Hydrogen-powered cars seem to be the best solution to the problem of fossil fuels pollution. The ever increasing concerns about global warming and the future shortage of natural fuel sources have given the automotive industry and researchers from other fields alike a new impulse in developing new technologies.

Hydrogen fuel-cell technology sounds almost too good to be true. You combine cheap and plentiful hydrogen and oxygen gas, the fuel cell generates electricity and the by-product is simply water. But there's a little more involved.

So far, the biggest downside of hydrogen-powered cars is the fact that it is very difficult to store it safely, and it's not stable, either, so these cars require bulky pressurized tanks that could explode much in the same way a methane gas tank does.

Now, a team of researchers at CNRS has discovered a storage solution which is both efficient and cheap: carbon nanohorns. These carbon structures offer a far more stable hydrogen bond than nanotubes did, and it's considered a breakthrough in the field, possibly the key to introducing carbon-based nanomaterials in industrial applications.

Carbon-based nanostructures like nanohorns are excellent candidates as hydrogen-bonding porous materials, due to their low mass and high adsorption capacity. Moreover, unlike nanotubes, they don't require extremely low temperatures, of around -196° C.

The new method of storing hydrogen was developed by researchers at the Centre de recherche sur la matière divisée (CNRS/University of Orléans), working in collaboration with their colleagues at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK), the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spain)

The fact that the interaction between the nanohorns and hydrogen molecules is much stronger than the one between carbon nanotubes and hydrogen makes these nanohorns promising materials for hydrogen storage applications.