Lifeboat Foundation

Over the last few decades, the high consumption of energy from fossil fuels has promoted a massive increase in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. To address this, scientists have been searching for an alternative, renewable sources of energy.

One of the main candidates is hydrogen produced from organic waste, or biomass, of plants and animals. Biomass also absorbs, removes, and stores CO₂ from the atmosphere, while biomass decomposition can also bring us ways to negative emissions or greenhouse gases removal.

Now, EPFL researchers have developed a way to maximize hydrogen yields from biowaste within a few milliseconds. The method uses rapid photo-pyrolysis to convert dried biomass powders such as banana peel into valuable gases and solids, including hydrogen and biochar.