Aug
19
A Big North Sea Oil Discovery
August 19, 2011 | 3 Comments
Statoil has confirmed their new oil field discovery will be classified as a giant oil field discovery. Two reservoir zones called the Aldous and Avaldsnes are believed to be communicating the petroleum. Combined the discovery should come in between 500 million and 1.2 billion barrels of recoverable oil equivalent. Note that’s ‘recoverable’ – making for [...]
Aug
18
Iron as a Catalyst Is Improved Again
August 18, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Iron as a catalyst is making news, especially in Europe where the element is suspected to have a role in the catalyst for the Rossi E-Cat. That might be the case as scientists at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique Varennes, Québec, Canada (INRS) have published a paper in Nature Communications showing an iron [...]
Aug
17
Looking For a Better Plastic Solar Cell
August 17, 2011 | 1 Comment
Lehigh University physicists Ivan Biaggio, professor of physics, and Pavel Irkhin, a Ph.D. candidate, have developed an imaging technique that makes it possible to directly observe light-emitting excitons as they diffuse in a new material that is being explored for its extraordinary electronic properties. The problem for low cost plastic based solar cells the absorption [...]
Aug
16
Fast Hydrogen Production Without Platinum
August 16, 2011 | 4 Comments
Researchers at the Pacific Northwest Lab (PNL) have used a common protein to guide the design of a material that can free hydrogen gas to store energy. The synthetic material works 10 times faster than the original source protein found in water-dwelling microbes. A common microbe stores energy in the bonds of hydrogen gas with [...]
Aug
15
Genetic Engineering Runs High Speed Metabolism In Reverse
August 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment
They must have some interesting brains storming sessions at Rice University. Bioengineering researchers at Rice have unveiled a new method for rapidly converting simple glucose, sugar, into biofuels and petrochemical substitutes. Rice’s team describes with a paper published online in Nature, how it reversed one of the most efficient of all metabolic pathways — the [...]
Aug
12
Better Rooftop Hydrogen Production
August 12, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Duke assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, Nico Hotz, proposes a hybrid option in which sunlight heats a combination of water and methanol in a maze of glass tubes on a rooftop. Using two catalytic reactions, the system produces hydrogen much more efficiently than current technology without [...]
Aug
11
Plastic Recycled Back to Oil Jumpstarts
August 11, 2011 | 7 Comments
JBI of Thorold, Ontario Canada has entered into an agreement with Rock-Tenn Company to convert Rock-Tenn’s mill by-product waste into petroleum products using JBI’s Plastic2Oil™ technology. JBI’s Plastic2Oil™ can use unwashed, mixed waste plastics. JBI developed and scaled up the original processor, then enhanced and commercialized a process that converts difficult to recycle waste plastics [...]
Aug
10
Algae Metabolism Is Now Documented
August 10, 2011 | Leave a Comment
In a collaboration of universities across the U.S., Iceland and the United Arab Emirates the metabolic network of the algae strain Chlamydomonas reinhardtii has been documented. This will provide a new platform for genomic data analysis and phenotype prediction. A metabolic network reconstruction encompasses existing knowledge about an organism’s metabolism and the genome. The research [...]
Feedburner
Reddit
Stumbleupon
