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M3GA V 7.1 :: CLIMATE changelog :: Technosphere :: Alternative Fuels
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Re: Alternative Fuels
« Reply #45 on May 27, 2005, 10:07am »
The Mad Genius from the Bottom of the Sea

Unlimited energy. Fast-growing fruit. Free air-conditioning. John Piña Craven says we can have it all by tapping the icy waters of the deep.
By Carl Hoffman

Halfway through an important lunch meeting in Kona, Hawaii, with the lieutenant governor of the Northern Mariana Islands, John Piña Craven is suddenly restless. The topic under discussion is Craven's plan to use cold water pumped up from the deep ocean to provide low-cost and environmentally sustainable power, water, and food to a new residential and commercial development in the Marianas, a chain of islands some 3,000 miles to the west. But none of his colleagues expect Craven to schmooze anyway, so he ditches the group and heads to the restaurant's parking lot.

Craven, who will soon turn 80, moves at a brisk shuffle, his black sneakers taking two steps for every one of mine. Back and forth we pace, like inmates in a jail yard. Craven's mind is already way beyond the Marianas project. "I've decided to run a marathon to demonstrate my newest innovation," he says. "You see, I apply cold temperatures to different parts of my body in three bastings. The third is the most complicated - I ice the terminuses of my lymphatic system. My body heals itself. Look at these hands," he says, opening and closing his fists. "I have no joint pain of any kind!"

Craven may sound like a brilliant psychotic, but he's got plenty of credentials: a PhD in ocean engineering, a law degree, and a stint as chief scientist for the US Navy's Special Projects Office. There he was instrumental in developing the Polaris missile program, the submarine-based backbone of America's nuclear deterrence and one of the most complex defense systems ever. In fact, most deep-ocean activities - saturation diving, exploring with submersibles, searching for tiny objects on the ocean floor - owe their origins to top secret, cold war-era Navy projects in which Craven had a hand.

A polymath who is as comfortable talking about the Law of the Sea as he is the plumbing nightmares inherent when 200 men a day urinate in a submarine, Craven is hard to keep up with. His mind darts from why the Navy should make subs out of glass to the sad end of his long telephone friendship with the late Marlon Brando to the remarkable prodigiousness of his small experimental Hawaiian vineyard. "One week the plants have no leaves," he says, "the next they just go zing, zing, zing and are full of fruit!"

The grapes are a key part of his plan, through his Common Heritage Corporation, to build communities around the world sustained by deep-ocean water, starting on the Mariana island of Saipan. And he's not doing it just out of the goodness of his heart. "I fully intend for CHC to be a multibillion-dollar corporation," Craven says.

His grand plan could come across as a bar-stool fantasy, but it's already won $75 million from Alpha Pacific, a Memphis, Tennessee, venture capital firm, and $1.5 million in federal funds. Craven hopes that within a year, bulldozers will begin clearing land on Saipan and engineers will start sinking a pipe to pump icy water from the ocean depths to produce electricity and freshwater. And back in Kona, Craven expects to use cold-water agriculture to transform five acres of otherwise barren lava fields into the world's most productive vineyard. "The economics are absurd," he boasts. "Once we prove the technology on Saipan, imagine what it could do for places like Haiti!"

Craven's system exploits the dramatic temperature difference between ocean water below 3,000 feet - perpetually just above freezing - and the much warmer water and air above it. That temperature gap can be harnessed to create a nearly unlimited supply of energy. Although the scientific concepts behind cold-water energy have been around for decades, Craven made them real when he founded the state-funded Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii in 1974 on Keahole Point, near Kona. Under Craven, the lab developed the process of using cold deep-ocean water and hot surface water to produce electricity. By the 1980s the Natural Energy Lab's demonstration plant was generating net power, the world's first through so-called ocean thermal energy conversion.

"The potential of OTEC is great," says Joseph Huang, a senior scientist for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and an expert on the process. "The oceans are the biggest solar collector on Earth, and there's enough energy in them to supply a thousand times the world's needs. If you want to depend on nature, the oceans are the only energy source big enough to tap."

Stephen Oney, vice president of Ocean Engineering and Energy Systems in Honolulu, which will design CHC's Saipan pipes, agrees: "The technology is there, and the science is there. It just needs to be improved." Oney, who recently inked a deal with the Pentagon to build an OTEC power plant for a US naval base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, envisions a day when floating OTEC platforms produce enough hydrogen to meet all of the world's energy needs.

Craven likes the way they think, but he believes there are simpler, cheaper, and more immediate applications of cold-water technology. He favors building systems in ideal locations, such as islands adjacent to deep water with no continental shelf. Sink a big pipe, crank a pump, and - voilà! - you've entered a world powered by ocean water. Once primed, the pipe acts like a giant siphon, requiring relatively little energy to keep an inexhaustible supply of cold at hand. Already, 39-degree-Fahrenheit water courses through the Natural Energy Lab's newest pipe - a 55-inch-diameter, 9,000-foot-long polyethylene behemoth - at the rate of 27,000 gallons a minute, 24 hours a day.

Running the frigid pipes through heat exchangers produces unlimited air-conditioning that costs almost nothing. Draining their sweat yields an endless supply of freshwater for drinking and irrigation. The cold water also creates a temperature difference between root and fruit that Craven believes speeds growth. And by turning the flow on and off, Craven has found he can further accelerate the plants' growth cycle by forcing them in and out of dormancy - he can get three crops of grapes a year and pineapples in eight months instead of the usual 18. Feeding some of the water through a contraption Craven calls a hurricane tower generates clean electricity. "What the world doesn't understand," says Craven, still zigzagging through the parking lot, "is that what we don't have enough of is cold, not heat."

A day later, the sun feels like a giant piece of red-hot charcoal overhead as Craven unlocks the gates to his small demonstration garden at the Natural Energy Lab. In tow are a handful of CHC's technical partners and managers escorting the lieutenant governor around the garden. The black lava ground is hard and hot, but behind the chain-link fence, Craven has created a little oasis: a 10- by 20-foot rectangle of lush lawn, a closely cropped putting green, a 10-foot-square "soccer field," flower gardens, an orchid patch, and rows of grapes. A wooden structure that Craven calls the skytower holds what resembles a radiator of sweating PVC pipes dripping steadily into a tub, providing freshwater for drinking, washing, and irrigation.

As proud as he is, Craven knows his marketing and administrative abilities leave much to be desired. In 2000, he placed his company stock in a blind trust, became "chief scientist," and let others take CHC forward as a for-profit business. Ke Kai Kealoha, CHC's project manager, is charged with the selling of his vision. Craven prefers to get things started, then have others manage the operation so he can wander on to something new. "I get put to death every seven years as great kings do, until I start a new kingship," he says, leading me away from the group to the grapes.

CHC's success depends on two projects that expand on Craven's ideas: a vineyard in Kona to grow table grapes for local restaurants, and a more complex, much larger-scale version of his oasis, on Saipan. A stable US territory, the island is a booming destination for Japanese tourists. Tokyo is just two and a half hours away by air. And the Marianas offer generous tax deals to Japanese who retire there. But Saipan has a limited supply of freshwater and must import, at great expense, all of its food and oil. On the northern end of the island, CHC plans to sink a 24-inch-diameter pipe and build a hundred-acre development featuring 100 townhouses, a golf course, soccer fields, and even an athletic complex where Japanese sports teams can train. Like a cross between an industrial park landlord and a public utility, CHC will supply electrical power (generated by a mix of ocean water, sun, and biomass), freshwater, and air-conditioning, as well as its cold-water agriculture tech to tenants and farmers of specialty crops. It will also sell freshwater to hotels that now rely on expensive reverse osmosis desalination.

