Big Advance In Hydrogen Production Could Change Alternative Energy Landscape

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Virginia Tech say they've had a genuine breakthrough in alternative energy production that could shake up the world's energy structure. Specifically, they've hit on a way to derive large amounts of hydrogen from any plant source. The method uses renewable natural resources, releases almost no greenhouse gasses, and needs no costly or heavy metals. The key is using xylose, the most abundant simple plant sugar, to produce a large quantity of hydrogen that previously was attainable only in theory."

Comments

Not a replacement yet

[tech.kyle]

At least for use in cars, I believe there's still the problem of storing enough of that hydrogen to get any decent range. Nice to hear we're making progress though. Yay humanity!

Re:Not a replacement yet

[h4rr4r]

You could take that H2 and combine it with some carbon and some oxygen. I believe these new fuels are called hydrocarbons. My understanding is that these revolutionary molecules have a high energy density and combusting them should be a reasonable way to use it to power vehicles.