Aluminium Waste as a Hydrogen Carrier: Inside Latvia's LACISE Research
Researchers at the Institute of Solid State Physics of the University of Latvia are working out how to pull hydrogen from the aluminium scrap that remelting cannot handle economically. We look at the energy numbers, the circular feedstock logic, and the Swiss-Latvian research base behind the work.
INNOVATIONSNEWS
PtXBaltic
10/15/20264 min read
Hydrogen is still expensive and the infrastructure barely exists. But it keeps turning up in places you wouldn't expect, and some of them are nowhere near an electrolyser. In a Riga lab, a crushed drinks can, a painted window frame and a roll of laminated foil are being used as fuel. Not melted down. Used to carry hydrogen. It's early-stage work and the researchers say so themselves.
The waste nobody else wants is the point
Start with what this research ignores. Clean, high-aluminium scrap is fine as it is. Remelting works, the money adds up, nobody needs a new process. Fresh primary aluminium is even further off the table, because it took an enormous amount of electricity to make and it's worth far more as metal.
So the team at the Institute of Solid State Physics of the University of Latvia (LU CFI) went after the messy end: medium and low aluminium content, laminated stuff, painted and lacquered pieces, foil, and scrap chopped so fine that normal recycling can't deal with it. Lead researcher Dr. Līga Grīnberga, who runs the institute's Energy Materials Laboratory, told Delfi that household aluminium is usually coated with paint, plastic or paper, or alloyed with something else. Get hydrogen and usable aluminium compounds out of that, and you get energy and less waste from the same tonne.
That choice does a lot of work. It makes this a way to earn something from a residue stream that currently costs money to deal with, not a rival to electrolysis.
What happens in the reaction vessel
The chemistry is old and nobody disputes it. Aluminium pulls the oxygen out of water, turns into aluminium hydroxide — a white gel or powder — and hydrogen comes off as gas. The problem is the thin oxide skin on every piece of aluminium. It has to be stripped or damaged first, with an alkaline solution like sodium hydroxide, with mechanical treatment, or some other activation method.
In practice: the material goes into a closed reactor with hydrogen collection and sensors for temperature and pH. Water and an activator go in, the protective layer gives way, and you get hydrogen and heat. The gas is analysed, or sent to a fuel cell. They check what's left behind too, solid and liquid, to see whether aluminium compounds, copper, iron or chromium can be pulled back out instead of going to waste management.
Most of the lab work is mapping what changes the yield: aluminium content, alloy, impurities, coatings, particle size, alkali concentration, temperature, reaction rate. Thin or finely ground aluminium reacts fast because there's more surface. Coated and laminated material is slow, because the solution has to get to the metal first.
The energy numbers, stated honestly
The figures are specific, so here they are. In theory a kilogram of pure aluminium gives about 0.11 kg of hydrogen, holding roughly 3.7 kWh of chemical energy. Through a fuel cell that's around 2 kWh of electricity. Delfi's version: a 10 W LED lamp burning for about 200 hours, or roughly 30 mid-range laptops charged. Catch the heat as well and you add about 1.5 kWh, what a 1 kW heater uses in ninety minutes.
Those are theoretical numbers for pure aluminium, from the researchers themselves, not measured output from a plant that's running. Real waste will do worse. But they fix the scale: small and medium amounts of hydrogen, made where the scrap already is. Not bulk supply.
They're blunt about the energy accounting too. The reaction needs no electricity, but making that aluminium took a lot of it. So you can't call this green or cheap by default. It pays off best when the input is genuinely hard to recycle, when the heat gets captured, when the alkaline solution is recovered, and when the reaction products get reused.
Energy made where it's used
Since the reaction needs no power source, the hydrogen could be made exactly where it's needed, including places with poor electricity supply. No moving it long distances, no storing it for months. Those two costs quietly decide most hydrogen business cases around here.
The uses the team thinks are realistic follow from that: metalworking companies that already produce aluminium waste on site and have somewhere to put the heat, compact automated units with a fuel cell for off-grid power, rescue work and emergencies. Flammability is a fair question. The answer is engineering — ventilation, hydrogen sensors, safety valves, pressure and temperature control, flame arresters, automatic shutdown, and no ignition sources in the room.
A Swiss-Latvian research base with weight behind it
The work sits inside LACISE, a project under the Swiss-Latvian Partnership in Applied Research Programme. LU CFI leads it, with Riga Technical University and the Institute of Electronics and Computer Science, and on the Swiss side the Paul Scherrer Institute, the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and CSEM. LU CFI's own project page puts it at 2025 to 2029, EUR 7,144,000, 15% co-funded by the Latvian state, across three strands: AI-based grid monitoring, battery materials, and hydrogen — both from aluminium waste and from water using sunlight and new catalysts.
The company matters. PSI is one of Europe's serious research centres, and a Latvian institute leading a project PSI is part of says something about the science base here. It also explains the pace. Four years is room to test variables properly, not a demo built for a press release. Next in the hydrogen strand: run the reaction in seawater. For a region with this much coastline, that's worth noting.
What this signals for the Baltic PtX ecosystem
None of this is settled. The team calls its own work lab experiments and an early prototype, with no industrial-scale prototype yet, so the economics so far come mostly from modelling on real but lab-scale data. Read it as a near-term supply option and you've read it wrong.
Here's what it does say. Latvia has a funded research line, with international partners, working on hydrogen right where the circular economy and the energy system meet. Waste operators, metalworking companies and municipalities sitting on aluminium residue are the obvious first calls, and they're cheap calls to make while the pilot design is still open. If the process can be made to pay, as Grīnberga puts it, this kind of aluminium waste can become a valuable resource in the circular economy.
Source: LU zinātnieku inovācija – alumīnija atkritumos uzglabā ūdeņradi