Alternative energy

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Typhoon
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Re: Alternative energy

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Robert Godes explained it’s not a nickel-hydrogen fusion reaction. Nickel is merely a catalyst. “A tiny amount of hydrogen protons are converted into neutrons. These newly produced neutrons are soon captured by hydrogen ions or other atoms in a metallic (e.g. nickel) lattice near to where the hydrogen ions were converted to neutrons. The captured neutrons generate heat because the new atoms that are one neutron heavier shed excess binding energy as heat to the lattice, resulting in a dramatically clean, low-cost, hi-quality heat output.”
proton - proton fusion chain reaction

Image

Note that in the first step a positron [anti-electron: e+] must be emitted by [electric] charge conservation [along with a neutrino for lepton number conservation].

The positron will almost immediately annihilate with an electron in the surrounding material

e+ + e− → 2 γ

to produce two back-to-back photons [γ], by conservation of energy-momentum, with energies of 511 keV.

Until I see such a plot of the photon energy spectrum with a peak at 511 keV due to two coincident photons, and it is repeatedly independently reproduced, I call shenanigans.

The one thing LENR has produced in excess to-date is scams separating credulous investors from their money.
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Doc
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Re: Alternative energy

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Typhoon wrote:
Robert Godes explained it’s not a nickel-hydrogen fusion reaction. Nickel is merely a catalyst. “A tiny amount of hydrogen protons are converted into neutrons. These newly produced neutrons are soon captured by hydrogen ions or other atoms in a metallic (e.g. nickel) lattice near to where the hydrogen ions were converted to neutrons. The captured neutrons generate heat because the new atoms that are one neutron heavier shed excess binding energy as heat to the lattice, resulting in a dramatically clean, low-cost, hi-quality heat output.”
proton - proton fusion chain reaction

Image

Note that in the first step a positron [anti-electron: e+] must be emitted by [electric] charge conservation [along with a neutrino for lepton number conservation].

The positron will almost immediately annihilate with an electron in the surrounding material

e+ + e− → 2 γ

to produce two back-to-back photons [γ], by conservation of energy-momentum, with energies of 511 keV.

Until I see such a plot of the photon energy spectrum with a peak at 511 keV due to two coincident photons, and it is repeatedly independently reproduced, I call shenanigans.

The one thing LENR has produced in excess to-date is scams separating credulous investors from their money.
I take it that the above is a theory of how it works. A lot of people have looked at it and said it works but no one can say exactly why it is working exactly.
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Typhoon
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Re: Alternative energy

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Doc wrote:
Typhoon wrote:
Robert Godes explained it’s not a nickel-hydrogen fusion reaction. Nickel is merely a catalyst. “A tiny amount of hydrogen protons are converted into neutrons. These newly produced neutrons are soon captured by hydrogen ions or other atoms in a metallic (e.g. nickel) lattice near to where the hydrogen ions were converted to neutrons. The captured neutrons generate heat because the new atoms that are one neutron heavier shed excess binding energy as heat to the lattice, resulting in a dramatically clean, low-cost, hi-quality heat output.”
proton - proton fusion chain reaction

Image

Note that in the first step a positron [anti-electron: e+] must be emitted by [electric] charge conservation [along with a neutrino for lepton number conservation].

The positron will almost immediately annihilate with an electron in the surrounding material

e+ + e− → 2 γ

to produce two back-to-back photons [γ], by conservation of energy-momentum, with energies of 511 keV.

Until I see such a plot of the photon energy spectrum with a peak at 511 keV due to two coincident photons, and it is repeatedly independently reproduced, I call shenanigans.

The one thing LENR has produced in excess to-date is scams separating credulous investors from their money.
I take it that the above is a theory of how it works. A lot of people have looked at it and said it works but no one can say exactly why it is working exactly.
No. It's how proton - proton fusion occurs regardless if it is in the interior of the Sun [due to gravitation] or supposedly being "catalyzed by nickel" in some terrestrial device.

That is the beauty of conservation laws in physics: in this case the relevant law is the conservation of electric charge

r_IfV9fkBhk

[The other oversized red flag is the fact that the fusion of two protons from hydrogen is a very rare process, even in the sun, as it requires one of the protons to convert to a neutron via beta decay - the weak force.]

