Growing hydrogen for the cars of tomorrow - Features


If we're going to run tomorrow's cars on hydrogen, it doesn't come any greener than farm fresh - New Scientist visits the gas growers
DOWN at the farm, glistening polythene tubes stretch into the distance across the salt flats of the southern Californian desert. But they aren't propagating some miraculous new crop that can grow on this barren, sun-baked earth. These water-filled tubes are teeming with countless microscopic algae that have been engineered to soak up the sun's rays and produce hydrogen to fuel the state's cars and other vehicles.
That, at least, is the vision of Tasios Melis of the University of California, Berkeley. And he's not stopping at California. "We've done some calculations," he says. "To displace gasoline use in the US would take hydrogen farms covering about 25,000 square kilometres." To put that in perspective, that's less than a tenth of what the US devotes to growing soya.
Crucially, you can farm algae where conventional crops don't stand a chance. The best areas will be sun-drenched deserts like the salt-covered dried ...
The complete article is 2053 words long.
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