14 DAY TRIAL // In an attempt to help rid human society of its dependency on fossil fuels, a team of researchers working at Virginia Tech have rolled out a new technology which makes it possible for hydrogen to be extracted in impressive amounts from any given plant.
As several reports issued by the Department of Energy in the United States have shown, hydrogen fuel is very much capable of helping various industries greatly improve on their ecological footprint. This is because, when burnt, hydrogen fuel produces just one by-product: water.
Working on the assumption that, as ever more industries start looking into the possibility of using hydrogen fuel in order to keep up and running, the demand for low-cost hydrogen will also increase, the Virginia Tech scientists wished to pin down a way to produce significant amounts of said chemical element.
According to the official website for Virginia Tech, what these scientists did was combine xylose (i.e. a plant sugar found in abundance in nature) with several enzymes and a polyphosphate.
This translated into significant amounts of hydrogen being liberated from the xylose, the same source informs us.
For the time being, the technology developed by the Virginia Tech scientists is still in its early days, and further investigations and experiments are needed prior to its being made available to the public.
Still, the researchers speculate that, in just three years' time, this method of obtaining hydrogen from plants will have become commercially available.
“Our new process could help end our dependence on fossil fuels. Hydrogen is one of the most important biofuels of the future,” Professor Y.H. Percival Zhang commented with respect to this scientific breakthrough.
“The potential for profit and environmental benefits are why so many automobile, oil, and energy companies are working on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as the transportation of the future,” the professor further added.