So the key bit of evidence required for proton - proton fusion to be occurring in this device is positron production and annihilation as described above.

If Godes was serious, then such evidence is the first thing that he would be showing as

1/ it would win him the Nobel Prize in physics; and

2/ he would receive all the funding that he would ever need or even want

My bet is that this is yet another scam similar to Rossi's E-CAT that will never get past the sucker, er, investor demo stage.

_____

It was the inability to provide evidence of a neutron and/or proton signal from deuterium + deuterium fusion that lead to the rejection of the original Pons and Fleischmann cold fusion claim.
_____

Another is example is if one is presented with some very complicated device and a claim that it is a perpetual motion machine.

One does not have to work out the details of why the claim is wrong, it is sufficient to known that it violates the conservation of energy.
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Re: Alternative energy

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Mapping the Biomass Racket
by JOSH SCHLOSSBERG

The first and only electronic map tracking logging sites sourcing wood to a biomass energy facility has been released by Energy Justice Network, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization with field offices in Vermont, Pennsylvania and Oregon and Biofuelwatch, an international organization based in Vermont and the UK.

The initial phase of the McNeil Biomass Forest Mapping Project — funded by a grant from the Fund for Wild Nature— maps logging sites in Vermont that provided wood to the McNeil Generating Station in 2010, a 50-megawatt biomass power incinerator in Burlington. The map overlays nearly 150 forest sites logged in 2010—along with several photo galleries—on a satellite map of Vermont using Google Maps.

Each logging site is marked with an icon of a stump with further zooming in revealing a transparent blue polygon outlining the exact location of the cutting. Clicking on the stump brings up relevant data including acreage, town, property owner, logger, forester, date logged, and documentation of the associated scans taken from Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department maps.

The McNeil project is integrated into Energy Justice Network’s Dirty Energy Mapping Project which pinpoints the locations of existing and proposed biomass and waste incinerators, nuclear reactors, natural gas and coal-fired power plants in the US and documents grassroots community resistance to those facilities.

Once completed, the McNeil Biomass Forest Mapping Project will map logging for both the McNeil station and the 25-megawatt Ryegate Biomass Incinerator (in Ryegate, Vermont) over a ten year period from 2002-2012 to depict the actual forest footprint of industrial scale biomass energy. The finished project will include dozens of photo galleries showing on-the-ground impacts of biomass energy logging projects.

The maps of the logging operations—scanned from hard copies and replicated by hand using Google Maps—were accessed through the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife which has been tasked by the Vermont State Legislature to pre-approve management plans to log forests providing wood to the McNeil and Ryegate biomass power incinerators. Final biomass logging projects are approved by foresters employed by the McNeil facility and its co-owner Burlington Electric Department, with Fish and Wildlife officials rarely making site visits in advance of the logging and never after logging has taken place.

An estimated one-half to two-thirds of the wood fueling the McNeil incinerator is sourced from New York State, where logging sites are neither tracked nor made available to the public, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Vermont is the only state in the US requiring that a state agency keep track of forests logged for some biomass energy facilities.

The McNeil biomass incinerator burns an estimated 400,000 green tons of wood per year—seventy-six tons, or thirty cords, of whole-tree chips per hour—along with a small percentage of natural gas, according to Burlington Electric Department. The wood fueling the McNeil incinerator consists of 70% trees and woody materials cut directly from the forest, 25% from “residues” (wood chips and bark from local sawmills), and 5% from recycled wood. Along with tree tops and limbs (which contain the highest level of nutrient content of any part of the tree), the McNeil facility burns whole trees, as has been documented in photographs.

McNeil sources its wood from “integrated harvest” logging operations, which typically involves “whole-tree” logging and includes clearcuts up to twenty-five acres, housing developments, and forest “thinning.” Whole-tree logging is more intensive than traditional logging since it removes the nutrient rich tree tops and branches from the forest which could otherwise provide habitat, prevent erosion, and enrich forest soils. Along with wood for the incinerator, these “integrated harvests” also provide lumber, paper pulp, and firewood. Some trees that could be used for furniture, paper pulp, particle board, firewood, mulch, compost (and occasionally lumber) are instead burned for electricity at less than 25% efficiency—effectively wasting three out of four trees.

