A team of researchers from Virginia Tech have discovered a method for creating hydrogen fuel through a biological process that is capable of greatly reducing the time and costs associated with producing the zero emissions fuel.
The newly discovered method uses corn stalks, corn cobs and corn husks, which are abundantly available materials, to produce the fuel.
The findings of the team could boost the development of hydrogen-powered cars into cars that are cheap to operate with very low emissions of carbon.
According to Virginia Tech Department of Biological Systems Engineering professor Percival Zhang, the new method is the most important step towards creating a hydrogen fuel economy, as the zero emissions fuel can now be produced at low costs using biomass resources.
The research team said that it has already received required funding to move the study to the next phase of scaling up production.
The new research is based upon previous work by the team of Zhang on xylose, which is the most abundant simple plant pentose sugar, for producing yields of hydrogen that can only previously be done in theory.
The uniqueness of the new method comes in two ways. First, unlike the other methods of producing hydrogen fuel that are reliant on highly processed sugars, the new method uses dirty biomass for creating fuel. Using such material drastically reduces initial expenses with the abundance of the stalks, cobs and husks of corn.
The new method also uses both xylose and glucose to increase the rate of the production of hydrogen, whereas in other methods, the usage of the two gases is not simultaneous, adding time and cost to the hydrogen fuel generation process.
These unique characteristics look to solve one of the major challenges in making hydrogen fuel use widespread, which is the high costs of capital needed to produce the needed fuel from natural gas within large facilities.
With the new method, the rates of reaction are increased threefold, which decreases the needed size of the facility to about that of a regular gas station, reducing capital required.
"We believe this exciting technology has the potential to enable the widespread use of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles around the world and displace fossil fuels," said Joe Rollin, the lead author of the study and a former doctorate student of Zhang.
Together with his former professor, Rollin co-founded Cell-free Bioinnovations, a startup firm.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
Photo: See-ming Lee | Flickr
