Tidal Turbine for Inter Scottish Island Tidal Flow Harvest. Click image for the largest view.

The test device located off Orkney is providing electricity for homes and businesses on the northern Orkney island of Eday to prove that the technology can operate efficiently in Scotland’s fast-flowing tides and that monitoring and maintenance operations can be honed and to help reduce costs in operations and installation.

SPR plans to use this technology as part of the world’s first tidal turbine array in the Sound of Islay. The company’s plans to develop a 10MW tidal array in Islay received planning consent from the Scottish government in March 2011.

Keith Anderson, chief executive officer of Scottish Power Renewables fills in the background with, “Engineers were able to install the device during atrocious weather conditions and it has been operating to a very high standard ever since. We have already greatly developed our understanding of tidal-power generation and this gives us confidence ahead of implementing larger-scale projects in Islay and the Pentland Firth.”

“The performance of the first HS1000 device has given us great confidence so far,” Anderson added.

The 1MW HS1000 tidal turbine is said to be seen as one of the worlds most advanced tidal turbine designs, a prototype device has been generating electricity in Norway for more than six years. The design is based on a mixture of technology used in traditional onshore wind turbines, subsea oil and gas production and in hydropower plants.

Andritz Hydro Hammerfest’s managing director Stein Atle Andersen offers, “The 1MW pre-commercial device is an important step in our staged strategy for developing reliable and cost-efficient tidal energy converting devices and power plants. The tests being carried out so far have confirmed the design basis for the technology and given comfort concerning the device’s capacity.”

Brimming with well-earned confidence Andersen adds, “We are still early in the testing program with endurance, availability and reliability being the most imminent factors for asserting a proper basis for developing commercial tidal-energy power plants. However, we are already well into design engineering for the first power plant.”

Six years on site operations will do that for an engineering effort.

All is not in ideal circumstances though. The tides where the tests are underway run water through between the islands very fast.  Although coming up on six months is a good confidence builder the prototype will need a close inspection.  Should the prototype pass inspection within specifications the launch of a system of tidal turbines could get underway.

The beauty of the Scot’s plan is there seem to be little in other costs involved.  A tidal capture behind a dam would add a dam cost and other significant investments to hold back flow for extended use.  The Scottish location, while not fully operational throughout the course of the day, has two periods when the flow reverses yielding a down period twice each day.  Still, that down time is very short and absolutely predictable – years into the future.

The Scots are quite blessed by topography and planetary position. Like Iceland with its huge repository of geothermal, Scotland could serve a model of local self sufficiency.

This is a fine example of making what is local pay off.

Copper – the stuff of pennies and electrical wiring – is also one of the few metals that can turn carbon dioxide into hydrocarbon fuels with relatively little energy.  But copper oxidizes easily, turning green and becoming unstable as a catalyst.

It’s long been known a copper electrode stimulated with voltage acts as a strong catalyst, setting off an electrochemical reaction with CO2 that reduces the CO2 to methane or methanol.  Researchers around the world have studied copper’s potential as an energy-efficient means of recycling CO2 emissions in power plants.  But the oxygen bonds to the copper slowing the reaction and yielding unwanted byproducts such as carbon monoxide and formic acid.  It’s been a dead end, until:

MIT’s researchers have come up with a solution that may further reduce the energy needed for copper to convert carbon dioxide, while also making the metal much more stable.

Copper and Gold Nanoparticle Production Samples

They’ve engineered tiny nanoparticles of copper mixed with gold, which is resistant to corrosion and oxidation. The researchers observed that a minor proportion of gold makes copper much more stable. In the experiments the coated electrodes with the hybrid nanoparticles required much less energy for the engineered nanoparticles to react with carbon dioxide, compared to nanoparticles of pure copper.

The paper detailing the results will appear in the journal Chemical Communications. (Check this link over the coming weeks for a search.)

Co-author Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli associate professor of mechanical engineering and biological engineering at MIT says the findings point to a potentially energy-efficient means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, “You normally have to put a lot of energy into converting carbon dioxide into something useful. We demonstrated hybrid copper-gold nanoparticles are much more stable, and have the potential to lower the energy you need for the reaction.”

Hamad-Schifferli explains the team chose to engineer particles at the nanoscale in order to “get more bang for their buck”.  The smaller the particles, the larger the surface area available for interaction with carbon dioxide molecules. “You could have more sites for the CO2 to come and stick down and get turned into something else,” she said.

The team settled on gold as a suitable metal to combine with copper mainly because of its known properties.  The gold with copper combination has been tried at much larger scales hinting that the oxidation issue could be solved.

