Energy

As a futurist I speak and write about trends and the future. I am often asked questions about the future of one thing or another. In most cases I speak to general trends, not specific outcomes. In some areas I can be somewhat specific as I have taken the time to analyze and then cross reference what I have learned with the trends and forces I see. One of those areas is the price of oil. In early 2007, when the price of oil was $53 a barrel I was invited on a business program to predict what I thought the price of oil might be by the end of the year. At that time I said that I thought…

Magnetic confinement fusion could be a safe, environmentally friendly way to provide a substantial part of the world’s energy needs in the 21st century but before that can happen science needs to understand the complex behavior of hot collisionless plasmas (ion gases) in strong magnetic fields. Such plasmas are subject to temperature and density gradient driven microturbulence which leads to particle and heat losses and tends to keep the plasma from reaching a "burning" state. Simulations are necessary if we are to understand and control plasma microturbulence but, because fusion plasmas are…

There are many on-going themes in the large discussion of global warming and replacing fossil fuels with renewable, clean energy. One of the dominant ones is that alternative fuels such as solar are much more expensive than fossil fuels. This argument is often put forth by those entrenched in the status quo of the fossil fuel industry. The general argument is that our entire economic world will take a hit if we use solar as it is so much more expensive that oil. There was a recent news story here at ScientificBlogging saying that it will take another ten years for solar energy to be price-…

Combustion without flames can be used to build much more efficient industrial gas turbines for power generation than are used in current models and produce almost no polluting emissions, say Mohamed Sassi of The Petroleum Institute in Abu Dabi and colleagues Mohamed Hamdi and Hamaid Bentîcha, at the National School of Engineers of Monastir. They explain that flameless combustion, or more precisely flameless oxidation (FLOX), has become a focus of industrial research. It has, they say, the potential to avoid one of the major noxious pollutants from gas turbines, NOx, or nitrogen oxides. In…

Chemists are describing development of a “revolutionary” process for converting plant sugars into hydrogen, which could be used to cheaply and efficiently power vehicles equipped with hydrogen fuel cells without producing any pollutants. The process involves combining plant sugars, water, and a cocktail of powerful enzymes to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide under mild reaction conditions. They say it is the world’s most efficient method for producing hydrogen. The new system helps solve the three major technical barriers to the so-called “hydrogen economy,” researchers said. Those…

In many homes, an employee from the electric or gas company comes by to read the meter and you only find out power consumption after the fact. That doesn't tell you precisely how much energy the customer has used at what times or with which devices but a new technology being developed will allow private households to check their power consumption – at all times of the day and night - and save a lot of money in the process. This new solution enables intelligent metering technologies, says says ISE project manager Dr. Harald Schäffler of the system being tested with Oldenburg-based energy…

Even with oil prices at $100 a barrel, it could take 10 or more years of intensive research and development to reduce the cost of solar energy to levels competitive with petroleum, according to Harry Gray, Ph.D., the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry and Founding Director of the Beckman Institute at the California Institute of Technology. He is the principal investigator in an NSF funded Phase I Chemical Bonding Center (CBC) – a Caltech/MIT collaboration – and a principal investigator at the Caltech Center for Sustainable Energy Research (CCSER). The single biggest challenge, Gray said…

In the last 20 years, physicists have, after drilling down into ever smaller particles of matter come to this conclusion, that everything is energy This, to some degree confirms some of the underpinnings of eastern philosophies and religions. If everything is energy then the century long human behavior of equating energy to fossil fuels is put into proper perspective: an incredibly narrow viewpoint. We are now entering a new age called the Shift Age One of the characteristics of the Shift Age is that it will become known as the time when all kinds of alternative and renewable sources of…

As gas prices continue to climb, alternative fuels get a lot of attention but how close are they? Scientists atArgonne National Laboratory are working to chemically manipulate algae for production of the next generation of renewable fuels – hydrogen gas. Some varieties of algae, a kind of unicellular plant, contain an enzyme called hydrogenase that can create small amounts of hydrogen gas. Tiede said many believe this is used by Nature as a way to get rid of excess reducing equivalents that are produced under high light conditions, but there is little benefit to the plant. “We believe there…

Independent tests conducted by engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory on a BMW Hydrogen 7 Mono-Fuel demonstration vehicle have found that the car's hydrogen-powered engine surpasses the super-ultra low-emission vehicle (SULEV) level, the most stringent emissions performance standard to date. "The BMW Hydrogen 7's emissions were only a fraction of SULEV level, making it one of the lowest emitting combustion engine vehicles that have been manufactured," said Thomas Wallner, a mechanical engineer who leads Argonne's hydrogen vehicle testing activities. "…