"For all the volatility of a gas like hydrogen, which combusts with one-tenth the energy required for gasoline, fuel cell vehicles are safer than internal combustion engines, according to industry experts.
At last week's LA Auto Show, several major car companies, including Audi, Honda, Hyundai and Toyota announced the release of, or updated plans for releasing, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles this year or over the next two years.
Toyota touted its four-passenger fuel cell vehicle (FCV), the Mirai, which will begin shipping next month. Audi unveiled the A7 Sportback h-tron quattro, a modification of its four-door coupe that swaps out a traditional drivetrain for a hydrogen fuel-cell-powered electric motor.
Meanwhile, Honda, which already leases its FCX Clarity hydrogen FCV in California, announced another concept vehicle that it plans to release in Japan in 2016. And, Hyundai, which began leasing its Tucson Fuel Cell in June, plans to produce 1,000 of the vehicles this year."
All of the cars are able to fully charge with hydrogen in three to five minutes, compared to the 20 minutes it takes for a Tesla all-electric vehicle (EV) to charge just half way.
A full charge in a Tesla provides up to 265 miles of travel. A Toyota RAV4 EV, gets only 125 miles on a full charge. Hydrogen FCVs, by comparison, can go 300 or more miles on a single charge.
Along with fast fueling and long distances, hydrogen fuel cells also carry a somewhat unfortunate reputation, via the infamous LZ 129 Hindenburg, the hydrogen-filled airship that exploded over Lakehurst, N.J. in 1937.
U.S. Navy This photo, taken during the initial explosion of the Hindenburg, shows the 804-foot German zeppelin just before subsequent explosions sent it crashing to the ground at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, N.J., 6 May 1937.
he hydrogen fuel cell tanks in the Toyota Mirai are pressurized up to 10,000psi, and hydrogen is 16 times lighter than air. So, if punctured or otherwise compromised, the hydrogen gas would instantaneously dissipate into the atmosphere, Hartline said.
John Kopasz, a scientist with Argonne National Laboratory who performs research on hydrogen gas production, said that while there are inherent dangers with any combustible fuel, hydrogen fuel is safer than gasoline.
If a gas tank is punctured, fuel pools beneath the vehicle, creating a source for a prolonged burn, Kopasz said.
Watch the second video! This is extraordinary.
"New Zealand's Duke Engines has been busy developing and demonstrating excellent results with a bizarre axial engine prototype that completely does away with valves, while delivering excellent power and torque from an engine much smaller, lighter and simpler than the existing technology. We spoke with Duke co-founder John Garvey to find out how the Duke Axial Engine project is going."
The reciprocator's center point is used to drive the central drive shaft, which rotates in the opposite direction to the reciprocator. "That counter-rotation keeps it in tidy balance," says Duke co-founder John Garvey. "If you lay your hand on it while it's running, you can barely detect any motion at all, it's quite remarkable."
That's borne out by the video below, where the engine revving doesn't even cause enough vibrations to tip a coin off its side.
"Today, carbon dioxide (CO2) is a hot topic. Scientists around the globe are searching for ways to store, dispose of, or prevent the formation of the greenhouse gas, which is a major driver of global climate change. Liquid Light hopes to take this concept one step further and harness waste CO2 as a source of carbon to make industrial chemicals and fuels.
The technology behind the process is simple: Take CO2 and mix it in a water-filled chamber with an electrode and a catalyst. The ensuing chemical reaction converts CO2 into a new molecule, methanol, which can be used as a fuel, an industrial solvent or a starting material for the manufacture of other chemicals.
Liquid Light's founders include Bocarsly and his former graduate student Emily Cole, who earned her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2009. Cole helped revive efforts in Bocarsly's lab to study the conversion of CO2 into usable fuels, which led to the launch of Liquid Light and an ongoing collaboration that Bocarsly said has been extremely positive for his research team at the University.
"We've made some discoveries that wouldn't have been made in a university setting, and this has really accelerated the research," Bocarsly said. "It is a very productive relationship."
Back in the 1990s, a former Ph.D. student of Bocarsly's named Chao Lin conducted some of the earliest experiments on turning CO2 into methanol. He used palladium metal as the electrode and pyridinium, an inexpensive ring-shaped molecule, as the catalyst. By plugging the electrode into an electrical outlet, he could drive an electrochemical reaction that converted CO2 into methanol.
As Bocarsly recalled, Lin was quite excited about his success. However, said Bocarsly, "We published that finding in 1994 and there was approximately zero interest in it."
The work languished until 2005 when Cole, then a new graduate student, told Bocarsly she wanted to work on a clean-energy project. She took up the challenge of reproducing Lin's results, but this time using sunlight instead of electricity to drive the reaction.