“For the first time we’re showing the direct impact on forests from biomass incineration,” said Aaron Kreider, web developer for Energy Justice Network and lead designer of the mapping project. “Can you imagine what the impact of McNeil will be during its entire lifetime? Can you imagine what could happen to our forests if we convert dozens of large coal plants to biomass?”

At twenty-six years old, Burlington’s McNeil Generating Station is one of the nation’s longest operating biomass power incinerators. The incinerator is sited adjacent to the low-income, ethnically-diverse Old North End neighborhood, 200 yards from the nearest residence. McNeil is Vermont’s largest polluter, according to Planet Hazard.com.

In a recent controversy, the City of Burlington, Vermont’s Draft Climate Action Plan reported only a fraction of the carbon dioxide (CO2) smokestack emissions from McNeil—hindering the city’s efforts to accurately measure and reduce its carbon footprint, according to critics. The 50-megawatt facility is jointly owned by Burlington Electric Company, Green Mountain Power, and Vermont Public Power Supply Authority.

Over 200 electricity-generating, wood-burning biomass power incinerators currently operate in the US, with another 200 proposed, according to Forisk Consulting. Though more and more of these facilities are being built across the nation—due, in large part, to generous federal and state “renewable” energy subsidies and incentives—the ecological footprint of existing industrial-scale biomass energy facilities has yet to be adequately assessed.

“Even as forest protection is increasingly recognized as one of the best defenses against climate change—while also critical to protecting water, soils and biodiversity—governments are putting into place policies and subsidies to cut and burn forests the world over for ‘biomass’ electricity and heat,” said Rachel Smolker of Biofuelwatch, an international organization based in the US and UK. “They falsely refer to this as ‘clean, green and renewable,’ but it is a total disaster in the making.”

The McNeil Biomass Forest Mapping Project would make the logging operations for the McNeil and Ryegate biomass incinerators transparent and accessible to industry, government, media, scientists and members of the public, allowing for the documentation of actual, on-the-ground impacts associated with forest biomass energy. The ultimate goal of the project is to provide a model for a comprehensive, national assessment of the total forest footprint of industrial-scale biomass energy facilities to gauge current and future ecological impacts.

Josh Schlossberg is editor and journalist for The Biomass Monitor newsletter, the only publication in the US covering the health and environmental impacts of biomass incineration.
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Azrael
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Re: Alternative energy

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Is high quality wood being used as fuel for biomass energy, or are they only burning the wood that has been judged not highly desirable for boards, beams, etc.?
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Re: Alternative energy

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IEEE Spectrum | Clean[er] coal power
OSU's chemical looping reactor (the centerpiece for a US $7.1 million ARPA-E project that began in 2010) is so named because it circulates its components in a continuous loop in a manner that controls the interaction of pulverized coal and oxygen to prevent ignition of the coal. "We carefully control the chemical reaction so that the coal never burns—it is consumed chemically, and the carbon dioxide is entirely contained inside the reactor," says Fan.

Tiny iron oxide beads (see right bottle in photo above) roughly 1.5-2 millimeters across efficiently and precisely manage the oxygen supply to the coal particles (left bottle in photo), which are 15-20 times smaller. The beads enter the first reactor chamber oxidized and react with the coal particles, heating the iron oxide and producing CO2. The CO2 bubbles up and out and is captured, while the beads flow on into a second chamber where air flow reoxygenates the beads and carries away their heat (25 kilowatts for their 8-meter-tall lab-scale reactor). The oxidized beads then loop back to start another round.
If there is one thing that the US has plenty of, it is coal.
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Azrael
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Re: Alternative energy

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Typhoon wrote:IEEE Spectrum | Clean[er] coal power
OSU's chemical looping reactor (the centerpiece for a US $7.1 million ARPA-E project that began in 2010) is so named because it circulates its components in a continuous loop in a manner that controls the interaction of pulverized coal and oxygen to prevent ignition of the coal. "We carefully control the chemical reaction so that the coal never burns—it is consumed chemically, and the carbon dioxide is entirely contained inside the reactor," says Fan.

