There has been plenty of debate going across the board the last few days about biofuel and if we can afford to produce food for fuel. I have constantly maintained and will do so in future that biofuel is a temporary solution to the fossil fuel crisis and the permanent solution to the problem is Hydrogen Fuel Cells. While that is the easy part, the difficult part is actually making them. We can achieve electrolysis sufficiently, but we need to be able to store and burn Hydrogen in a controlled fashion for us to use it.
The problem with Hydrogen is that it is highly combustible and if you had conventional Hydrogen vehicle involved in an accident, everything might turn to ashes within seconds. This safety aspect cannot be ignored at all. But in Rice University, scientists discovered a nanoscale structure which could effectively store hydrogen atoms. Carbon cages which look like soccer balls called “buckyballs” were tested, exceeding scientists’ expectation–these buckyballs could reportedly endure pressure similar to the core pressure of Saturn and Jupiter! That might mean that even the best known collision to man will not cause them to explode.
Whereas theoretically, only one hydrogen atom could fit inside the microscopic cage, the researchers were able to fit 58 atoms in, until the hydrogen took a near-metallic state and the carbon cage was destroyed. Based on this research, a future aim would be to create larger buckyballs a few nanometers in size, which would be visible to the naked eye as gray powder. The technology is still only for lab usage and it might take another decade to make it to industrial level; if it does make it. But one hopes that more research in this regard will help the planet immensely indeed.