Cole set up a flask containing a solution of CO2 and a pyridinium catalyst dissolved in water. In place of sunlight, which emits a broad spectrum of wavelengths of light, she shined on the flask a blue light-emitting diode (LED) because it gives off certain wavelengths that are highly efficient at driving the reaction. In the flask she placed an electrode that is activated by particles of light, or photons. "We used a semiconductor electrode that would allow us to substitute light for electricity," said Cole.
In Cole's setup, photons hit a gallium phosphide semiconductor and excite its electrons to travel to the semiconductor's surface and into the surrounding water. The catalyst then shuttles the electrons to the CO2. Those electrons attract hydrogen from the surrounding water to turn CO2 (one carbon and two oxygens) into methanol (one carbon, one oxygen and four hydrogens) with the release of oxygen.
Bocarsly likes to call the process "reverse combustion" because it is like running a burning reaction backwards. Instead of burning fuel and oxygen to produce CO2, the CO2 converts back into fuel and oxygen. This time, when the team published in May 2008 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the results generated a lot of interest.
Taking the idea into industry
One person who read that paper was Kyle Teamey, an entrepreneur who was representing a venture capital firm that wanted to invest in clean-energy technologies. He was attracted to the idea that waste CO2 could be put to use as a starting material for making fuels and industrial chemicals that could be sold at a profit.
"Everyone had been talking about burying CO2 underground," said Teamey. "Why not instead turn carbon dioxide into something valuable?"
After months of talks with Bocarsly and Cole as well as other advisers, Teamey and Cole co-founded Liquid Light. The company licensed the technology from the University. Teamey serves as company president, while Cole and her team of chemists tackle the practical issue of how to scale up a laboratory invention to an industrial scale. Bocarsly serves as chair of the company's scientific advisory board."
summary: This photoelectrochemical cell contains a solution of carbon dioxide and pyridinium as a catalyst dissolved in water. A low-power blue light-emitting diode (LED) provides light, which activates the semiconductor, causing the conversion of the CO2 and water to methanol and oxygen with the help of the pyridine catalyst. This cell is highly efficient, with greater than 95 percent of the electrons generated by the illumination going into the formation of methanol. Credit: Andrew Bocarsly
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-06-startup-carbon-dioxide-fuels.html#jCp
The research has received funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFSOR), the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy (DOE). The collaboration between Liquid Light and the University was supported by the DOE Small Business Innovation Research program and the AFOSR Small Business Technology Transfer program.
Princeton's agreement with Liquid Light allowed the company to continue to collaborate with Bocarsly and his research team. Before long, new discoveries were emerging. "They started noticing interesting chemistry that we wouldn't have predicted," said Bocarsly.
The Princeton scientists did some additional studies, and made a surprising discovery: They could turn CO2, which contains only one carbon, into a compound with a carbon-carbon bond, which vastly increases the possibilities for creating commercial applications. This was radical because although the reaction is certainly possible, it is highly unlikely to happen because so many other competing reactions are occurring.
"Everyone who electrochemically reduces CO2 today makes compounds with only one carbon," said Bocarsly. "Nobody makes things with carbon-carbon bonds." He paused. "But we can."
"That was a very 'wow' moment," recalled Cole, "because we thought that our process could only make methanol. But now we were finding that we could make a variety of products, and that is what makes this technology commercially interesting." She said Liquid Light scientists can now make more than 20 different products from CO2.
"Simulated sun, authentic opportunity"
At the University's Solar Energy Laboratory, the process begins with an indoor solar simulator in the form of seven mirrored, 6,500-watt lamps that concentrate the light on a 10-centimeter spot with an irradiance of 3,000 suns. (One "sun" equals 1,000 watts of solar energy falling per square meter of surface.) With this concentrated radiant energy, one can generate temperatures of more than 3,600 F in a chemical reactor. There, carbon dioxide and water are split to form carbon monoxide and hydrogen, the two components of syngas.
Davidson, along with mechanical engineering professor Tom Chase and their students, have developed two prototype reactors to split water and CO2. Deploying these technologies in the Earth's sunbelt could yield enough renewable energy to significantly exceed the world's current needs, the researchers say.
"More sun falls on Earth in one hour than is consumed globally in a year," Davidson notes. "Harvesting the sun to meet our energy needs is a challenge with a huge payoff."
Of course, it's a little more complicated than focusing concentrated sunlight into a reactor filled with carbon dioxide and water. The key to the technology rests with using metal oxides in a reduction/oxidation cycle to reduce the temperature required to split water and carbon dioxide.
"Metal oxides allow you to split water and carbon dioxide at temperatures achievable with modern solar concentrating devices," Davidson explains.
In the reactor, the metal oxides go through cycles in which they strip oxygen alternately from carbon dioxide or water—forming carbon monoxide or hydrogen, respectively—then release the oxygen as a byproduct. The syngas formed from the carbon monoxide and hydrogen can be converted into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, methane (natural gas), or other products.