Caught under the glare of Craven's brainpower, it all seems doable. "John Craven is a visionary," says Sylvia Earle, former director of NOAA and a CHC board member. "He's effectively demonstrated his pilot approach on a small scale, and who knows where it will lead? Who could have guessed how Henry Ford's auto design would change the world? Craven is not always right, but he's always worth listening to."

Craven has no doubts. On the grapes and freshwater alone, he says, "we'll make a fortune. We'll make freshwater for nothing, 13,000 to 15,000 pounds of grapes per acre per year, three times what the best vineyard in California can do." If the numbers pan out, Craven says, CHC will pay off its investors in seven years.

As the official tour winds on, Craven drags a plastic chair to the middle of the lawn, plunks himself down, and resumes talking about his anti-aging experiments. Investigating the osmotic and thermodynamic properties of plants led him to wonder about the human body, and now he's hooked. "I've patented my cold-water therapy, and I want to open a cold-water health spa right there," he says, pointing to the rocky coast. "The doctors don't agree with me, but that's because innovation is the enemy of the status quo - it puts people out of business."

Craven flexes his limber ankles and smiles. It won't be long before we know whether he's unleashed a new wave of octogenarian marathon runners or stepped off the deep end at last.

Creating a Deep-Sea Oasis on Dry Land

[image]
Clockwise from top left: Power generation, desalination, irrigation, refrigeration

The key to Craven's cool world is converting the ocean's thermal energy. The first step: Sink a pipe at least 3,000 feet deep and start pumping up seawater. The end result: an environmentally sustainable, virtually inexhaustible supply of electricity, freshwater for drinking and irrigation, even air-conditioning. Here's how it works:

Refrigeration:
Cold seawater circulates through a closed loop of pipes that replace the coolant and compressor found in conventional air-conditioning units.

Irrigation:
Pipes carrying cold water run beneath fields of crops, sweating freshwater to irrigate plants and chilling their roots, promoting faster crop cycles.

Desalination:
Cold seawater passes through Craven's "skytowers," which contain closely packed radiator-like networks of pipes. The frigid pipes sweat in the tropical heat, producing­ freshwater condensate.

Power Generation:
Pipes draw warm water from the ocean surface and cold water from the seabed. The warm water enters a vacuum chamber and is evaporated into steam that drives an electricity-producing turbine. The cold water condenses the steam back into water for drinking and irrigation.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/craven_pr.html
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."

Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860

"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."

John F. Kennedy
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Re: Alternative Fuels
« Reply #46 on May 28, 2005, 9:48pm »
Map Reveals Wind Power Potential
By Amit Asaravala

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/planet/0,2782,67600,00.html

02:00 AM May. 23, 2005 PT

Wind power could generate enough electricity to support the world's energy needs several times over, according to a new map of global wind speeds that scientists say is the first of its kind.

The map, compiled by researchers at Stanford University, shows wind speeds at more than 8,000 sites around the world. The researchers found that at least 13 percent of those sites experience winds fast enough to power a modern wind turbine. If turbines were set up in all these regions, they would generate 72 terawatts of electricity, according to the researchers.

[image]
A new map of global wind speeds shows that wind power has the potential to produce five times more energy than the world consumes.
Photo: Courtesy of Archer and Jacobson / Journal of Geophysical Research

That's more than five times the world's energy needs, which was roughly 14 terawatts in 2002, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The researchers readily admit that existing buildings, land rights and other obstacles would make it impossible to set up turbines in every single one of the identified regions. But they point out that even 20 percent of those sites could satisfy world energy consumption as it stands today.

More importantly, the study shows that wind can be a feasible alternative to fossil fuels, said study co-author Cristina Archer.

"There is really a lot of wind out there that can be utilized for electricity generation," said Archer. "The 72-terawatt finding quantifies how much wind power is available.... It's like when people say how much oil is available on a global scale. It doesn't mean all of it will be extracted."

If anything, the 72-terawatt figure is likely to be on the low side. Most of the 8,199 wind-monitoring stations that contributed data to the map are concentrated in highly developed nations. So the researchers had to make broad and often conservative estimates for countries in Africa and Asia, and for other regions.

"They are probably significantly underestimating the total potential," said Christopher Flavin, CEO of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research firm.

For instance, Flavin pointed to China, which several environmental organizations have identified as having great potential for wind power. In contrast, the Stanford map shows only a few locations there having the wind speeds necessary to power a wind turbine.

Of the regions that are well-marked by the map, North America and parts of Northern Europe both have a high number of ideal spots for setting up wind turbines. To date, Northern Europe -- and Denmark in particular -- has made the best use of that potential. Approximately 20 percent of Denmark's energy consumption is fulfilled by wind power, according to the Danish Wind Industry Association.

The United States, on the other hand, generates less than 1 percent of its electricity with wind power.

Archer said it was "ironic and sad" that the United States wasn't doing more, given the resources available.

"But it's not too late," she said. "We can still do it and I really hope we do."

The authors' study is scheduled to appear in the Journal of Geophysical Research -- Atmospheres later this month.
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."

Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860

"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."

John F. Kennedy
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Re: Alternative Fuels
« Reply #47 on May 31, 2005, 9:11am »
Freezing gas prices
May 25, 2005, 11:11 AM

Americans guzzle 65 billion gallons of fuel a year and lately we have been paying a pretty penny at the pump. NewsChannel 4 has done reports in the past on how to get the most out of your gas. Now we introduce you to a new way to save on those gasoline dollars.

There is a man who fills up his tank once every two months. One tank of gas, literally, lasts him two months. He is freezing the price of gas by freezing something else.

People complain about the price of gas and we are all spending dearly to stay on the road these days. The money we spend on gas seems to burn up faster than the fuel.

While there may be little rhyme or reason to why the prices are on a perpetual roller-coaster, there is one man who has found a way to freeze them in their tracks, literally.

David Hutchison is a Cryogenics expert. He built this Cryo-Process himself. He runs a business out of his garage where he cryogenically tempers all kinds of metals. He submerges them in a frozen tank of nitrogen vapor that is 300 degrees below zero.

David says, “During that time, at minus 300 degrees, the molecules slow down. Then they reorganize themselves. That's when the actual chemical change happens.”

Hutchison cryogenically tempers machine parts, tools, golf clubs and even razors. He says it makes them last three to five times longer.

A few years ago he began an experiment on his hybrid Honda, freezing the engine components. The results were a fuel-efficiency dream.

David Hutchison says, “You should expect a “Cryo'd” engine to last anywhere from 600,000 to 1 million miles without wearing out.”

A hybrid Honda typically gets really great gas mileage anyway, around 50 miles to the gallon, but David Hutchison's cryogenically tempered engine has been known to get close to 120 miles a gallon.

“It's just a very efficient vehicle.” Hutchison says,

Racers have picked up on David's trick of cryogenically freezing car parts. It is now widely accepted among NASCAR and Indy-car racers.

Hutchison has no plans of taking his Honda to the track. His prize is in his pocketbook.

David says, “I thought about selling it, but gas prices keep going up. So, I thought, I'm not going to sell it.”

Hutchison tells us cryogenically tempering car parts has more benefits than just fuel efficiency. He freezes all of the brake rotors at a car dealership near his home in Missouri. It makes them last three to five times longer.

http://www.kfor.com/Global/story.asp?s=3390503
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."

Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860

"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."

John F. Kennedy
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Re: Alternative Fuels
« Reply #48 on Jun 4, 2005, 12:31am »
Biomass Adds To Ethanol Debate
By John Gartner
Wired News
6-1-5


Federal subsidies have made growing corn for ethanol a profitable venture for Corn Belt farmers while irking free-market advocates. Now, new technology for processing biomass from widely available plant and tree residue could increase Beltway bickering over ethanol funding.

