Features
Bioenergy
Other renewables
Turning bio-waste into hydrogen
August 20, 2014 - Whilst hydrogen cars look set to be the next big thing in an increasingly carbon footprint-aware society, sustainable methods to produce hydrogen are still in their early stages. The HYTIME project is working on a novel production process that will see green hydrogen being produced from grass, straw and food industry residues.
When sustainability and bioeconomy are being discussed, the words ‘hydrogen’ and ‘biomass’ are usually not too far away — although rarely mentioned in the same sentence. But what if hydrogen could be produced directly from second generation biomass?
Starting in 2000 with the Dutch project ‘Hydrogen from biomass’ and followed up with funding under FP5 and 6, Pieternel Claassen’s quest for creating an efficient, marketable hydrogen production process from bio-waste has recently reached a new high. HyTIME (Low temperature hydrogen production from second generation biomass), an EU-funded project due to be completed in December, aims to increase the productivity of fermentative hydrogen production, thereby accelerating its implementation in industrial processes.
The stakes are high: in the EU, some 118 to 138 million tons of bio-waste are currently produced every year. With the HYTIME technology, these could be converted into 0.34 million tons of hydrogen and provide a significant contribution to the EU’s sustainability targets.
August 20, 2014 By European Commission: CORDIS