Tiny iron oxide beads (see right bottle in photo above) roughly 1.5-2 millimeters across efficiently and precisely manage the oxygen supply to the coal particles (left bottle in photo), which are 15-20 times smaller. The beads enter the first reactor chamber oxidized and react with the coal particles, heating the iron oxide and producing CO2. The CO2 bubbles up and out and is captured, while the beads flow on into a second chamber where air flow reoxygenates the beads and carries away their heat (25 kilowatts for their 8-meter-tall lab-scale reactor). The oxidized beads then loop back to start another round.
If there is one thing that the US has plenty of, it is coal.
Unfortunately, geological and/or mineral carbon storage is extremely expensive, can be very energy intensive and is not well enough understood for researchers to know how long the carbon would be trapped, how much geological and/or mineral capacity there is for storage, or how much it would cost.

Investing more money in researching, developing and deploying nuclear power would probably be more practical.
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Re: Alternative energy

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Azrael wrote:
Typhoon wrote:IEEE Spectrum | Clean[er] coal power
OSU's chemical looping reactor (the centerpiece for a US $7.1 million ARPA-E project that began in 2010) is so named because it circulates its components in a continuous loop in a manner that controls the interaction of pulverized coal and oxygen to prevent ignition of the coal. "We carefully control the chemical reaction so that the coal never burns—it is consumed chemically, and the carbon dioxide is entirely contained inside the reactor," says Fan.

Tiny iron oxide beads (see right bottle in photo above) roughly 1.5-2 millimeters across efficiently and precisely manage the oxygen supply to the coal particles (left bottle in photo), which are 15-20 times smaller. The beads enter the first reactor chamber oxidized and react with the coal particles, heating the iron oxide and producing CO2. The CO2 bubbles up and out and is captured, while the beads flow on into a second chamber where air flow reoxygenates the beads and carries away their heat (25 kilowatts for their 8-meter-tall lab-scale reactor). The oxidized beads then loop back to start another round.
If there is one thing that the US has plenty of, it is coal.
Unfortunately, geological and/or mineral carbon storage is extremely expensive, can be very energy intensive and is not well enough understood for researchers to know how long the carbon would be trapped, how much geological and/or mineral capacity there is for storage, or how much it would cost.
Carbon dioxide storage is a dumb idea from the get go. However, being able to use coal without creating the type of smog enveloping Beijing is not.
Azrael wrote:Investing more money in researching, developing and deploying nuclear power would probably be more practical.
Yes, but US is in no rush to do so.
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Re: Alternative energy

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We need to study all of the things.
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
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Re: Alternative energy

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IOP | Real-world generating capacity of wind farms at large scales has been overestimated

Anyone advocating wind generated electric power should be first required to spend a year on a sailboat with no engine.
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Re: Alternative energy

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AFP | Japan extracts methane hydrate gas from seabed
The consortium, led by Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation, began initial work in February last year and on Tuesday started a two-week experimental production, an economy, trade and industry ministry official said. "It is the world's first offshore experiment producing gas from methane hydrate," the official said, adding that the team successfully collected methane gas extracted from the half-frozen substance.

Under the project, the consortium is to separate methane—the primary component of natural gas—from the solid clathrate compound under the seabed using the high pressures available at depth, officials said. A huge layer of methane hydrate containing 1.1 trillion cubic metres (38.5 trillion cubic feet) in natural gas—equivalent to Japan's consumption of the gas for 11 years—is believed to lie in the ocean floor off the coast of Shikoku island, western Japan, the officials said. "We aim to establish methane hydrate production technologies for practical use by the fiscal 2018 year" ending March 2019, a consortium official said.
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Re: Alternative energy

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Typhoon wrote:AFP | Japan extracts methane hydrate gas from seabed
The consortium, led by Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation, began initial work in February last year and on Tuesday started a two-week experimental production, an economy, trade and industry ministry official said. "It is the world's first offshore experiment producing gas from methane hydrate," the official said, adding that the team successfully collected methane gas extracted from the half-frozen substance.