Nearly all of the ethanol in the United States is currently produced by fermenting the sugars in corn grain, according to Robin Graham, the group leader of ecosystem and plant sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Most of that corn is produced in the Corn Belt of the upper Midwest, an area that benefits from the 52 cents per gallon federal tax credit for producing ethanol. Free-market enthusiasts such as the Cato Institute's Alan Reynolds and the Heritage Foundation have decried subsidizing ethanol production that otherwise would not be economically viable.

"There is no ethanol industry in the USA, but simply a subsidies industry," said Rogério de Cerqueira Leite, a professor at Brazil's University of Campinas, in an e-mail. "Corn productivity is low and the energy balance is poor."

Corn is the favored feedstock for ethanol today because "it is dense and full of energy, and it is grown all over the country," according to Ralph Groschen, senior marketing specialist for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. He said that corn is easy to transport while biomass is "fluffy" and takes a larger area for storage.

Groschen said that commercial companies have been cautious in their approach toward biomass-to-ethanol technology. "Everyone is waiting to be the second one in line to build a plant for processing cellulose," he said.

The economics of ethanol could soon change, as Oak Ridge National Lab's Graham said that producing ethanol from the cellulose of plants is less costly than using corn grain. The cost of raw materials for biomass-based ethanol could be much lower, since tree and plant residue from clearing lots can be obtained for free, and switchgrass (a perennial crop that grows everywhere east of the Rocky Mountains) and corn stovers (dried leaves and stalks) are inexpensive to acquire, according to Graham.

Using corn grain to produce ethanol is relatively energy-inefficient when compared to utilizing biomass, Graham said. Producing ethanol from corn grain generates about 1.4 times as much energy as the process consumes, when pesticides and fossil fuels are factored in, she said. "The energy yield from cellulosic materials is like 10-to-1."

Iogen of Ottawa, Canada, and Danish company Novozymes are close to commercializing biomass technologies.

The companies use enzymes to break down the cellulose found in the leaves, stalks and walls of plants into simple sugars that are then converted into ethanol. Iogen will break ground later this year on a demonstration power plant for converting wheat straw and switchgrass into ethanol, according to spokeswoman Tania Glithero. She said Iogen's current test facility is processing ethanol that powers a fleet of about 90 vehicles.

In April, Novozymes completed a four-year project in conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that reduced the cost of using enzymes to convert corn stovers thirtyfold. According to the company, the technology will be tested next year at a processing facility in York, Nebraska.

Unlike corn, biomass can be harvested in quantity throughout the United States, according to Burt English, a professor in the agricultural economics department at the University of Tennessee. English said agricultural waste that comes from yard clippings and clearing trees could be collected from any urban area. Producing ethanol from switchgrass would take some land out of food production and would have "the impact of increasing farm prices and reducing government payments," he said.

English said the federal government should fund biomass ethanol that could be produced throughout the United States. "The facts point to the conclusion that biomass is a better use of resources," English said.

In April, a group of 33 governors -- including those from Corn Belt states -- released a report (.pdf) recommending that the federal government spend $800 million over the next 10 years on biomass research.

Biomass could be converted into ethanol in commercial quantities at a cost equivalent to $25 per barrel of crude oil, or roughly half the current price of imported oil, according to E. Kyle Datta, co-author of Winning the Oil Endgame and managing director of research and consulting at the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy policy group. Datta said farmers who shift from corn to switchgrass could increase their per-acre profit from about $350 to between $400 and $600.

Commercializing biomass-to-ethanol technology would also have international political ramifications, according to Datta. Producing 2.4 million barrels of ethanol per day would "be a $40 billion per year transfer of wealth from the Middle East to our farmers," he said. Federal funding of biomass-based ethanol should be less controversial because "instead of six states benefiting, everyone benefits."

© Copyright 2005, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

http://wired.com/news/planet/0,2782,67691,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_7
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."

Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860

"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."

John F. Kennedy
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Re: Alternative Fuels
« Reply #49 on Aug 17, 2005, 9:49am »
Saving The World With Sunbeams
Wired News
8-8-5


CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (AP) -- A U.S. chemist is trying to determine how the world will produce enough energy to supply 9 billion people by mid-century -- and whether that can be done without pumping off-the-charts amounts of carbon dioxide into the air.

Daniel Nocera, 48, is working to achieve an old, elusive dream: using the bountiful energy in sunlight to split water into its basic components, hydrogen and oxygen. The elements could then be used to supply clean-running fuel cells or new kinds of machinery. Or the energy created from the reaction itself, as atomic bonds are severed and re-formed, might be harnessed and stored.

There is a beautiful model for this: photosynthesis. Sunlight kickstarts a reaction in which leaves break down water and carbon dioxide and turn them into oxygen and sugar, which plants use for fuel.

But plants developed this process over billions of years, and even so, it's technically not that efficient. Nocera and other scientists are trying to replicate that -- and perhaps improve on it -- in decades.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it's generally locked up in compounds with other elements. Currently, it is chiefly harvested from fossil fuels, whose use is the main cause of carbon dioxide emissions blamed for global warming.

And so while hydrogen fuel cells -- in which hydrogen and oxygen combine to produce electricity and water -- have a green reputation, their long-term promise could be limited unless the hydrogen they consume comes from clean sources.

That's where Nocera's method comes in. If it works, it would be free of carbon and the epitome of renewable, since it would be powered by the sun. Enough energy from sunlight hits the earth every hour to supply the world for months. The challenge is to harnessing and store it efficiently, which existing solar technologies do not do.

"This is nirvana in energy. This will make the problem go away," Nocera said one morning in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the Grateful Dead devotee has a "Mean People Suck" sticker on his window. "If it doesn't, we will cease to exist as humanity."

Lots of people have explored this challenge, but Nocera had a big breakthrough when he used light to coax multiple hydrogen atoms out of liquid. The key was figuring out the right chemical catalyst.

Nocera's 2001 paper on the process in the journal Science, written with graduate student Alan Heyduk, turned heads. Venture capitalists rang his phone off the hook offering to fund him in an alternative-energy company.

The achievement, and its revolutionary prospects, won Nocera this year's Italgas Prize, a $100,000 award given annually by an Italian utility to a top energy researcher.

"Dan is even-money (odds) to solve this problem," says Harry Gray, a renowned California Institute of Technology chemist who was Nocera's graduate adviser.

But there's a catch. In fact, there's a few, and they illustrate how hard it can be to move alternative energy beyond the proof-of-concept phase.

Nocera has performed the reaction with acidic solutions, but not water yet. The catalyst he used was a compound that included the expensive metal rhodium. To be a practical energy solution, it will have to be made from inexpensive elements like iron, nickel or cobalt.

Nocera's reaction got the photons in light to free up hydrogen atoms, but that's only half the equation. The harder part will be to also capture the oxygen that emerges when water molecules are split. That way, both elements can be fed into a fuel cell, making the process as efficient as possible.

Scientists not affiliated with his work say those steps are achievable, and Nocera agrees. But first, major advances in basic chemistry will be necessary for the reactions to be well understood. As a result, Nocera believes it might be 20 years before engineers design systems based on his work. And he frets that too few scientists are exploring the problem, with many top minds instead focused on biomedical research.

"This is a massive construction project," he says. "You can go back to building New York City in the '20s and '30s. You can't do it with just a few construction workers. So I need more construction workers, more hard hats, with me as a hard hat."

There's another big hurdle. While Nocera plugs away at trying to save the world, some people don't believe it needs saving.

Most scientists concur that continuing to burn fossil fuels will send the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- it's now 35 percent higher than in preindustrial times -- to dangerous levels, causing global temperatures to rise with potentially devastating effects.

"We are literally poisoning ourselves," Nocera says. "People don't get it because they can't see it."

But this is a famously politicized topic in the United States, where some powerful political leaders question the science behind global warming. And that, many scientists say, diverts attention and funds from trying to solve the problem.

