Oct
31
Butanol Reality Check - Cobalt Biofuels
October 31, 2008 | 1 Comment
Last week saw Cobalt Biofuels raise $25 million in a ‘C’ round of financing. Cobalt is developing a process for producing biobutanol. This is major news as butanol is a heavy alcohol at four carbon atoms and much more difficult to make than lighter products like one carbon atom methanol or two carbon [...]
Oct
30
Watching Catalysts Work
October 30, 2008 | 3 Comments
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists have managed to observe catalysts restructuring themselves as gases are moved through. Using a state-of-the-art spectroscopy system the team watched, for the first time, as nanoparticles composed of two catalytic metals changed their composition in the presence of different reactants. Until now, scientists have had to rely on snapshots of [...]
Oct
29
Endless Energy From A New Physics?
October 29, 2008 | 1 Comment
There goes that skepticism trigger again. History is littered with ideas that turned out to be groundless from bleeding people in medicine to the parade of perpetual motion motors in physics. So it’s hard to give such ambition and revolutionary concepts much traction.
Except the germ theory panned out and something will have to give in [...]
Oct
28
Pop Goes the Oil Bubble - Spraying Goo On Your Finances
October 28, 2008 | 2 Comments
With a rush that may be even faster than the rising price of oil, prices have just collapsed. This is a good thing. In many ways:
Many people dream, invest and work at of developing alternative energy and fuel technologies and the price collapse is a reality check illustrating that as alternatives take market share or [...]
Oct
27
Fuel From Thin Air
October 27, 2008 | 6 Comments
Headlines like that really set off skeptical responses. But nature is doing it and has been at it for at least hundreds of millions of years. Cleaving off the O2 from water made animal life possible. It exists so it’s only a matter of time until science comes up with ways to do it too.
There [...]
Oct
24
The End of Food, Fuels and Life on Earth
October 24, 2008 | 5 Comments
Perhaps nothing rates as nutty as the idea now thoroughly adopted by so many that CO2 is a dangerous gas.
So lets have a quick review of what it will be like to have it treated as such. Carbon moves through the planetary system’s carbon cycle to the plant kingdom in one form only. Atmospheric CO2 [...]
Oct
23
A New Solar Sensation
October 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Ohio State University research leader Professor Malcolm Chisholm at the Department of Chemistry and two noted researchers at the National Taiwan University Department of Chemistry have their new photovoltaic solar material research published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
The excitement is about a synthesized electrically conductive plastic combined with metals including molybdenum [...]
Oct
22
It’s National Security, Stupid! - Reality Check
October 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Somehow since James Carville’s famous comment in the first Clinton campaign of “It’s the Economy, Stupid!” the press/media has dimly followed along and its doing the same idiot practice of letting campaign managers and spin doctors lead the press corps about like leashed pets. Groan . . . Just a few weeks ago the press [...]
Oct
21
New Numbers Equal A Big Synfuel Breakthrough
October 21, 2008 | 1 Comment
Maria Sudiro and her colleagues at the University of Padova, Department of Chemical Engineering in Italy and Foster Wheeler Italiana Spa, Milan, Italy are reporting that a new process could eliminate key obstacles to expanded use of coal gasification. Today’s processes for converting coal into much-needed liquid fuels are uneconomical again at $70 oil and [...]
Oct
20
Reality Check - Plans and Policies
October 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment
It seems like this election season is filled with more attention from the media than any in memory. Its not, rather there is a lot more venues for election information to get to people. The old media like newspapers and radio, the middle aged outlets of TV are supplanted by several cable news channels, news [...]
