Despite interest from time to time in hydrogen as a planet-friendly source of energy free of all the pollutants associated with carbon-based fuels, hydrogen never caught on — that is until this year’s Nobel laureate in chemistry, Omar Yaghi, who suggests otherwise.

First, the downsides of hydrogen. Based on recent data from California, one kilogram of hydrogen costs $3 to produce using electrolysis but the price at the pump is $35 per kilogram — 10 times the cost of production because of the costs associated with storage and transportation. The basic reason for both is that by volume, hydrogen is incredibly light and takes up a lot of space. For example, at room temperature, one gram of hydrogen occupies 11 litres. That’s a lot of room for very little energy.

Up to now, the solution has been to compress hydrogen gas to pack far more energy into a space convenient enough for a vehicle. Hydrogen gas can be compressed to 5,000 to 10,000 psi — 50 to 100 times that of the air pressure in our bike and car tires. In this form, hydrogen gas works for big vehicles, but not cars.

The other option has been to store hydrogen as a liquid at very low temperatures: minus. That may work for larger vehicles, but again, not cars. Both compression and liquefaction are wasteful and not cheap: compression wastes up to 20 per cent of the stored hydrogen energy and liquefaction may be associated with “boil off,” which may consume up to 50 per cent of the energy.

Another option is to store hydrogen in solid form in metal hydrides, but this requires temperatures up to 300 degrees centigrade to release the gas. In short, none of the foregoing options are attractive because they’re wasteful, bulky and tricky to manage.

Enter Omar Yaghi, a Nobel laureate in chemistry in 2025 and his brilliant solution for using hydrogen to fuel aircraft, which was highlighted by Graham Warwick in the November 2025 issue of the commercial aviation magazine, Aviation Week & Space Technology.

What Yaghi and his co-laureates, Richard Robson and Susumu Kitagawa, created were three-dimensional molecules, metal-organic frameworks, which combined metals such as copper, cobalt, nickel or zinc with organic compounds to create containers divided by labyrinthine internal spaces to increase the internal surface area.

One of Yaghi’s recent devices increased the internal surface area of a metal-organic frameworks by a factor of 7,000 times, making it a practical way to store large quantities of hydrogen at near normal temperatures and pressures — and, scaled up, enough to provide safe hydrogen fuel tanks for commercial aircrafts.

For at least a decade now, there has been considerable interest in Europe, the U.S. and China in developing a lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery-powered commuter aircraft for short routes within or between neighboring cities. The problem is range and complexity and, as with most electric vehicles, the cost to the environment isn’t seen by the operator — it comes when Li-ion batteries need to be recycled or disposed with.

Yaghi’s suggestion makes far more sense to me than Li-ion batteries, because hydrogen is a clean fuel and there’s nothing nasty to dispose of like Li batteries at the end of the shelf-life of the battery. The fact that hydrogen can be stored in a near-solid and readily accessible form — all at normal operating altitudes and pressures — are huge plusses.

The focus of Yaghi and his team has been on drones, but if the promise of safe storage of useful amounts of fuel can be scaled up to commercial aircrafts, it would be a game-changer for an aviation industry looking for a way forward to cheaper and much cleaner fuels.

Similar technology can be used to capture carbon dioxide, methane and other toxic gases and fluids, cleaning water supplies, extracting water from dry dessert air — the list goes on.

The whole exercise with metal-organic frameworks began with Richard Robson 40 years ago in Australia, teaching students how atoms link up to form molecules. They created complex molecules with large interior spaces with few practical applications in mind at the time.

Later, Susumu Kitagawa created the first metal-organic frameworks molecules with practical applications in mind, but his work wasn’t taken seriously enough at that stage to garner reliable funding.

It was left to Omar Yaghi, born and raised in Jordan and later a U.S. citizen, who had the vision and determination to apply rational design to assemble atoms and molecules like Lego pieces to make large flexible crystals with enormous interior surface areas.

He and his team have gone on to exploit metal-organic frameworks technology to today’s level, in which growth in metal-organic frameworks technology and practical applications is now exponential.

Here was an example of the evolution of a novel technology in the hands of the three laureates in chemistry who reimagined how atoms and molecules might be arranged to the eventual advantage of humankind — one of the core goals of all Nobels in the sciences.

Dr. William Brown is a professor of neurology at McMaster University and co-founder of the InfoHealth series at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library.