A team of Virginia Tech researchers has discovered a way to create hydrogen fuel using a biological method that greatly reduces the time and money it takes to produce the zero-emissions fuel. This method uses abundantly available corn stover - the stalks, cobs, and husks - to produce the hydrogen.
The team's new findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help speed the widespread arrival of the hydrogen-powered vehicles in a way that is inexpensive and has extremely low carbon emissions.
"This means we have demonstrated the most important step toward a hydrogen economy - producing distributed and affordable green hydrogen from local biomass resources," said Percival Zhang, a professor in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering, which is in both the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Engineering.
The team already has received significant funding for the next step of the project, which is to scale up production to a demonstration size...snip
...The team also increased enzymatic generation rates. This reaction rate is fast enough for hydrogen production in distributed hydrogen-fueling stations. The achieved reaction rate is at least 10 times that of the fastest photo-hydrogen production system...SNIP
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-discovery-breakthrough-hydrogen-cars.html
****************
Around the world: H2 is #1
Wasserstoff hidrógeno hidrojen idrogeno hydrogène waterstof