Canadian, German fuel tank development brings cheap hydrogen vehicles closer to reality

Researchers in Canada and Germany have taken a step toward making hydrogen-powered vehicles a reality. The team has devised -- in theory -- a way to store hydrogen in a chemically altered form of graphite.

The development addresses one of the major obstacles in developing hydrogen-powered cars -- the challenge of storing hydrogen in the vehicle safely and economically.

Up to now, hydrogen has been stored in high-pressure tanks, a dangerous and inefficient solution. The work was done by Dr. John Tse, a physics professor at the University of Saskatchewan, along with colleagues at the Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences in Ottawa and Germany's Technical University of Dresden. "The second step ... is to follow it up with some hard thinking [about] how to make this compound," says Dr. Tse.