To make the nanoparticles, Hamad-Schifferli and her colleagues mixed salts containing gold into a solution of copper salts. They heated the solution, creating nanoparticles that fused copper with gold.  Postdoc Zichuan Xu then put the nanoparticles through a series of reactions, turning the solution into a powder that was used to coat a small electrode.

To test the nanoparticles’ reactivity, Xu placed the electrode in a beaker of solution and bubbled carbon dioxide into it. He applied a small voltage to the electrode, and measured the resulting current in the solution. The team reasoned that the resulting current would indicate how efficiently the nanoparticles were reacting with the gas: If CO2 molecules were reacting with sites on the electrode – and then releasing to allow other CO2 molecules to react with the same sites – the current would appear as a certain potential was reached, indicating regular “turnover.” If the molecules monopolized sites on the electrode, the reaction would slow down, delaying the appearance of the current at the same potential.

Over the course of the experiments the team found that the potential applied to reach a steady current was much smaller for hybrid copper-gold nanoparticles than for pure copper and gold – an indication that the amount of energy required to run the reaction was much lower than required when using nanoparticles made of pure copper.

For the future Hamad-Schifferli said she hopes to look more closely at the structure of the gold-copper nanoparticles to find an optimal configuration for converting carbon dioxide. So far, the team has demonstrated the effectiveness of nanoparticles composed of one-third gold and two-thirds copper, as well as two-thirds gold and one-third copper.

The team has given the cost issue some thought and allows that coating industrial-scale electrodes partly with gold can get expensive. However, Hamad-Schifferli points out the energy savings and the recycling potential for the metals in the electrodes may balance the initial costs.

Hamad-Schifferli explains the overall view with, “It’s a tradeoff. Gold is obviously more expensive than copper. But if it helps you get a product that’s more attractive like methane instead of carbon dioxide, and at lower energy consumption, then it may be worth it. If you could reuse it over and over again, and the durability is higher because of the gold, that’s a check in the plus column.”

The other team members are Yang Shao-Horn, the Gail E. Kendall Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, and Erica Lai, class of 2014.

It looks like the combustion effluent of CO2 is going to have value soon.

The new solid form material tops the current technology of using an amine fluid as a material for collecting CO2 in a chemical absorption technique.  The Hitachi amine fluid is said to save 30% in energy costs during the CO2 release phase.  Hitachi is planning to conduct a field test of the amine fluid technique in the aim of commercializing it.  Keep those energy requirements in mind as the comparison continues.

The newly developed solid adsorbent material is made using cerium oxide for collecting and accumulating carbon dioxide with the CO2 production from coal fired power generation stations foremost in mind.  Compared with zeolitic solid adsorbents, which are commercially available and commonly used for collecting CO2, the amount of CO2 adsorbed by the new material is about 13 times larger, according to Hitachi.

A problem is the traditional solid adsorbent materials preferentially adsorb the moisture that exists in exhaust gas streams, making it difficult to efficiently separate the CO2. The cerium oxide employed for the new solid adsorbent material can efficiently adsorb CO2 even when there is moisture.

Next Hitachi has increased the number of adsorption sites of the new adsorbent material by using its exhaust purification catalyst technologies so that more CO2 can be adsorbed. Specifically, to increase adsorption efficiency, a second component that attracts CO2 was added to the surface of the adsorbent material.

This is all constructed by a development using a template method for forming pillar-shaped fine pores on cerium oxide that are regular hollow structures. As a result, CO2 molecules are dispersed inside the fine pores and more likely to contact with the adsorption sites.

The amine fluid is up for conducting a field test of the technique in the aim of commercializing it.  But the chemical absorption technique using the amine fluid requires energy for reheating a liquid containing CO2 with vapor from a steam turbine and separating system for collecting the CO2.

That creates a demand to reduce the energy required for collecting CO2.  Hitachi is developing a collection technique using the solid material that has a low specific heat and enables reducing the amount of steam vapor.

To date, the report out of the Nikkei says the new method using the solid adsorbent material requires an amount of energy equivalent to that required by the chemical absorption technique using the amine fluid.  Hitachi plans to further reduce the required amount of energy by 20% or more by improving the solid adsorbent material and building an optimal system in the aim of commercializing the new material in or after 2025.

Hitachi Process Flow Graph of New Flue Gas Treatment. Click image for the largest view.

Hitachi is getting set up with the amine fluid.  A few days ago Hitachi announced it has signed a license agreement with Solios Environment Inc. to design and supply Enhanced All-Dry (EAD) Scrubber technology, jointly developed with Solios Environment Inc, for the global electric utility market.