And even among people who believe global warming's risks are too great to ignore, there is no consensus on what kind of green energy should come to the rescue.

Nocera cites a calculation by Caltech chemist Nathan Lewis that power demands in 2050 will be so great that just to keep carbon dioxide emissions at twice preindustrial levels, a nuclear plant would have to be built every two days. There's not enough room on the planet's surface for other widely touted solutions such as wind and biomass to have much impact.

Only the sun is the answer, Lewis argues.

Critics of that vision say many energy technologies being explored -- including improved ways of storing electricity and different kinds of fuel cells -- will come online in the next few decades and throw off today's extrapolations about the future.

Arno Penzias, who won the Nobel Prize for confirming the Big Bang and now invests in alternative energy startups for New Enterprise Associates, contends there are dozens of ideas more promising than ones involving hydrogen. When told about Nocera's project, Penzias gets heated, saying it is unlikely to be practical.

"It is so far from being revolutionary that it's not even worth mentioning," Penzias says. "It will be a big yawn."

Nocera seems to thrive on such opposition, because he expects to prove naysayers wrong.

It's part of his blunt enthusiasm, which manifests itself when he discusses the joys of teaching chemistry to freshmen ("They love me") or when he meets with his grad students to discuss the status of their research.

Those sessions often devolve into arguments over the meaning of some data or the direction that projects ought to take. Provoked by Nocera's intensity -- he'll exclaim, "I'm dying here!" in a tone resembling neurotic comic Larry David -- tempers often rise.

One student recently threw an eraser at Nocera, leaving a pink welt on his back that Nocera later showed off with a laugh.

"There were times I absolutely hated working for him, because he knew how to press all of my buttons and drive me absolutely insane," says Heyduk, now assistant professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. "He knew I was the kind of person that needed to be challenged all the time."

Nocera believes this constant prodding at what's possible is the essence of science. As evidence, he reels off several ancillary developments from his research, including microscopic sensors that detect biological hazards, which attracted funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Pointing to a whiteboard sketch of his vision for using sunlight to split water, Nocera acknowledges that it ultimately might not be an energy panacea.

"Is it right? Maybe not. But it will be something. And it might be something I can't see right now," he says. "That's OK. But you don't stop doing something because you can't see it. It's antiscientific. It's anti-intellectual."

© Copyright 2005, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Lycos® is a registered trademark of Carnegie Mellon University.

http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282
,68460-2,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."

Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860

"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."

John F. Kennedy
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Re: Alternative Fuels
« Reply #50 on Aug 19, 2005, 10:42am »

Boffins invent urine-powered battery
17-08-2005
From: The Daily Telegraph


A SINGAPORE scientific institute yesterday said it has invented a urine-powered micro battery that can be used in test kits for diabetes and other diseases.
The state-funded Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology said a drop of urine placed on the paper battery will generate enough electricity to power a "biochip device" that can analyse the urine sample for disease "biomarkers".

"We are striving to develop cheap, disposable credit card-sized biochips for disease," the institute's research scientist Dr Lee Ki Bang said.

"Our battery can be easily integrated into such devices, supplying electricity upon contact with biofluids such as urine," Dr Lee said.

Urine is widely used to test for signs of various diseases and as an indicator of a persons general state of health, the institute said. The glucose in urine is a useful diagnostic tool for diabetics.

http://www.news.com.au/story/print/0,10119,16286135,00.html
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Re: Alternative Fuels
« Reply #51 on Aug 26, 2005, 7:23am »
25 August 2005
Polymer Fuel Cell Breakthrough

The widespread use of fuel cells has, up until now, been hampered by the problem of operating temperature. While ceramic fuel cells demonstrate good efficiency, they operate at around 800 degrees Celsius, way too hot for appliances like cell phones and computers. Polymer fuel cells, on the other hand, operate at much lower temperatures but are much fussier about the quality of their fuel and consequently less efficient. But now, a new chemical has been identified that allows polymer fuel cells to run at moderate temperatures where the quality of the fuel becomes much less critical. The researchers believe this discovery could open the door to the widespread use of fuel cells as power sources for a whole raft of devices.

[image]

A fuel cell produces electricity by converting hydrogen and oxygen into water and harnessing the energy released in the reaction. To do this, fuel cells need a proton exchange membrane to conduct protons (positively charged ions) but block electrons. The exchange membrane is critical to the efficiency of the fuel cell.

The polymer electrolyte membranes (PEM) used up until now in fuel cells have several drawbacks. Their operating temperature is so low that even trace amounts of carbon monoxide in the hydrogen fuel will wreck the fuel cell's platinum catalyst. To avoid this contamination, the hydrogen fuel must go through a very expensive purification process that makes fuel cells a pricey alternative compared to traditional power sources. Additionally, while existing PEM fuel cells can operate at much lower temperatures, they are much less efficient than ceramic fuel cells. They must be kept relatively cool so that the membranes can retain the moisture they need to conduct protons. Consequently, polymer fuel cells were previously forced to operate at temperatures below 100 degrees Celsius.

Now however, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have pinpointed a chemical that could allow PEM fuel cells to operate at a much higher temperature without moisture, potentially meaning that polymer fuel cells could be made much more cheaply than before and finally run at temperatures high enough to make them practical for everyday use. The team, lead by Dr. Meilin Liu, has discovered that a chemical called triazole is significantly more effective than other chemicals researchers have explored to increase conductivity and reduce moisture dependence in polymer membranes. And with triazole, the fuel cell can tolerate much higher levels of carbon monoxide in the hydrogen fuel.

According to the research, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, triazole PEMs allow the fuel cell operating temperature to be increased to above 120 degrees Celsius, whilst also eliminating the need for a water management system and dramatically simplifying the cooling system. "We're using the triazole to replace water," Liu said. "By doing so, we can bring up the temperature significantly."

"Triazole will greatly reduce many of the problems that have prevented polymer fuel cells from making their way into things like cars, cell phones and laptops. It's going to have a dramatic effect," concluded Liu.

Source: Georgia Tech

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20050724233250data_trunc_sys.shtml
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Re: Alternative Fuels
« Reply #52 on Nov 5, 2005, 9:31am »
Source: Texas A&M University - Agricultural Communications
Date: 2005-11-04
URL: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/11/051104084222.htm
Canola Oil May Soon Burn In Engines Rather Than Frying Pans

A growing market for biodiesel fuels is heating up interest in canola among Texas producers.

Dr. Brent Bean, Texas Cooperative Extension agronomist here, said he quit participating in the National Winter Canola Variety Trials some time back when interest waned. But he's participating once again due to calls from several producers.

David Bordovsky, Texas Agriculture Experiment Station research scientist in Chillicothe, said he hasn't had a lot of producer interest, but he expects his work in the national variety trials will play a role as canola becomes a larger part of the growing biodiesel industry.

Canola's industrial use began as a lubricant for machinery during World War II. In the 1970s, it was developed more for human consumption and that's when Kansas State University began playing an active role. Kansas State's canola breeding program is the lead agency in the National Winter Canola Variety Trials, said Cindy LaBarge, assistant scientist.

K-State has primarily focused on human consumption in the past, she said, but the biodiesel end started picking up in the past couple years, LeBarge said.

"Especially with the higher fuel prices, I think people are starting to look for alternative fuel sources and biodiesel is really catching on," she said.

Producers are shifting their attitudes also, realizing canola is a crop they might make more profit from than wheat. And they don't have to change equipment, LaBarge said.

Dr. Bill Heer, Kansas State University agronomist in Hutchinson, Kan., said some of the interest is because canola is slightly better than soybeans because of higher oil yields. Soybean oil also is more expensive, because more of it is used in edible food. As more players enter the marketplace for canola, with competition between the food and biodiesel markets, producers can expect even better prices with the canola, Heer said.