Davidson and her colleagues have produced syngas this way in their laboratory. They have moved from bench top experiments to demonstration in prototype reactors. While Davidson and Chase concentrate on designing reactors, University chemistry professor Andreas Stein and colleagues at Caltech and UCLA are researching new materials that could increase the efficiency and ease of operation.
If adopted, a "sunlight to synfuels" process would be an energy supply system in which the same amount of carbon dioxide that is removed from the atmosphere and locked into the fuels is released when the fuels are burned. Thus, it would be carbon neutral. And because synfuels can be the same as the conventional fuels, they won't require a new infrastructure.
Contact the writer at morri029@umn.edu"
Very interesting presentation at the TED Conference. Not quite a nuclear battery, but a really good redesign of nuclear power systems.
excerpt:
"Instead of finding a new way to boil water, Wilson's compact, molten salt reactor found a way to heat up gas. That is, really heat it up.
Wilson's fission reactor operates at 600 to 700 degrees Celsius. And because the laws of thermodynamics say that high temperatures lead to high efficiencies, this reactor is 45 to 50 percent efficient.
Traditional steam turbine systems are only 30 to 35 percent efficient because their reactors run at low temperatures of about 200 to 300 degrees Celsius.
And Wilson's reactor isn't just hot, it's also powerful. Despite its small size, the reactor generates between 50 and 100 megawatts of electricity, which is enough to power anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 homes, according to Wilson.
Another innovative component of Wilson's take on nuclear fission is its source of fuel. The molten salt reactor runs off of "down-blended weapons pits." In other words, all the highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium collecting dust since the Cold War could be put to use for peaceful purposes.
And unlike traditional nuclear power plants, Wilson's miniature power plants would be buried below ground, making them a boon for security advocates.
According to Wilson, his reactor only needs to be refueled every 30 years, compared to the 18-month fuel cycle of most power plants. This means they can be sealed up underground for a long time, decreasing the risk of proliferation.
Wilson's reactor is also less prone to proliferation because it doesn't operate at high pressure like today's pressurized-water reactors or use ceramic control rods, which release hydrogen when heated and lead to explosions during nuclear power plant accidents, like the one at Fukushima in 2011.
In the event of an accident in one of Wilson's reactors, the fuel from the core would drain into a "sub-critical" setting- or tank- underneath the reactor, which neutralizes the reaction. The worst that could happen, according to Wilson, is that the reactor is destroyed."
Very interesting article describing the near market ready potential of "supercapacitor" batteries. This is truly game changer stuff, and very interesting to me since i've been following the research and development of "graphene technologies" for some time. The graphene superconductor targets the future of both energy and computing. But graphene is also at the cutting edge of "faster, better, cheaper" water desalinization! Nor does it take a rocket scientist to see that a graphene nano latice will have an enormous impact on methods of separating water (H2O) atoms to create an electical current - a cost free flow of electons.
Very well written research!
excerpt:
"an article in the recent issue of Nature Communications on a novel way to mass-produce so-called superconductors on the super-cheap – using no more equipment than the average home CD/DVD burner. Hacked together by a group of research scientists at UCLA, the ingenious technique is a way of producing layers of microscopically nuanced lattices called graphene, an essential component of many superconductor designs. It holds the promise of rapidly dropping prices for what was until now a very expensive process.
You see, we've known about the concept of supercapacitors for decades. In fact, their antecedent, the capacitor, is one of the fundamental building blocks of electronics. Long before the Energizer Bunny starting banging its away around our television screens, engineers had been using capacitors to store electrical charge – originally as filters to help tune signals clearly on wireless radios of all sorts. The devices did so by storing and releasing excess energy, but only teeny amounts of it... we're talking millions of them to hold what a simple AA battery can.
Over the years, however, scientists worked on increasing their storage capacity. Way back in 1957, engineers at General Electric came up with the first supercapacitor... but back then there were no uses for it. So, the technology stayed in the lab until 1978, when NEC started marketing the tech (and calling it a "supercapacitor" for the first time) as a solution for backing up computer memory during power outages. For hanging on to a few milliamps of power for an hour or so, there was no better tool for the job – at least until watch batteries were employed at a hundredth of the cost.
Despite decades of on-and-off research interest, it wasn't until the dawn of the age of nanomaterials that the supercapacitor became competitive with batteries. As materials could be produced more accurately and the size of the supercapacitor's components could be driven down, its advantages became apparent.
A typical 3.6-volt lithium-ion battery (LIB) – some of the better technology on the market – can take up to an hour to charge to full capacity, and certainly no less than 10 minutes in the best case. It can only be charged 500 to 1000 times before it starts to seriously degrade.
A typical, recent-vintage 2.5-volt supercapacitor, however, can typically be charged in a few seconds – and it can last for hundreds of thousands or even a million charge cycles.