Solios’ EAD Scrubber technology is the original circulating semi-dry scrubber technology developed by Solios in the 1980s that has been widely applied in industrial sectors.  The EAD kit effectively removes SO2 as well as SO3, HCl, mercury and particulate matter from flue gas.  The EAD Scrubber technology has the additional advantages of low capital cost, low water consumption and dry byproducts, avoiding costly waste water treatment.  Hitachi’s role is applying the EAD Scrubber technology with a modular approach that allows unlimited scrubber capacity, virtually unlimited turndown, and enhanced system layout flexibility.

This sets the company out in front for introducing the amine fluid CO2 capture technology.

CO2 is very useful beyond being plant food for plants to grow what animals and people need to eat.  But the stuff is quite problematic to process.  Catching CO2 isn’t so hard as its happily reactive; it’s the separation and collection that pose the problems. Keeping CO2 isolated and recapturing is a dream of industry and environmentalists for very different reasons.

Whether one sees gold or global disaster, CO2 is a single carbon atom with a couple oxygen atoms hanging on in gas form.  It’s a great resource for making food and fuel.

Hitachi gets us closer to practical capture and recycling, but there is still a large gap to close for synthetically recycling CO2 into useful foods and fuels.

Deli Wang, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering quoted in the University press release said, “This is a clean way to generate clean fuel.”  The study paper is at the journal Nanoscale.

The nanowires look quite like trees in the photo, becoming a forest.  The team’s press release offers Wang’s explanation – The trees’ vertical structure and branches are keys to capturing the maximum amount of solar energy because the vertical structure of trees grabs and adsorbs light while flat surfaces simply reflect it.  It’s similar to retinal photoreceptor cells in the human eye. There’s a clue in images of Earth from space, light reflects off of flat surfaces such as the ocean or deserts, while forests appear darker.

Nanotrees for Generating Hydrogen. Click image for the largest view. Image credit, Wang Research Group, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

That intuitive grasp of the opportunity to build a more three-dimensional structure suggested a “3D branched nanowire array”.  Inside the forest the process called photoelectrochemical water splitting produces hydrogen gas.  This process uses sunlight energy with no greenhouse gas byproduct. By comparison, the current conventional way of producing hydrogen relies on generated electricity or high temperature reforming using fuel sources

Ke Sun, a PhD student in electrical engineering who led the project said, “Hydrogen is considered to be clean fuel compared to fossil fuel because there is no carbon emission, but the hydrogen currently used is not generated cleanly.”  Clearly the team has a “clean” motive at least as far as most likely the funding and perhaps further research.  That’s fine if they get to a low cost hydrogen generation system.

On the technical details Wang’s team has developed a way to harvest more sunlight using the vertical nanotree structure that is said to produce more hydrogen fuel efficiently compared to planar counterparts.

Along with the vertical structure efficiency gains, the structure maximizes hydrogen gas output.  Sun explains for example, on the flat wide surface of a pot of boiling water, bubbles must become large to come to the surface. In the nanotree structure, very small gas bubbles of hydrogen can be extracted much faster.

Sun said, “Moreover, with this structure we have enhanced by at least 400,000 times the surface area for chemical reactions.”

But aside from the commentary, neither the press release nor the study abstract are detailing how much hydrogen is produced per surface area.  No information is discussed on the costs per area.  There isn’t any data on the operation.

Still, the concept is a striking and effective innovation on the quality of sunlight and its harvest.  If the numbers on building modules are reasonable and operating costs low this is an idea that suggests a little sunlit area could go a long way for making hydrogen fuel.

For the long-term Wang’s team is aiming for artificial photosynthesis.  Artificial photosynthesis is a fine idea, but generating hydrogen is a mighty fine idea on its own that’s deserves a closer look and perhaps development.

Wang’s team hopes to mimic photosynthesis to also capture CO2 from the atmosphere, reducing carbon emissions, and convert it into hydrocarbon fuel.

Sun said, “We are trying to mimic what the plant does to convert sunlight to energy. We are hoping in the near future our ‘nanotree’ structure can eventually be part of an efficient device that functions like a real tree for photosynthesis.”

There’s quite a bit of competition in the artificial photosynthesis effort.  Everyone remains bedeviled in capturing the CO2.  The recombining of the carbon and hydrogen remains economically elusive as well.

The team is upfront with their plans. Its also being said the team is studying alternatives to zinc oxide, which absorbs the sun’s ultraviolet light, but has stability issues that affect the lifetime usage of the nanotree structure.