This year, several producers have planted circles of canola in the Dumas and Dalhart areas in the northwest corner of the Panhandle. With this in mind, Bean planted his 40-variety trial near Dalhart. But he said producer interest was expressed as far south as Floydada.

The majority of canola is planted in Canada and the northern U.S., so the goal of the trials will be to find varieties suited to this region's climate, Bean said.

"We used to grow a few acres of canola around here in the late 80s, early 90s," he said. "But the price just wasn't there to make it competitive if you had to haul it."

At that time, the Frito Lay plant in Hereford and an oil mill near Quanah were taking the canola from producers in the Hereford and Wellington areas, Bean said.

Where the producers will take their seed to be processed now is uncertain, he said, but some producers have expressed interest in starting a crushing plant.

One good thing now is there is Roundup Ready canola, Bean said. Previously, herbicide treatments were limited.

Canola is grown on a similar time line as wheat and is harvested with a combine, he said. Yields of around 3,500 pounds to the acre are hoped for under irrigation, without any winter grazing, Bean said.

Canola is a broadleaf crop, rather than a grass like wheat, sorghum and corn, he said. It is always beneficial to the soil to rotate grass and broadleaf crops.

Bordovsky said growing canola presents some problems. Getting a stand can be difficult due to the small seeds. The seeds also can be lost through any holes in the combine or truck after harvest. And, canola has a tendency to shatter at harvest, he said.

Canola makes a rosette in the fall. The flower stalk that shoots up in the spring starts blooming around mid-March and early April. As long as the heat doesn't stop it, and it has plenty of moisture, it will keep blooming and get taller, Bordovsky said. "The taller it is, the more pods you have and the higher the yield," he said.

Canola is a rapeseed, which is part of the mustard family. Rapeseed oil can't be used for human consumption due to high amounts of erucic acid, Bordovsky said.

However, the Food and Drug Administration approved it for food production in the U.S. when researchers bred varieties low in erucic acid. To distinguish these varieties from rapeseed, they coined the name canola, he said.

Bordovsky worked with canola at the Munday research facilities, as well as three years at Chillicothe. His work serves as a screening trial primarily, but he said the crop will work well for someone who has center pivot, which allows a light watering. With is no market in the immediate area, it is not grown on any significant basis, he said. Contracts with a crusher are needed, as well as an oil mill if it were to be considered for human consumption.

Another concern for growing canola is weather.

"With the way our harvest weather can get, it can go from too green on Friday to too late by Monday," Bordovsky said. "The wind and temperatures dry it down in a hurry. When that happens, it's subject to the pods shattering." Sometimes just a hard beating rain can shatter 40 percent of it, he said.

Bean said shatter-resistance will be one factor he screens varieties on in his trials, as well as winter hardiness. Regardless of the possible production problems, both Bordovsky and Bean agreed if the market is pumped up by the growing biodiesel industry, producers around the region could soon be seriously looking at canola as an alternative crop once again.
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Re: Alternative Fuels
« Reply #53 on Nov 14, 2005, 6:39am »
Fuel's paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head

· Scientist says device disproves quantum theory
· Opponents claim idea is result of wrong maths

Alok Jha, science correspondent
Friday November 4, 2005
The Guardian

It seems too good to be true: a new source of near-limitless power that costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste. If that does not sound radical enough, how about this: the principle behind the source turns modern physics on its head.

Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel. Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments and Dr Mills says that his company, Blacklight Power, has tens of millions of dollars in investment lined up to bring the idea to market. And he claims to be just months away from unveiling his creation.

The problem is that according to the rules of quantum mechanics, the physics that governs the behaviour of atoms, the idea is theoretically impossible. "Physicists are quite conservative. It's not easy to convince them to change a theory that is accepted for 50 to 60 years. I don't think [Mills's] theory should be supported," said Jan Naudts, a theoretical physicist at the University of Antwerp.

What has much of the physics world up in arms is Dr Mills's claim that he has produced a new form of hydrogen, the simplest of all the atoms, with just a single proton circled by one electron. In his "hydrino", the electron sits a little closer to the proton than normal, and the formation of the new atoms from traditional hydrogen releases huge amounts of energy.

This is scientific heresy. According to quantum mechanics, electrons can only exist in an atom in strictly defined orbits, and the shortest distance allowed between the proton and electron in hydrogen is fixed. The two particles are simply not allowed to get any closer.

According to Dr Mills, there can be only one explanation: quantum mechanics must be wrong. "We've done a lot of testing. We've got 50 independent validation reports, we've got 65 peer-reviewed journal articles," he said. "We ran into this theoretical resistance and there are some vested interests here. People are very strong and fervent protectors of this [quantum] theory that they use."

Rick Maas, a chemist at the University of North Carolina at Asheville (UNC) who specialises in sustainable energy sources, was allowed unfettered access to Blacklight's laboratories this year. "We went in with a healthy amount of scepticism. While it would certainly be nice if this were true, in my position as head of a research institution, I really wouldn't want to make a mistake. The last thing I want is to be remembered as the person who derailed a lot of sustainable energy investment into something that wasn't real."

But Prof Maas and Randy Booker, a UNC physicist, left under no doubt about Dr Mill's claims. "All of us who are not quantum physicists are looking at Dr Mills's data and we find it very compelling," said Prof Maas. "Dr Booker and I have both put our professional reputations on the line as far as that goes."

Dr Mills's idea goes against almost a century of thinking. When scientists developed the theory of quantum mechanics they described a world where measuring the exact position or energy of a particle was impossible and where the laws of classical physics had no effect. The theory has been hailed as one of the 20th century's greatest achievements.

But it is an achievement Dr Mills thinks is flawed. He turned back to earlier classical physics to develop a theory which, unlike quantum mechanics, allows an electron to move much closer to the proton at the heart of a hydrogen atom and, in doing so, release the substantial amounts of energy he seeks to exploit. Dr Mills's theory, known as classical quantum mechanics and published in the journal Physics Essays in 2003, has been criticised most publicly by Andreas Rathke of the European Space Agency. In a damning critique published recently in the New Journal of Physics, he argued that Dr Mills's theory was the result of mathematical mistakes.

Dr Mills argues that there are plenty of flaws in Dr Rathke's critique. "His paper's riddled with mistakes. We've had other physicists contact him and say this is embarrassing to the journal and [Dr Rathke] won't respond," said Dr Mills.

While the theoretical tangle is unlikely to resolve itself soon, those wanting to exploit the technology are pushing ahead. "We would like to understand it from an academic standpoint and then we would like to be able to use the implications to actually produce energy products," said Prof Maas. "The companies that are lining up behind this are household names."

Dr Mills will not go into details of who is investing in his research but rumours suggest a range of US power companies. It is well known also that Nasa's institute of advanced concepts has funded research into finding a way of using Blacklight's technology to power rockets.

According to Prof Maas, the first product built with Blacklight's technology, which will be available in as little as four years, will be a household heater. As the technology is scaled up, he says, bigger furnaces will be able to boil water and turn turbines to produce electricity.

In a recent economic forecast, Prof Maas calculated that hydrino energy would cost around 1.2 cents (0.7p) per kilowatt hour. This compares to an average of 5 cents per kWh for coal and 6 cents for nuclear energy.

"If it's wrong, it will be proven wrong," said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace USA. "But if it's right, it is so important that all else falls away. It has the potential to solve our dependence on oil. Our stance is of cautious optimism."

Alternative energy

Cold fusion

More than 16 years after chemists' claims to have created a star in a jar imploded in acrimony, the US government has said it might fund more research. Mainstream physicists still balk at reports that a beaker of cold water and metal electrodes can produce excess heat, but a hardy band of scientists across the world refuse to let the dream die.

