil based fuels. This pinch point has been dominated by global oil companies who own the refineries and oil and gas assets and the oil producing countries in the middle east, who control price and supply.
The crisis has revealed clear opportunities and benefits of the energy transition. Globally, low cost distributed solar energy generation is delivering rapid deleveraging of residential and light industrial energy demand. However “No country will be energy-secure or independent as long as its fuel supply remains finite and fossilized and its power plants and energy grids centralized and fossil fuel-dependent. Those are sitting ducks, targets very vulnerable to attack by adversaries”, according to the Guardian.
As a result, according to the, “governments are pushing renewables plans into overdrive: to restore national security, economic stability, competitiveness, policy autonomy and basic sovereignty.”
It’s not just generation, storage of this energy is also essential as weather and usage partners are often not synchronised. Short duration (2-4 hour) batteries are scaling rapidly, and are already playing a critical role in grid balancing, and new medium duration (4-12 hour) solutions are being piloted (for example the Hunter Vanadium 12 hour Flow Battery), however batteries fundamentally have limited range (owing to their weight), capacity, and duration, and create new dependencies on critical minerals.
Energy storage via hydrogen provides new scalable opportunities for zero emissions storage, in particular for long duration (12 hours to many months) and transportable energy, with low levels of waste along the whole value chain. Hydrogen also creates distributed and sovereign storage opportunities that frees the world from dependence on a small number of fossil fuel suppliers. Energy generated from renewable energy sources like solar and wind can be stored as hydrogen to mitigate daily and seasonal imbalances and stabilise the electricity networks, facilitating the transition to renewable energy.
Hydrogen is an exceptionally efficient, flexible and clean fuel that generates only water vapour when burned, releasing no harmful emissions. It is also the most efficient molecule to store energy, with next generation hydrogen electrolyser groups like Hysata delivering 95% efficiency, and hydrogen combined-heat-and-power (CHP) solid oxide fuel cell groups like Bloom achieving 90% efficiency. Hydrogen can be used flexibly in internal combustion engines (ICEs), rocket engines, turbines and fuel cells, and can be blended into existing diesel truck, train and ship engines, and natural gas turbines. Due to its energy density, which is over three times more than that of gasoline, it is highly efficient for energy storage..
A key barrier to the uptake of hydrogen is storage. Hydrogen has high gravimetric density (120 MJ/kg), which is substantially higher than that of conventional fuels, such as gasoline (44 MJ/kg), but a low volumetric density compared to other fuels, necessitating a much larger storage volume to achieve energy equivalency with gasoline, complicating logistics and infrastructure requirements. Therefore, effective usage of hydrogen as a greener fuel replacement requires a balance between gravimetric and volumetric energy densities. Another key issue is safety during transportation, filling, discharge and refilling. Most existing techniques are only able to attain low storage levels within acceptable safety limits.
Physical storage methods such as compression or liquefaction require energy and have high hazards from fire or explosion. Chemical conversion to carriers such as methanol, ammonia, hydrides or liquid organic hydrogen carriers have high energy costs from the conversion to and from the chemical carrier and also high safety, health and environmental hazards.
Rux Energy’s hydrogen storage solution addresses these challenges by enabling physical storage of hydrogen in solid state. Hydrogen is stored at low pressure within the pores of its novel metal organic framework (MOF) materials, in a safe and compact form. The MOF acts like a sponge, and the molecules of hydrogen stay whole, sticking to the vast inner surface area (football fields of surface area per gram of material) of the nanoporous MOF material. It enables storage at high volumetric energy density, high energy efficiency, and significantly improved safety.
Additionally, Rux Energy’s novel materials are produced using sustainable synthesis, eliminating toxic solvents, using waste materials from other industries as input materials, reducing reliance on critical minerals, and using energy efficient processes.
Crucially, the systems we’re developing are designed to interoperate with renewable energy generation assets to provide long duration storage at a fraction of the cost of batteries, and e-fuel production lower cost than fossil diesel by 2029 across several countries we operate in, enabling individual countries to deleverage their firm energy storage and fuel demand from fossil imports, delivering resilience and security.
As the transition to renewable energy accelerates, Rux Energy is contributing to address the crucial bottleneck – safe and efficient hydrogen storage and distribution. And in concert with a whole next-generation of new hydrogen technologies which are entering the market, we hope to create a paradigm shift to accelerate the inevitable second wave of sovereign, distributed and democratised energy – drawing from sun and wind that is now available to us all around the world and transforming it into stored, transportable affordable, clean energy for our use and for future generations, anywhere, anytime.
Author: Dr Jehan Kanga, June 2026
Photo Credit: Straits of Hormuz by Planet Volumes on Unsplash