Under the project, the consortium is to separate methane—the primary component of natural gas—from the solid clathrate compound under the seabed using the high pressures available at depth, officials said. A huge layer of methane hydrate containing 1.1 trillion cubic metres (38.5 trillion cubic feet) in natural gas—equivalent to Japan's consumption of the gas for 11 years—is believed to lie in the ocean floor off the coast of Shikoku island, western Japan, the officials said. "We aim to establish methane hydrate production technologies for practical use by the fiscal 2018 year" ending March 2019, a consortium official said.
How stable is this methane hydrate at surface temperatures and pressure? Can they just drop in a warm straw and suck the money out, or are they contemplating a mile-deep Sterno mining project?
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Typhoon
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Re: Alternative energy

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Nonc Hilaire wrote:
Typhoon wrote:AFP | Japan extracts methane hydrate gas from seabed
The consortium, led by Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation, began initial work in February last year and on Tuesday started a two-week experimental production, an economy, trade and industry ministry official said. "It is the world's first offshore experiment producing gas from methane hydrate," the official said, adding that the team successfully collected methane gas extracted from the half-frozen substance.

Under the project, the consortium is to separate methane—the primary component of natural gas—from the solid clathrate compound under the seabed using the high pressures available at depth, officials said. A huge layer of methane hydrate containing 1.1 trillion cubic metres (38.5 trillion cubic feet) in natural gas—equivalent to Japan's consumption of the gas for 11 years—is believed to lie in the ocean floor off the coast of Shikoku island, western Japan, the officials said. "We aim to establish methane hydrate production technologies for practical use by the fiscal 2018 year" ending March 2019, a consortium official said.
How stable is this methane hydrate at surface temperatures and pressure? Can they just drop in a warm straw and suck the money out, or are they contemplating a mile-deep Sterno mining project?
Some of the physics and technology involved is described here.

MH21 Research Consortium | Production of gas from methane hydrate

It's not easy, but appears to be doable.
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Re: Alternative energy

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

Straw.

Image
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Re: Alternative energy

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Nonc Hilaire wrote:Straw.

Image
Yes, I suppose it is. Sorry to not have answered your question directly.
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Re: Alternative energy

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Typhoon wrote:
Nonc Hilaire wrote:Straw.

Image
Yes, I suppose it is. Sorry to not have answered your question directly.
More information is always better. It points out that the gas will not migrate as in a normal tapping, and that the production can be controlled. In a normal gas well, it is use it or lose it and using it is costly if one needs LP containers. It seems here the producer can titrate supply to meet demand. Very sweet profitwise to whoever owns the rights to the deposits.

How do you think this ties into the international breastbeating about the southern islands?
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Re: Alternative energy

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Nonc Hilaire wrote:
Typhoon wrote:
Nonc Hilaire wrote:Straw.

Image
Yes, I suppose it is. Sorry to not have answered your question directly.
More information is always better. It points out that the gas will not migrate as in a normal tapping, and that the production can be controlled. In a normal gas well, it is use it or lose it and using it is costly if one needs LP containers. It seems here the producer can titrate supply to meet demand. Very sweet profitwise to whoever owns the rights to the deposits.
Interesting point.
Nonc Hilaire wrote:How do you think this ties into the international breastbeating about the southern islands?
I don't think it does. The resources thought to be around the Senkaku islands are of the conventional variety: oil

This deposit in in the Nankai Trough.

Image
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Re: Alternative energy

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Oklahoma earthquake linked to oil extraction wastewater
By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Scientists have linked the underground injection of oil-drilling wastewater to a magnitude-5.7 earthquake in 2011 that struck the US state of Oklahoma.

Wastewater injection from drilling operations has been linked to seismic events in the past, but these have typically been much smaller quakes.

They also have tended to occur in the first weeks or months of injection.

The study in Geology suggests that "induced seismicity" can occur years after wastewater injection begins.

Wastewater was first injected into Oklahoma's Wilzetta oilfields, near the town of Prague, some 18 years prior to the November 2011 series of quakes that included three of magnitude 5 or greater.

The new study adds to an increasing body of evidence that the injection of wastewater is correlated to an increase in seismic events.

A comprehensive review in 2012 by the US' National Academy of Sciences found that "injection for disposal of waste water derived from energy technologies into the subsurface does pose some risk for induced seismicity".