This looks like another in a series of sunlight to hydrogen processes of which there are many.  It’s noticeable now that few ever note the actual productivity per area.  This should be casting a long shadow.  CO2 is a very small part of the atmosphere; its harvest at scale is going to be a major hurdle.  Competition with plants for getting to carbon molecules that are useful or easily reformed to fuel products is another substantial hurdle.

The test should be, can the research ideas get competitive to the common processes to free hydrogen?  Electrolysis isn’t cheap nor is steam reforming.  There is a huge market for hydrogen now.  Should a market scale low cost hydrogen fuel cell break out, a lot of researchers and funding sources are going to wonder why they chased artificial photosynthesis when they may well have a block busting revolution on the self.

This concept looks like a great idea. Let’s hope the politically correct atmosphere doesn’t derail a good idea off onto a shelf somewhere.

First off, South Dakota’s government has approved a subsidy of 20 cents per gallon for ethanol plants to transition over to butanol.  The cap for the subsidy is $4 million per facility equaling 20 million gallons.  The state’s own Redfield Energy is converting its 50 million gallon ethanol facility over to a 40 million gallons of biobutanol, in partnership with Gevo. The math?  It’s 40/18 million bushels of corn or 2.22 gallons.  Butanol is nearly the same in energy value as gasoline, so it’s expected to be a drop in replacement.

As noted in the post on Feb 24, Big Oil has invested in CoolPlanet and it’s a good guess that more investing is coming.   “Big Oil” as in the oil refiner Valero who already owns 8% of the ethanol production in the U.S. now, is a major backer in Mascoma.

Mascoma’s  foundation technology comes from consolidated bioprocessing, in which Mascoma’s engineered microorganism both extracts the available sugars from biomass and ferments them, all in one step. No need for those additional enzymes to extract sugars from biomass, which are generally available at 50 cents a gallon today, and perhaps as little as 30 cents per gallon in the future.  Cutting those costs out of production makes cellulose based alcohol a much more competitive fuel product.

It’s all working well for corn, new butanol and ramping up of cellulose production.  Another big ethanol producer, POET, has announced a stunning deal with DSM to start an ethanol joint venture.  This follows news that POET’s Project Liberty is to cost $250 million producing 25 million gallons annually.  The math at Project Liberty is a massive improvement.  Poet’s first run at cellulose started back in 2008, had costs in the $6 a gallon range.  Project Liberty figures to get to $1.85 – more than a 2/3rds reduction.

Valero is invested in Mascoma’s estimated $232 million first commercial facility at Kinross, Michigan.  This isn’t to be a corn fed plant.  Mascoma’s’s technology is working on hardwoods because hardwood can be gathered and shipped in with better economics than corn stover and operated at larger capacities.

The Kinross facility is designed to reach 40 million gallons, while POET has indicated that it believes that 25 million gallons is the sustainable capacity for add-on cellulosic ethanol capacity at corn ethanol plants.  This is a major difference – drawn from those gathering and shipping costs.

Mascoma appears to be slightly ahead of POET, projecting a $1.77 unsubsidized operating cost per gallon, compared to the $1.85 estimated for POET.

It’s still early for figuring what path cellulosic will grow to dominate.  There’s still the new guy, CoolPlanet with that big rich investor base.

CoolPlanet’s technology is to make synthetic hydrocarbon fuels based on biomass from plant photosynthesis that absorbs carbon from the air.  The announced focus is heading towards Miscanthus grass. The technology is said to make exact replacements for gasoline that will operate in the current gasoline fueled fleet and can make even more advanced “superfuels” for even higher gas mileage and better performance in future vehicles.

Miscanthus isn’t the only potential feedstock.  So far as one can tell, CoolPlanet is a kind of pyrolysis, some kind of revolutionary thermal/mechanical processor that directly inputs raw biomass such as woodchips, crop residue, algae, etc. and produces multiple distinct gas streams for catalytic upgrading to conventional fuel components.

Over the course of three steps three fuel precursors are produced.  Then a range of simple one-step catalytic conversion processes produce useful products such as eBTX (high octane gasoline), synthetic diesel and proprietary ultra-high crop yield super fuels.

The waste is the highly desirable biochar, in the form of activated carbon that can be used as a soil enhancer similar to “terra preta”.

Even more encouraging is the CoolPlanet model is design to be small and close to the feedstock source and even mobile.  As seen in the POET Mascoma competition, the gathering and shipping can limit growth.

There’s a lot of “oil” interest in CoolPlanet already.

The independent oil industry understands full well the implications of higher cost fossil petroleum sources.  As the Chevron folks say quite pointedly, “we’ll need and use every molecule”.