Methane hydrates

The US and Japan are leading attempts to tap this source of fossil fuel buried beneath the seabed and Arctic permafrost. A mixture of ice and natural gas, hydrates are believed to contain more carbon than existing reserves of oil, coal and gas put together.

Solar chimneys

Sunlight heats trapped air, which rises through a giant chimney and drives turbines. Leonardo da Vinci designed such a power tower and the Australian company Enviromission plans to build one. Despite being scaled down recently, the concrete chimney will still stand some 700 metres over the outback.

Nuclear fusion

Turns nuclear power on its head by combining atoms rather than splitting them to release energy - copying the reaction at the heart of the sun. After years of arguments the world has agreed to build a test reactor to see whether it works on a commercial scale. Called Iter, it could be switched on within a decade.

Wave generators

No longer a dead duck, the hopes of engineers are riding on bobbing floats again. The British company Trident Energy recently unveiled a design that uses a linear generator to convert the motion of the sea into electricity. A wave farm just a few hundred metres across could power 62,000 homes.
David Adam

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0%2C3605%2C1627424%2C00.html
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Re: Alternative Fuels
« Reply #54 on Nov 19, 2005, 5:58am »
Bacteria Eat Human Sewage, Produce Rocket Fuel
Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
November 9, 2005

The high cost of treating human wastewater may one day tank thanks to a bacterium that eats ammonia and produces rocket fuel.

Standard water treatment plants use oxygen-hungry bacteria to break down human waste. To feed the microbes, plants must aerate sewage sludge with costly, power-hogging equipment.

But Brocadia anammoxidans, or anammox bacteria, survive without oxygen, producing energy from nitrite and ammonia, which is found naturally in human waste.

"Conventional [bacteria] treatments do a good job, so the big benefit is doing this much more efficiently and cheaply," said Marc Strous, a microbiologist at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

Strous says savings could be enormous, up to 90 percent versus standard sewage treatment plants. A prototype facility in Rotterdam is already earning praise.

Rocket Fuel

Scientists first discovered anammox bacteria in yeast and later in the open ocean in the late 1990s.

The unusual microbes consume ammonia, producing hydrazine—better known as rocket fuel—in the process. The ability still puzzles scientists.

"They are the only organism on Earth that produces hydrazine, so until their discovery, [hydrazine] was thought to be a man-made substance," Strous said.

The bacteria safely store the toxic fuel in an organelle, or specialized cell structure, similar to mitochondria, a type of biological power plant found in human cells.

The anammox organelle binds hydrazine with a fatty-acid membrane that could itself have intriguing scientific applications, including the design of optoelectronic equipment.

But don't expect the bacteria to supply NASA with rocket fuel to launch a spacecraft.

"It costs [the bacteria] a lot of energy, and they get return on their investment by consuming it again," Strous explained. "They are dependent on it, so it can't be removed."

Prototype Plant

Instead, researchers are harnessing the bacteria for more down-to-Earth applications, such as sewage treatment.

Strous says it took two or three years to scale up the anammox process from the lab to a waste treatment facility.

The prototype plant in Rotterdam is performing at a high level, he says, and others will soon follow. "The next one is already starting up much more quickly," Strous said.

The researcher, who advises sewage treatment projects in the Netherlands, notes that conventional sewage treatment facilities can be easily retrofitted to use the anammox reaction.

The low operating costs might allow such systems to provide much needed waste water treatment in regions where adequate facilities are lacking or nonexistent.

More sewage treatment plants could benefit human health. They could also reduce global amounts of ammonia from untreated waste.

Excessive ammonia can wreak havoc with freshwater ecosystems by reacting with oxygen, tying up the gas, which many species need for respiration.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1109_051109_rocketfuel.html
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Re: Alternative Fuels
« Reply #55 on Dec 14, 2005, 9:43am »
Plasma engine passes initial test
The concept exploits a natural phenomenon we see taking place in space
Roger Walker, Esa
The European Space Agency (Esa) says initial testing of a new plasma drive for spacecraft has been a success.

The 'double layer thruster' is a new kind of ion drive which could give much more power than existing versions.

It works by accelerating charged particles between two layers of argon plasma, gas where the atoms have been stripped of electrons.

Esa says it has 'proven the principle', and will proceed with simulations and perhaps bigger prototypes.

Esa already uses an ion drive on its Smart 1 Moon probe, and the US space agency Nasa deployed one on Deep Space 1, which flew out to Comet Borrelly in 2001.

Different chemistry

The concept is very different from a conventional rocket engine powered by chemical reactions.

Gas is ionised and the ions accelerated in a magnetic field, producing a small thrust.

Although far less powerful than a chemical engine, an ion drive of realistic size can operate for much longer; for deep space missions it may prove a much better option.

The new drive developed by Esa and the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris uses a different way of accelerating ions.


"Essentially the concept exploits a natural phenomenon we see taking place in space," said Dr Roger Walker of Esa's Advanced Concepts Team.

"When the solar wind, a plasma of electrified gas released by the Sun, hits the magnetic field of the Earth, it creates a boundary consisting of two plasma layers.

"Each layer has differing electrical properties, and this can accelerate some particles of the solar wind across the boundary, causing them to collide with the Earth's atmosphere and create the aurora."

In 2003 researchers at the Australian National University in Canberra created a plasma double layer in the laboratory.

The European team has now replicated the Australian findings and shown that the double layer can remain stable enough to accelerate ions reliably.

Their Helicon Double Layer Thruster uses radio waves to ionise argon gas; the ions are accelerated across the junction between the two plasma layers.

Esa believes this approach could lead to drives which are as small and economical as the one on board Smart 1, but much more powerful, which would enable craft to accelerate and decelerate faster.

Its next step is to construct computer simulations of the double layer thruster, and then use these simulations in designing larger prototypes.

[image]

HOW SMART 1'S ION ENGINE WORKS
Xenon gas atoms are pumped into a cylindrical chamber, where they collide with electrons from the cathode. The electrons - which are negatively charged - knock electrons off the xenon atoms, creating xenon ions - which are positively charged.
Coils outside the chamber create a magnetic field, which causes electrons from the cathode to spiral and become trapped at the mouth of the chamber.
The build-up of negatively-charged electrons at the mouth of the chamber attracts the positively charged ions, accelerating them out of the chamber.
The stream of accelerated ions leaving the chamber thrusts the spacecraft forward. Although the force is small, over time it creates great speed in the frictionless environment of space.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/4527696.stm

Published: 2005/12/14 12:17:06 GMT
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Re: Alternative Fuels
« Reply #56 on Dec 17, 2005, 9:27am »
Although not a fuel per se it is a novel way of power generation:

Ramp creates power as cars pass
A road ramp that uses passing cars to generate power has been developed.

Dorset inventor Peter Hughes' Electro-Kinetic Road Ramp creates around 10kW of power each time a car drives over its metal plates.

[image]
The ramps generate up to 50kW of power

More than 200 local authorities had expressed an interest in ordering the £25,000 ramps to power their traffic lights and road signs, Mr Hughes said.

Around 300 jobs are due to be created in Somerset for a production run of 2,000 ramps next year.

Plates in the ramp move up and down as vehicles pass over them, driving a generator.

"The ramp is silent, comfortable and safe for vehicles," Mr Hughes said.

Depending on the weight of the vehicle passing overhead, between five and 50kW can be generated.

The prototype was created and tested at Hughes Research unit at the Westland Helicopter base in Somerset, at a cost of £1m.

The concept has been developed by Dorset-based Mr Hughes over the past 12 years. He recently approached councils across the country with the final patented project.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/somerset/4535408.stm
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Re: Alternative Fuels
« Reply #57 on Feb 24, 2006, 7:18am »
“Double Crystal Fusion” Could Pave the Way for Portable Device

Troy, N.Y. — Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while offering substantial improvements over the original design.

