The United States of America is committed to a future hydrogen economy but hydrogen is not available as an elemental resource.  There are many methods for producing hydrogen including coal gasification, from natural gas, and using nuclear energy.  Coal gasification offers one of the most versatile and cleanest ways to convert the energy content of coal into hydrogen.  Rather than burning coal directly, gasification breaks down coal or virtually any carbon based feedstock into its basic chemical constituents.  Effective recovery of hydrogen from gas mixtures then becomes a central issue.  The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has a versatile process to fabricate inorganic membranes having pore sizes ranging from less than 1 nanometer to over 20 micrometers with virtually no materials limitations.  Proper materials selection and tailoring of pore size is the key to fabricating a membrane having a long lifetime with a high separation factor and high flux.  We will present information and data relative to recent advances in the development at ORNL of microporous inorganic membranes for high temperature hydrogen separation.  Laboratory and pilot-scale testing data on these membranes will be presented and new insights into diffusion mechanisms will be included in the discussion.

* The Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725.  Accordingly, the U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free license to publish or reproduce the published form of this contribution, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes.