Production costs, however, are higher compared to gasoline and around 95 percent of it is currently produced, somewhat counter-intuitively, from fossil fuels. Now researchers at Virginia Tech claim to have created a method to produce hydrogen fuel using a biological technique that is not only cheaper and faster, but also produces hydrogen of a much higher quality ... and all from the leftover stalks, cobs, and husks of corn.

The waste products of corn – stover, as it is called – is the basis for the Virginia tech hydrogen production, where the researchers used an enzymatic process to break the stover down into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Specifically, the team partly utilized the results of previous investigations it performed with cellulose to glucose conversion to help create a system that is claimed to produce hydrogen levels previously thought only theoretically possible.

To do this, Joe Rollin, a doctoral student in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech, used a specifically tailored set of genetic algorithms to help assess each part of the enzymatic process that turns corn stover into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Rollin also proved the capacity of this method to enable both of the sugars found in plant material – glucose and xylose – simultaneously, thereby detailing a method of accelerating the speed at which the hydrogen could be produced.