Many hopes are placed on the hydrogen economy, but for all those
hopes, there sure aren't a lot of good ways to get hydrogen
without burning a bunch of fossil fuels. But research being done
at the University of Minnesota has efficiently created hydrogen
from non-volatile sources such as Soybean Oil and dissolved
glucose. This new process does away with the need to convert raw
bio-mass to something volatile (ethanol / methane / etc) in
order to produce hydrogen. Small droplets of the non-volatile
biomass are sprayed onto a super-hot metal catalyst that
converts the carbohydrates (glucose) to carbon monoxide and
hydrogen extremely rapidly. The breakup of the molecules
produces a lot of heat (think of burning vegetation) which
actually keeps the catalyst hot so it requires no external
heating. The hydrogen can then be captured for fuel, and the CO
can either be captured and used as a mixing agent for the
combustion of the hydrogen, or converted to CO2 (which is the
CO2 that the vegetation fixed in the first plac