[image]
An internal view of the vacuum chamber containing the fusion device, showing two pyroelectric crystals that generate a powerful electric field when heated or cooled.

Photo by Rensselaer/Yaron Danon

The device, which uses two opposing crystals to generate a powerful electric field, could potentially lead to a portable, battery-operated neutron generator for a variety of applications, from non-destructive testing to detecting explosives and scanning luggage at airports. The new results are described in the Feb. 10 issue of Physical Review Letters.

“Our study shows that ‘crystal fusion’ is a mature technology with considerable commercial potential,” says Yaron Danon, associate professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering at Rensselaer. “This new device is simpler and less expensive than the previous version, and it has the potential to produce even more neutrons.”

The device is essentially a tabletop particle accelerator. At its heart are two opposing “pyroelectric” crystals that create a strong electric field when heated or cooled. The device is filled with deuterium gas — a more massive cousin of hydrogen with an extra neutron in its nucleus. The electric field rips electrons from the gas, creating deuterium ions and accelerating them into a deuterium target on one of the crystals. When the particles smash into the target, neutrons are emitted, which is the telltale sign that nuclear fusion has occurred, according to Danon.

A research team led by Seth Putterman, professor of physics at UCLA, reported on a similar apparatus in 2005, but two important features distinguish the new device: “Our device uses two crystals instead of one, which doubles the acceleration potential,” says Jeffrey Geuther, a graduate student in nuclear engineering at Rensselaer and lead author of the paper. “And our setup does not require cooling the crystals to cryogenic temperatures — an important step that reduces both the complexity and the cost of the equipment.”

The new study also verified the fundamental physics behind the original experiment. This suggests that pyroelectric crystals are in fact a viable means of producing nuclear fusion, and that commercial applications may be closer than originally thought, according to Danon.

“Nuclear fusion has been explored as a potential source of power, but we are not looking at this as an energy source right now,” Danon says. Rather, the most immediate application may come in the form of a battery-operated, portable neutron generator. Such a device could be used to detect explosives or to scan luggage at airports, and it could also be an important tool for a wide range of laboratory experiments.

The concept could also lead to a portable x-ray generator, according to Danon. “There is already a commercial portable pyroelectric x-ray product available, but it does not produce enough energy to provide the 50,000 electron volts needed for medical imaging,” he says. “Our device is capable of producing about 200,000 electron volts, which could meet these requirements and could also be enough to penetrate several millimeters of steel.”

In the more distant future, Danon envisions a number of other medical applications of pyroelectric crystals, including a wearable device that could provide safe, continuous cancer treatment.

Frank Saglime, a graduate student in nuclear engineering at Rensselaer, also contributed to the research. The work was funded through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Engineering Education Research (NEER) Program.

About Rensselaer
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, founded in 1824, is the nation’s oldest technological university. The university offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in engineering, the sciences, information technology, architecture, management, and the humanities and social sciences. Institute programs serve undergraduates, graduate students, and working professionals around the world. Rensselaer faculty are known for pre-eminence in research conducted in a wide range of fields, with particular emphasis in biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology, and the media arts and technology. The Institute is well known for its success in the transfer of technology from the laboratory to the marketplace so that new discoveries and inventions benefit human life, protect the environment, and strengthen economic development.

http://news.rpi.edu/update.do
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Re: Alternative Fuels
« Reply #58 on Feb 28, 2006, 7:32am »
Mutant Algae Is Hydrogen Factory


Breaking News
Breaking News from AP and Reuters

* Saudi says four dead militants on wanted list
* Walkout at Saddam trial, Baghdad bombs kill 30
* Report: Record Number of Female Lawmakers
* Judge Rules Pa. Killer Can't Be Executed
* Iran minister says won't give up nuclear program


*
See Also

* Truckers Choose Hydrogen Power
* Sunlight to Fuel Hydrogen Future
* Fuel Efficiency Trumps Fuel Cells
* Microbes Pass Valuable Gas
* Algae: Power Plant of the Future?

By Sam Jaffe | Also by this reporter
12:00 PM Feb, 23, 2006 EST

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have engineered a strain of pond scum that could, with further refinements, produce vast amounts of hydrogen through photosynthesis.

The work, led by plant physiologist Tasios Melis, is so far unpublished. But if it proves correct, it would mean a major breakthrough in using algae as an industrial factory, not only for hydrogen, but for a wide range of products, from biodiesel to cosmetics.

The new strain of algae, known as C. reinhardtii, has truncated chlorophyll antennae within the chloroplasts of the cells, which serves to increase the organism's energy efficiency. In addition, it makes the algae a lighter shade of green, which in turn allows more sunlight deeper into an algal culture and therefore allows more cells to photosynthesize.

"An increase in solar conversion efficiency to 10 percent ... is thought to be enough to make the mass culture of algae viable," says Juergen Polle, a former student of Melis’ who now does research on algae at the City University of New York, Brooklyn.

Polle points out that Melis has probably already reached that 10 percent threshold. But further refinements are still required before C. reinhardtii farms would be efficient enough to produce the world’s hydrogen, which is Melis’ eventual goal.

Currently, the algae cells cycle between photosynthesis and hydrogen production because the hydrogenase enzyme which makes the hydrogen can’t function in the presence of oxygen. Researchers hope to further boost hydrogen production by using genetic engineering to close up pores that oxygen seeps through.

Melis got involved in this research when he and Michael Seibert, a scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, figured out how to get hydrogen out of green algae by restricting sulfur from their diet. The plant cells flicked a long-dormant genetic switch to produce hydrogen instead of carbon dioxide. But the quantities of hydrogen they produced were nowhere near enough to scale up the process commercially and profitably.

"When we discovered the sulfur switch, we increased hydrogen production by a factor of 100,000," says Seibert. "But to make it a commercial technology, we still had to increase the efficiency of the process by another factor of 100."

Melis’ truncated antennae mutants are a big step in that direction. Now Seibert and others (including James Lee at Oak Ridge National Laboratories and J. Craig Venter at the Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland) are trying to adjust the hydrogen-producing pathway so that it can produce hydrogen 100 percent of the time.

A bigger challenge, and one that’s further down the road to solving, is improving the efficiency of the hydrogenase itself.

"Right now the electron chain that goes into the system should produce a lot more hydrogen than comes out, and we don’t know what’s causing the bottleneck," says Seibert. "More basic research is needed to better understand exactly what’s happening in there." Seibert also points out that there are plenty of naturally occurring hydrogenases in microbes, most of which haven’t been studied and some of which might be much more efficient than the one used by C. reinhardtii.

Whether or not scientists can find solutions for those two problems will have a lot to do with realizing the vision of a hydrogen-powered economy based on algae farms in desert areas.

But algae can do a lot more than produce hydrogen. They are already used widely in the cosmetics industry to produce key chemicals used in make-up and perfume. And pharmaceutical companies have long viewed algae as a potential way to produce drugs in a cheap and environmentally friendly manner.

Some algae are also viewed as an ideal source for biodiesel because they can produce oils at a much higher rate than other plants (which can then be converted into vehicle fuel without adding any carbon dioxide to the environment).

For all these applications, Melis’ antenna-truncated algae should be a major breakthrough, allowing higher rates of production and thus making the end product more cheaply.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0%2C70273-0.html
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"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."

