MgH(2) is one of the most promising hydrogen storage materials due to its high capacity and low cost. In an effort to develop MgH(2) with a low dehydriding temperature and fast sorption kinetics, doping MgH(2) with NiCl(2) and CoCl(2) has been investigated in this paper. Both the dehydrogenation temperature and the absorption/desorption kinetics have been improved by adding either NiCl(2) or CoCl(2), and a significant enhancement was obtained in the case of the NiCl(2) doped sample. For example, a hydrogen absorption capacity of 5.17 wt% was reached at 300 degrees C in 60 s for the MgH(2)/NiCl(2) sample. In contrast, the ball-milled MgH(2) just absorbed 3.51 wt% hydrogen at 300 degrees C in 400 s. An activation energy of 102.6 kJ/mol for the MgH(2)/NiCl(2) sample has been obtained from the desorption data, 18.7 kJ/mol and 55.9 kJ/mol smaller than those of the MgH(2)/CoCl(2), which also exhibits an enhanced kinetics, and of the pure MgH(2) sample, respectively. In addition, the enhanced kinetics was observed to persist even after 9 cycles in the case of the NiCl(2) doped mgH(2) sample. Further kinetic investigation indicated that the hydrogen desorption from the milled MgH(2) is controlled by a slow, random nucleation and growth process, which is transformed into two-dimensional growth after NiCl(2) or CoCl(2) doping, suggesting that the additives reduced the barrier and lowered the driving forces for nucleation. Crown Copyright (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Professor T. Nejat Veziroglu. All rights reserved.