Strategies were adopted to cost-efficiently produce cellulose-hydrogen by anaerobic fermentation in this paper. First, cellulase used for hydrolyzing cellulose was prepared by solid-state fermentation (SSF) on cheap biomass from Trichoderma viride. Several cultural conditions for cellulase production on cheap biomass such as moisture content, inoculum size and culture time were studied. And the components of solid-state medium were optimized using statistical methods to further improve cellulase capability. Second, the crude cellulase was applied to cellulose-hydrogen process directly. The maximal hydrogen yield of 122 ml/g-TVS was obtained at the substrate concentration of 20 g/L and cultured time of 53 h. The value was about 45-fold than that of raw corn stalk wastes. The hydrogen content in the biogas was 44-57%(v/v) and there was no significant methane gas observed. (C) 2009 Professor T. Nejat Veziroglu. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.