A new breakthrough in fuel production could put hydrogen cars back in the race for clean transportation. Researchers from Virginia Tech have developed a way to drastically cut the time and money necessary to produce hydrogen fuel. By using discarded corn cobs, stalks, and husks, they have improved on previous methods deemed too inefficient by energy experts. Their research, which was funded in part by Shell, was published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/Sc...rough-could-pave-the-way-for-clean-cars-video
From your link: "Corn cobs, husks and stalks – decays into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Using genetic algorithms, Dr. Zhang and co-author Joe Rollin developed an “enzymatic pathway” that speeds up this reaction. {only by a factor of three} By including two simple plant sugars, glucose and xylose ..." Enzymatic processing of those sugars, could lead to easier to store Alcohol, I bet. How much of the energy in the produced H2 comes from corn cob starches? Interestingly, fine ground corn cobs have lots of surface, on which the hydrogen will condense as mono-layer of "quasi-liquid" density at room temperatures and easily contained, low pressure. I bet if corn cobs have a role to play it will be in cheap storage, not source, of hydrogen. Also production of not natural in the mass enzymes to ferment alcohol for "2nd generation cellulosic" alcohol is proving to be hard (batches get contaminated with other microbes) and expensive. Article does not tell how the enzymes are made.
