Sweet hydrogen: how sugar could help satisfy the world’s energy needs | Lou Del Bello | Science | guardian.co.uk
▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2013/jul/19/sweet-hydrogen-sugar-energy-needs
There are problems with hydrogen in transport, however: the gas needs to be stored and transferred at high pressure, and it’s highly flammable. This has prevented the technology from being implemented in small vehicles.
But Zhang’s proposed solution to this problem is simple. “Why should we transport hydrogen? We can transport sugar instead, and perform the reaction in the car or in the service station.”
Using solid sugar as raw material, he wants to create cheap bioreactors that will produce hydrogen, as required, using the enzyme cocktail developed at Virginia Tech.
The ultimate test for the method’s viability will be the creation of a prototype, but at the moment researchers are still working to obtain maximum efficiency from the reaction.