The fast development of the world economy since the industrial revolution and the more recent fluctuations in the price of oil has led to serious environmental and global energy problems. The production of pure hydrogen and its use as the main source of vehicular fuel make it one of the more promising solutions for the production of clean and cost-effective energy. 

To this end, a multitude of new process for the production of hydrogen has been proposed from the international scientific community. Current technologies for the clean production of pure hydrogen revolve around the water electrolysis process. Unfortunately, the electrolysis of pure water requires excess energy to overcome the various activation barriers, so the process is not efficient. This has led to research into hydrogen production, which focuses on renewable/inexhaustible energy sources. 

Membrane technology is one of the more promising areas for hydrogen production, and area in which our team has a long established experience. 

The microporous carbon hollow fiber membrane is a new type of carbon membrane that can be used in gas separations process, more so in hydrogen production applications. However, the fragility of these membranes means that the scale-up of the process from lab to industrial-scale is difficult. In order to tackle this problem, the proposed project is focused on the production of a new generation of nanocomposite nanoporous carbon hollow fiber membranes with advance properties in gas separations coefficients for hydrogen.