However, the report said the number of such documented events over several decades was small compared to the overall number of operations carried out.

In April 2012, a study by scientists at the US Geological Survey of the interior of the US found that events of magnitude 3 or greater had "abruptly increased in 2009" from 1.2 per year in the previous 50 years to more than 25 per year - although a number of gas and oil extraction methods may be implicated in the rise.

[...]
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Re: Alternative energy

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Due to the wind and dams being almost full, Portugal generated yesterday 90% of its energy needs from renewable sources. I believe we can sustain high levels of alternative energy production, if we stop listening to the doomsayers...
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Re: Alternative energy

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Plastic shopping bags make a fine diesel fuel, researchers report

Plastic shopping bags, an abundant source of litter on land and at sea, can be converted into diesel, natural gas and other useful petroleum products, researchers report.

The conversion produces significantly more energy than it requires and results in transportation fuels – diesel, for example – that can be blended with existing ultra-low-sulfur diesels and biodiesels. Other products, such as natural gas, naphtha (a solvent), gasoline, waxes and lubricating oils such as engine oil and hydraulic oil also can be obtained from shopping bags.

A report of the new study appears in the journal Fuel Processing Technology.

There are other advantages to the approach, which involves heating the bags in an oxygen-free chamber, a process called pyrolysis, said Brajendra Kumar Sharma, a senior research scientist at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center who led the research. The ISTC is a division of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois.

"You can get only 50 to 55 percent fuel from the distillation of petroleum crude oil," Sharma said. "But since this plastic is made from petroleum in the first place, we can recover almost 80 percent fuel from it through distillation."

Americans throw away about 100 billion plastic shopping bags each year, according to the Worldwatch Institute. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that only about 13 percent are recycled. The rest of the bags end up in landfills or escape to the wild, blowing across the landscape and entering waterways.

Plastic bags make up a sizeable portion of the plastic debris in giant ocean garbage patches that are killing wildlife and littering beaches. Plastic bags "have been detected as far north and south as the poles," the researchers wrote.

"Over a period of time, this material starts breaking into tiny pieces, and is ingested along with plankton by aquatic animals," Sharma said. Fish, birds, ocean mammals and other creatures have been found with a lot of plastic particles in their guts.

Whole shopping bags also threaten wildlife, Sharma said.

"Turtles, for example, think that the plastic grocery bags are jellyfish and they try to eat them," he said. Other creatures become entangled in the bags.

Previous studies have used pyrolysis to convert plastic bags into crude oil. Sharma's team took the research further, however, by fractionating the crude oil into different petroleum products and testing the diesel fractions to see if they complied with national standards for ultra-low-sulfur diesel and biodiesel fuels.

"A mixture of two distillate fractions, providing an equivalent of U.S. diesel #2, met all of the specifications" required of other diesel fuels in use today – after addition of an antioxidant, Sharma said.

"This diesel mixture had an equivalent energy content, a higher cetane number (a measure of the combustion quality of diesel requiring compression ignition) and better lubricity than ultra-low-sulfur diesel," he said.

The researchers were able to blend up to 30 percent of their plastic-derived diesel into regular diesel, "and found no compatibility problems with biodiesel," Sharma said.

"It's perfect," he said. "We can just use it as a drop-in fuel in the ultra-low-sulfur diesel without the need for any changes."
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Re: Alternative energy

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2011 Oklahoma Induced Earthquake May Have Triggered Larger Quake

PASADENA, Calif. — In a new study involving researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey, scientists observed that a human-induced magnitude 5.0 earthquake near Prague, Oklahoma in November 2011 may have triggered the larger M5.7 earthquake less than a day later. This research suggests that the M5.7 quake was the largest human-caused earthquake associated with wastewater injection.

"The observation that a human-induced earthquake can trigger a cascade of earthquakes, including a larger one, has important implications for reducing the seismic risk from wastewater injection," said USGS seismologist and coauthor of the study Elizabeth Cochran.

Historically, earthquakes in the central United States have been uncommon. Yet in the year 2011 alone, numerous moderate-size earthquakes occurred in Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio and Arkansas. Many of these earthquakes occurred near waste-water injection wells, and some have been shown to be caused by human activities.