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Re: Alternative Fuels
« Reply #59 on Mar 4, 2006, 7:41am »
Car Engine Design Breakthrough
Reported on CBS News


"A car that can go from zero to 60 in four seconds and get more than 50 miles to the gallon would be enough to pique any driver's interest. So who do we have to thank for it. Ford? GM? Toyota? No — just Victor, David, Cheeseborough, Bruce, and Kosi, five kids from the auto shop program at West Philadelphia High School."
-- CBS News, 2/17/06
March 3, 2006
Dear friends,

The CBS news article below reveals a major breakthrough in car engine design. This car engine gets over 50 mpg, goes from zero to 60 in four seconds, and runs on soybean oil! So why isn't this remarkable breakthrough making front page headlines in all major media? For the same reason that many other major energy breakthroughs have been reported but never given the headlines they deserve. Those who are reaping huge profits from oil sales have much more political and media influence than you might imagine.

Under the short, but revealing CBS article below, I've included links to several other major energy breakthroughs reported in the mainstream media which should be getting major attention. I invite you to explore these fascinating articles to see if these aren't legitimate inventions that should transform car engines and energy production. You can make a difference now by playing the role at which the media is so sadly failing. Spread the news on these amazing breakthroughs far and wide. Together, we can and will build a brighter future.

With best wishes,
Fred Burks for the WantToKnow.info Team
Former language interpreter for Presidents Bush and Clinton


http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/17/eveningnews/main1329941.shtml

Kids Build Soybean-Fueled Car

The star at last week's Philadelphia Auto Show wasn't a sports car or an economy car. It was a sports-economy car — one that combines performance and practicality under one hood.

But as CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman reports in this week's Assignment America, the car that buyers have been waiting decades [for] comes from an unexpected source and runs on soybean bio-diesel fuel to boot.

A car that can go from zero to 60 in four seconds and get more than 50 miles to the gallon would be enough to pique any driver's interest. So who do we have to thank for it. Ford? GM? Toyota? No — just Victor, David, Cheeseborough, Bruce, and Kosi, five kids from the auto shop program at West Philadelphia High School.

The five kids, along with a handful of schoolmates, built the soybean-fueled car as an after-school project. It took them more than a year — rummaging for parts, configuring wires and learning as they went. As teacher Simon Hauger notes, these kids weren't exactly the cream of the academic crop.

"We have a number of high school dropouts," he says. "We have a number that have been removed for disciplinary reasons and they end up with us."

One of the Fab Five, Kosi Harmon, was in a gang at his old school — and he was a terrible student. The car project has changed all that.

"I was just getting by with the skin of my teeth, C's and D's," he says. "I came here, and now I'm a straight-A student."

To Hauger, the soybean-powered car shows what kids — any kids — can do when they get the chance.

"If you give kids that have been stereotyped as not being able to do anything an opportunity to do something great, they'll step up," he says.

Stepping up is something the big automakers have yet to do. They're still in the early stages of marketing hybrid cars while playing catch-up to the Bad News Bears of auto shop.

"We made this work," says Hauger. "We're not geniuses. So why aren't they doing it?"

Kosi thinks he knows why. The answer, he says, is the big oil companies.

"They're making billions upon billions of dollars," he says. "And when this car sells, that'll go down — to low billions upon billions."


More energy breakthroughs in the major media
that should have been headline news (verbatim quotes from articles)

Iceland the First Country to Try Abandoning Gasoline
January 18, 2006, ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1518556

Iceland has already started...turning water into fuel — hydrogen fuel. Here's how it works: Electrodes split the water into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. Hydrogen electrons pass through a conductor that creates the current to power an electric engine. Hydrogen fuel now costs two to three times as much as gasoline, but gets up to three times the mileage of gas, making the overall cost about the same. As an added benefit, there are no carbon emissions — only water vapor.

Fuel's paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head
November 4, 2005, The Guardian (one of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1627424,00.html

It seems too good to be true: a new source of near-limitless power that costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste. Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel. "We've got 50 independent validation reports, we've got 65 peer-reviewed journal articles," he said. "We ran into this theoretical resistance and there are some vested interests here.

Magnetic energy? Perhaps
September 7, 2005, San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/07/BUG9NEJD3L1.DTL

"All we know is that we're seeing more energy output than input. Does Goldes realize what's he's saying -- that he's perhaps discovered a clean, inexhaustible energy source? "That's exactly what it appears to be," he answered. A handful of other companies worldwide are believed also to be pursuing zero-point energy via magnetic systems. One of them...is run by a former scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. According to Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, the Pentagon and at least two large aerospace companies are actively researching zero-point energy as a means of propulsion.

Solar Challenge Finishes in Calgary
July 28, 2005, Open Source Energy Network/Detroit News
http://pesn.com/2005/07/28/9600141_Solar_Challenge_results
http://www.detnews.com/2005/schools/0507/28/01-262474.htm - Detroit News (article removed late 2005)
http://wwmt.com/engine.pl?station=wwmt&a....kout_local.html - CBS affiliate

The ten-day solar car race from Austin to Calgary came to a successful finish yesterday. U of Michigan takes prize, finishing the 2500-mile course in 54 hours. They also set a record by averaging 46.2 mph in this, the world's longest solar car race.

Eco-car more efficient than light bulb
July 5, 2005, CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/07/04/eco.car

The hydrogen-powered Ech2o needs just 25 Watts -- the equivalent of less than two gallons of petrol -- to complete the 25,000-mile global trip, while emitting nothing more hazardous than water. But with a top speed of 30mph, the journey would take more than a month to complete. Ech2o, built by British gas firm BOC, will bid to smash the world fuel efficiency record of over 10,000 miles per gallon at the Shell Eco Marathon. The record is currently....5,385 km/per liter [over 12,000 mpg!].

Advanced vehicles demonstrate zero oil-consumption, reduced emissions
May 18, 2005, Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/cars/news/2005/may/0518_tourdesol.html (article removed late 2005)
http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=communique&newsid=8474 (includes copy of above article)

Top prize for the Monte-Carlo Rally went to a modified Honda Insight [which] broke the 100-mile-per-gallon barrier over a 150-mile range. The car actually got 107 miles-per gallon. St. Mark's High School in Southboro, and North Haven Community School, North Haven, ME, demonstrated true zero-oil consumption and true zero climate-change emissions with their modified electric Ford pick-up and Volkswagen bus.

Fans of GM Electric Car Fight the Crusher
Washington Post, March 10, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21991-2005Mar9

GM agrees that the car in question, called the EV1, was a rousing feat of engineering that could go from zero to 60 miles per hour in under eight seconds with no harmful emissions. The market just wasn't big enough, the company says, for a car that traveled 140 miles or less on a charge before you had to plug it in like a toaster. Ted Flittner, a...Costa Mesa industrial engineer...said, "they have such a brilliant solution they've developed. They've put it on the market and proved it works. People still want it and they're taking it away and destroying it."

100 MPG Car Heralded by London Times in 2002 - Where is it now?
December 2 , 2004, WantToKnow.info/London Times
http://www.WantToKnow.info/carmileage - WantToKnow.info (includes text of London Times article)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,588-451038,00.html - London Times (article removed in 2005)

The Toyota Eco Spirit was the talk of the fuel economy car industry in 2002. At over 100 MPG and with the lowest exhaust emissions and a very reasonable sticker price, the Eco Spirit's debut was widely anticipated. (see London Times article). What happened to it?

1908 Ford Model T: 25 MPG, 2004 EPA Average All Cars: 21 MPG
Detroit News/WantToKnow.info, June 4, 2004
http://www.WantToKnow.info/050711carmileageaveragempg

Ford's Model T, which went 25 miles on a gallon of gasoline, was more fuel efficient than the current Ford Explorer sport-utility vehicle -- which manages just 16 miles per gallon.

Note: The last article above is an excellent summary of eye-opening contradictions which have received very little media coverage, including links to major media articles to back up the facts presented. And for an excellent, two-page summary of the entire energy cover-up: http://www.WantToKnow.info/newenergysources


http://www.wanttoknow.info/060303carenginebreakthrough
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."

Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860

"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."

John F. Kennedy
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