A team of researchers from the Rice University have developed a new technique that could help at the harvesting hydrogen in bulk. Their idea is to crop hydrogen with the help of buckyballs which are mini carbon-capsules and according to the researchers, those might be “capable of holding volumes of hydrogen so dense as to be almost metallic”.

These words were said by Boris Yakobson, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Rice University, and he is backed by some calculations which showed that “they can hold about 8 percent of their weight in hydrogen at room temperature, which is considerably better than the federal target of 6 percent”.

Buckyballs are part of the fullerenes family which are a class of carbon molecules. It was very hard to reproduce the strength of the bonds between carbon atoms because they are one of the strongest chemical bonds and those are responsible for the hardest known substance, the diamond.

I hope that this will result in a breakthrough that will help the humanity to scale-harvest hydrogen which will lead to a greener Earth.