Imagine that: connect up a few supercapacitor cells in a chain, and charge up a power drill in 30 seconds.
However, that's where the comparisons end between supercapacitance and batteries. Unfortunately, in their current state, supercapacitors can only hold about 30 watt-hours of charge per kilogram. That's only 20% of what the typical LIB can manage. What they lack in storage they make up for in power delivery, though. Unlike slowly discharging LIBs, if you need a quick zap of juice, a supercapacitor can deliver as much as 10 times the power at a time.
Quick to charge and quick to discharge, they've become a popular choice for things like guarding server farms against brownouts and powering components in hybrid cars – and companies like private startup Ioxus have been able to fill those specialized needs. But their biggest Achilles heel has always been cost, which runs around 20 times as much as LIBs, putting the technology out of reach of all but highly specialized applications.
That's where the team at UCLA comes in. Instead of manufacturing their double-layer capacitors using some sort of high-end manufacturing equipment from the semiconductor industry in a clean room with millions in supporting infrastructure, they used a very sophisticated new device called a… DVD burner. Yep, one of those LightScribe models available for $40 at NewEgg and shipped with every desktop computer these days. By employing its laser and a novel layer of substrates, the team was able to print 100 small sheets of graphene-based superconductors, right on top of a compact disc:"
Awesome video describing the fracking process. I was very surprised to learn that it takes 4 months to drill a fracking well that might last between 20 to 40 years. Incredible technology.
"From Marathon Oil --"Safe, cost-effective refinements in hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking), horizontal drilling and other innovations now allow for the production of oil and natural gas from tight shale formations that previously were inaccessible. This animated video introduces you to the proven techniques used to extract resources from these shale formations in a safe, environmentally responsible manner."
Great animation of the drilling technology that is responsible for America's revolutionary, game-changing, shale-based energy bonanza, the "energy equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down."
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Representative Dr. William Cassidy (R-LA) has put forward a common sense change to the tax code that will jump the economy of the USA forward, making use of plentiful and comparatively inexpensive natural gas.
excerpt:
The recent natural gas boom in the United States has been so wide-spread and profound that it has dropped natural gas prices to historical lows. These prices are so low that producers have begun to scale back operations as extraction has almost become uneconomical. We should be focused on exploring new commercial markets for natural gas to take advantage of such a low-cost energy source. Because technology and supply is currently available to sell the natural gas equivalent for about $1.50 a gallon compared with the current price of gasoline, it would seem natural for consumers to begin making the switch to compressed natural gas CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) vehicles.
So if the technology is already available and we have at least a 100-year supply of natural gas right here in America, why aren’t we all driving CNG cars?
Unfortunately, the main obstacle is a lack of natural gas fuel infrastructure in our country. Currently in the United States, there are only 449 CNG fueling stations accessible to the public, which is dwarfed by the more than 157,000 gasoline stations.
There are a number of proposals to spur natural gas infrastructure development in Washington. Not surprisingly, when it comes to Congress, the most talked about option involves subsidies for both natural gas vehicles and for the actual CNG fuel itself. While we should be using all of our available natural resources to aid in lowering the costs of transportation, the reality is that our country has neither the money to subsidize development nor the expertise to pick winners and losers in the energy and transportation sectors.
As opposed to subsidies, I believe that a simple change to our tax code would help those companies that develop natural gas look at domestic retail infrastructure development as a serious option. For background purposes, it is important to understand the differences between independent and major oil and gas producers. Under our tax code, independent producers of oil and gas, such as Apache and Chesapeake, are different from major oil and gas companies, such as ExxonMobil or Shell, as independents are limited to $5 million in revenue from retail sales. Whether intentional or not, this antiquated provision is keeping companies that from investing in CNG fueling stations all over the country.
I have drafted legislation, H.R. 1712, that will help remove these unnecessary tax barriers. It begins by recognizing that independent producers are the companies principally involved in new natural gas discoveries, and who have the most financial incentive to find new markets for natural gas. The creation of a new market for natural gas — as well as a new income stream for independent producers — would almost undoubtedly incentivize these companies to invest in the infrastructure needed to deliver CNG through retail operations.
Nice collection of Obama lies about Oil and energy.
If you're looking for a single picture that captures the salient points of President Barack Obama's oil policy, here it is. Courtesy of the Republican Study Committee, this set of graphics says it all. Except perhaps for one little discussed note; the USA is the number 3 oil producing nation in the world. Every decision effects world energy production and pricing. Especially when the dollar is being devalued and destroyed at breakneck speed.
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"Civilizations run on energy. The more energy produced and consumed, the more advanced the civilization" (from Zero Sum by Richard Wright). Energy as an industry accounts for 17% of our economic activity with this important caveat: everything else depends on energy production and cost. Includin...
Updated on Nov 26, 14
Created on Mar 01, 12
Category: Government & Politics
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