sunflower power...

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Scientists Create Hydrogen Fuel from Sunflower Oil

 

British scientists have discovered a way to power cars with sunflower

oil. While biodiesel cars that directly burn cooking oil are fairly

common, researcher Valerie Dupont and her colleagues have something

else in mind, as they reported this week at an American Chemical

Society conference. They've figured out a way to use catalysts to

extract pure hydrogen from a combination of air, water vapor, and

sunflower oil. Hydrogen is frequently hailed as the clean fuel of

the future, but most current methods of creating hydrogen burn the

very fossil fuels responsible for pollution and greenhouse gases.

Dupont's process could eventually use any vegetable oil and be

miniaturized to the point that the converter could transform oil to

hydrogen on the fly, in the car itself. Another researcher at the

same conference claimed she was working on a process that could

convert pure water directly to hydrogen using a catalyst and solar

energy. For now, both veggie oil and water catalysts are

prohibitively expensive, but still, maybe this whole hydrogen thing

will work out after all.

 

straight to the source: BBC News, Richard Black, 26 Aug 2004

<http://www.gristmagazine.com/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=2899>

 

straight to the source: The Guardian, Tim Radford, 26 Aug 2004

<http://www.gristmagazine.com/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=2900>