Energy

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy Joint BioEnergy Institute have identified the genetic origins of a microbial resistance to ionic liquids, based on a pair of genes discovered in a bacterium native to a tropical rainforest in Puerto Rico, and successfully introduced this resistance into a strain of E. coli bacteria. Yes, it's Frankenfuel, but hopefully anti-science zealots won't make creating an abomination of nature that leads to less fossil fuels. The burning of fossil fuels continues to release nearly 9 billion metric tons of excess carbon into the atmosphere each year to the…

A recent trend has seen government efforts to switch to energy sources that are variable - wind turbines and solar parks - but those have been expensive and have not caught on because grid structures, industry and private households don't want to deal with the fluctuations.  People want their lights to turn on when they want them, not when nature randomly decides. However, smarter energy management systems might make alternative energy schemes more palatable to consumers and business.  Today, alternative energy runs on an impossible business model. The government subsidizes the…

Worldwide installations of solar and wind power has skyrocketed. Since 2009, the heyday of government subsidies, global solar photovoltaic installations have increased about 40 percent a year on average, and the installed capacity of wind turbines has doubled. There's just one problem. It hasn't appeared to help much. No one wants wind turbines near their homes and the cost to create infrastruture in remote areas means the turbines wouldn't evenpay for themselves before they would need to be replaced. Solar panels have startling drops in efficiency after just a few weeks. Countries in Europe…

South Carolina is suing the federal government to save the mixed oxide fuel project at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where weapons-grade plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapon stockpiles will be converted to fuel for nuclear reactors. The MOX plant is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, just like the James Webb Space Telescope and whatever President Obama is calling the successor to the Constellation program he canceled because it had George Bush's name on it. In other words, it is just like 100% of government projects. He is not canceling the Obamacare…

Shale is the source of the United States' current natural gas boom and the lower greenhouse gas emissions it has brought. As if that is not wonderful enough, it could help solve another energy problem: what to do with radioactive waste from nuclear power plants.  The unique properties of the sedimentary rock and related clay-rich rocks make it ideal for storing the potentially dangerous spent fuel for millennia, according to a geologist studying possible storage sites who made a presentation at the latest National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). As energy scientists know…

The worldwide love affair with subsidized green energy is fading fast but that shouldn't be taken to mean the science is not solid.  In America, new power plants are difficult to get built and as a result the cost of electricity has gone up while the supply has gone down. Yet the government seems to still want to fast track alternative energy and regulations that allow small biomass plants may also help solve a grid problem that solar and wind energy only make worse. Small biomass power plants that can fit on a farm and can be built at relatively low cost may be better than giant wind…

Maybe photosynthesis can be improved. That may sound like blasphemy but the easy solution to growing more food is teaching crop plants to concentrate carbon dioxide in their leaves. That could increase photosynthetic efficiency by 60 percent and yields by as much as 40 percent, according to a new study. Obviously efficiency is not everything. An electric car is 90% efficient while a combustion car is only 25%, yet if you want to go up a hill you'd be crazy to think efficiency is what matters. Plant photosynthesis is a lowly 5 percent efficiency yet we would be ecstatic if solar panels could…

On a per capita electricity production basis, environmentalists are winning the war on energy Electricity for all, which was once considered the goal of technological progress, is now treated like a giant step on the road to an ecological Apocalypse. As a result, we've increased regulation and decreased generation and the price per kilowatt-hour has gone up and supply per capita has gone down. We can thank a confluence of bad ideas, chiefly subsidies for inefficient and expensive green alternatives, penalties for coal and natural gas, and a war on nuclear science. And every time there is a…

Wind farms are not very good. Yes, politicians embrace them because the unions advocating them donate heavily to campaigns, and environmentalists advocate them because they always advocate something new until it becomes popular (natural gas the 1980s, ethanol in the 1990s, then wind - anything but nuclear) but aside from a lot of dead endangered birds, wind hasn't helped much. But concern that wind farms would cause more global warming are overblown. They don't help, and they are unsightly and ridiculously expensive, but they sure don't hurt, even though they were previously implicated in…

Duckweed is a tiny floating plant  that often becomes a hard-to-control weed in ponds and small lakes. Yet these ecological lemons might become energy lemonade. It's not all bad, duckweed has been used to clean contaminated water and to produce pharmaceuticals, and now the genome of Greater Duckweed (Spirodela polyrhiza) has given this miniscule plant's potential as a biofuel source a big boost.  Simple and primitive, a duckweed plant consists of a single small kidney-shaped leaf about the size of a pencil-top eraser that floats on the surface of the water with a few thin roots…