UK company, Biofusion’s new subsidiary, BioHydrogen, Ltd., is developing a method of microbial production to produce hydrogen from fermentable sugars. The microbes are capable of munching on glucose and other sugars from the sugar beet, creating huge amounts of hydrogen (6 times more hydrogen than before). BioHydrogen is to commercialize the work first developed at Sheffield University.
But, Sheffield University is not the only institution of higher learning in the United Kingdom that has been working on bacterial methods to produce hydrogen or electricity from hydrogen. The University of Birmingham is also using fermentative bacteria to ingest Cadbury Schweppes nougat and other candies and expel hydrogen gas.
In addition, the Department of Chemistry at Oxford University is using a biofuel cell made up of one of the oldest life forms on earth, R. metallidurans hydrogenase, to create electricity from air spiked with just 3-percent hydrogen.
So, while the rest of the world is looking for high tech mechanical solutions to creating hydrogen, the UK is investigating lower tech biological solutions that may just outperform most other methods of producing high quality hydrogen in mass quantities.