LONDON, Aug 29: A spoonful of sugar might not just help the medicine go down in the future, it might also help your car get along.

Researchers say they have found a relatively effortless way to extract the clean fuel source hydrogen from a glucose solution.

“We are at the (laboratory) bench experiment stage so far, but it works,” Jim Dumesic, who leads the research team at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told Reuters by telephone.

He noted it was far more efficient and quicker than the alternative of using bacteria to break down plant material such as maize to generate hydrogen.

The research, published on Thursday in the science journal Nature, found that heating the sugar solution to 200 degrees Celsius and passing it over a platinum-based catalyst broke it down into hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

The hydrogen could then be piped off into a fuel cell — a cleaner alternative for powering cars which manufacturers hope will soon be in widespread use — with the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, where it could be absorbed normally by growing vegetation and transformed back into oxygen.

“The beauty of our process is that it is fairly simple, and at fairly mild temperatures, with no harmful by-products,” Dumesic said.

He says the process does not produce extra carbon dioxide, as this would have been released back into the air anyway through biodegredation of the plants.

The process is still at an early stage, with much work still to be done on preventing the catalyst degrading and on improving the efficiency of the conversion process.

But with growing world anxiety over the quantity and security of oil supplies as well as oil’s effect on global warming and climate change, the search has been on for some time to find a renewable and environmentally friendly source of energy.

Glucose can be obtained from a variety of renewable sources.

“Our goal in a perfect situation would be to achieve a process where 25 percent of the hydrogen would be used to heat the solution with the remaining 75 percent free to be used as fuel,” Dumesic said. “But we are a long way from that.”

The implications of the research are potentially huge.

Several major car manufacturers including DaimlerChrysler and Ford have already begun experimenting with fuel cells powered by hydrogen which produces a lot of energy and whose only by-product is water.—Reuters