The 2011 Oklahoma earthquake sequence included the November 6, 2011, M5.7 earthquake that ruptured a part of the Wilzetta fault system, a complex fault zone about 200 km (124 mi) in length near Prague, Oklahoma. Less than 24 hours prior to the M5.7 earthquake, a M5.0 foreshock occurred on November 5, 2011. That foreshock occurred near active waste-water disposal wells, and was linked in a previously published study to fluid injection in those wells. The earthquakes have not been directly linked to hydrofracturing.

The research published this week suggests that the foreshock, by increasing stresses where M5.7 mainshock ruptured, may have triggered the mainshock, which in turn, triggered thousands of aftershocks along the Wilzetta fault system, including a M5.0 aftershock on November 8, 2011. If this hypothesis is correct, the M5.7 earthquake would be the largest and most powerful earthquake ever associated with wastewater injection. All three earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 and greater along the Wilzetta fault exhibited strike-slip motion at three independent locations along the fault, suggesting that three separate portions of the Wilzetta fault system were activated.

The paper, "Observations of Static Coulomb Stress Triggering of the November 2011 M5.7 Oklahoma Earthquake Sequence," by D.F. Sumy, E.S. Cochran, K.M. Keranen, M. Wei, G.A. Abers, from the University of Southern California, USGS, Cornell University, Brown University, and the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, was published in the "Journal of Geophysical Research" this week.
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Re: Alternative energy

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Going solid-state could make batteries safer and longer-lasting
New research paves the way for rechargeable batteries with almost indefinite lifetimes, researchers say.
David L. Chandler | MIT News Office
August 17, 2015

[...]

The research team was able to analyze the factors that make for efficient ion conduction in solids, and home in on compounds that showed the right characteristics. The initial findings focused on a class of materials known as superionic lithium-ion conductors, which are compounds of lithium, germanium, phosphorus, and sulfur, but the principles derived from this research could lead to even more effective materials, the team says.

The research that led to a workable solid-state electrolyte was part of an ongoing partnership with the Korean electronics company Samsung, through the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ceder says. That alliance also has led to important advances in the use of quantum-dot materials to create highly efficient solar cells and sodium batteries, he adds.

This solid-state electrolyte has other, unexpected side benefits: While conventional lithium-ion batteries do not perform well in extreme cold, and need to be preheated at temperatures below roughly minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit, the solid-electrolyte versions can still function at those frigid temperatures, Ceder says.

The solid-state electrolyte also allows for greater power density — the amount of power that can be stored in a given amount of space. Such batteries provide a 20 to 30 percent improvement in power density — with a corresponding increase in how long a battery of a given size could power a phone, a computer, or a car.

"The quality of this work is top-tier,” says Ying Shirley Meng, an associate professor of nanoengineering at the University of California at San Diego, who was not involved in this work. “The team has a long, outstanding track record in computational materials science, and they succeeded again in providing the battery and materials communities new scientific insights to push the fields forward.”

Meng adds that this study "provides some very significant design principles for designing and optimizing new solid state electrode (SSE) materials. Now the experimentalists can explore the new phase space with this guidance and speed up SSE discovery. It is very exciting.”
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Re: Alternative energy

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Scientists move one step closer to turning water into hydrogen fuel, affordably

[...]

The biomaterial, called P22-Hyd, is made up of a modified enzyme, hydrogenase, protected within the protein shell of a bacterial virus. Taken together, the material forms a nano-reactor that catalyzes hydrogen formation 150 times more efficiently than the enzyme would in its original form.

The mechanism goes both ways. P22-Hyd breaks the chemical bonds in H2 O to produce hydrogen and oxygen, but it can also combine the two gases to generate power.

[...]
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Re: Alternative energy

Post by noddy »

of all the futuristic energy sources the one i have the biggest hopes for and most irrational desire to see succeed is hydrogen fuel cells.
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Re: Alternative energy

Post by Simple Minded »

noddy wrote:of all the futuristic energy sources the one i have the biggest hopes for and most irrational desire to see succeed is hydrogen fuel cells.
then after ten years of practical use, All "those who really care" will be screaming about how we are using too much water and destroying the planet.
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