It’s also a good time to get in.  With Obama and the Federal Reserve busily pouring dollars into the economy creating a pyrolysis of the dollar so to speak, having cash isn’t a real good idea when its clear that some early renewable fuel technologies are getting competitive and can now become real working assets.  Those dollars of today will be earning inflated dollars later – one reason rich folks don’t scream as loud as the middle class and poor.

Should CoolPlanet get to scale, the estimated costs the POET and Mascoma processes could be in for real competition.  In biofuels pennies matter, two cents saved over 50 million gallons comes to a million dollars.

But we can’t call a dominator yet, POET has already shown it can slash production costs; Mascoma will surely work to the same ends.

Renewables based in ethanol and butanol are about to arrive at scale.  It took the U.S. corn farmers decades to get to nearly a million barrels a day, it won’t take the cellulosic guys anywhere near that long and by then a lot of the corn will go to butanol.
One million barrels a day done, ten million barrels a day to go.  It’s looking more probable than possible now.

The capstone of the class was when Dr. Mitchell Swartz, of JET Energy presented experimental results showing excess power in Palladium/Deuterium and Nickel/Hydrogen systems, with a particular focus on experiments he himself has conducted.

The news reported is Dr. Swartz and Prof. Hagelstein demonstrated cold fusion openly for the attending scientists and engineers.  Using the Jet Energy NANOR device they demonstrated a significant energy gain, greater than 10, much larger than the previous open demonstration back in 2003 with a 2.3 yield.  The demonstration was for the class, meaning no attempt was made to assuage skeptics.  Add the Jet Energy NANOR to the things to watch.

For the highly literate, Dr. Swartz is going to firm ground on the technical description of cold fusion or Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), as least as far as his perception is concerned.  Swartz says, “The name should be LANR, for “lattice assisted nuclear reactions”.  That is a valid point concerning his technology.

Drs. Fleischmann and Pons actually described their work as “electrochemical experiments” that had produced more energy (“excess energy”) than could be accounted for by input energy and available chemical reactions.  Where “Cold Fusion” came from is due some research – if anyone cares.  Over the media explosion that bombed Fleischmann and Pons and the failures of others to replicate their work the Cold Fusion moniker has acquired an undeserved dubious reputation.

Then came LENR for low energy nuclear reactions.  The phrase and term work fine, but in reality now, with the nickel based work and the increasing improvement of the palladium work, the idea these are low energy is getting to be a vast understatement.

However the moniker battle shapes up, it hardly matters.  The research field’s events are definitely running temperatures lots cooler than any of the big money fusion projects and the energy outputs just keep on climbing.  Depending on the skill set of the experiment replicators, lattice based reactions are getting better and those with well-engineered experiments are showing good returns on the energy input.

It seems that after 5 (about 2 hour classes each day) days of Prof. Hagelstein sharing his breakthrough explanatory theory, the demonstration had the desired effect.  Perhaps the class will encourage the participants to continue their research and more improvement can come over time.

This week also has Defkalion back in the news.  The firm has a short video on YouTube of some testing taking place on one of their “bare” reactors.  This comes soon after the firm offered qualified testing opportunities to worthy scientists and industrial concerns.

The company commented on the firm’s website forum about the video saying, “As you can notice, this is a setup with one Hyperion “bare” reactor testing. The setup of the third party independent tests is with two identical reactors (one active, one not-active) working/tested in parallel, as described in our latest Press Release.”

At another posting the firm (translated) says, “. . . this video . . . is not suitable “tool” for the interpretation of phenomena or the calculation of the performance of reactors or for any other conclusion, and the duration of but also because of deliberately “scattered” content. Consider it as an honest view of some of the places where they work every day our people.”

Before you hit the comment link or email your humble writer, please consider this:

Forty years ago only a visionary could imagine fields free of weeds, only the crop growing.  Twenty years ago the technology was common across the developed world.

Roundup combined with genetically modified crops revolutionized food production.

By about ten years ago the extremists had decided that the genetically modified crops would poison or kill them and law was established where extremists held sway to restrict and eliminate the new crops use.

Over a generation has passed and not a single bit or any evidence, study or proof exists that roundup resistant crops hurt anyone.  But the human resistance has killed tens millions of people by starvation and millions more will die from the denial of technical potential, facts based in experience and human nature’s tendency to be fearful.

Let the visionaries run their courses as best they can and hope that one at least gets to the market with something great for all of us.  Then be on guard for the extremists who will try to take it away from you.

The new finding gives graphene’s potential a most surprising dimension – graphene can also be used for distilling alcohol by removing water.

Water evaporates through graphene sheets prepared by the team as quickly as if the membranes were not there at all.  The UM researchers have found that it is superpermeable with respect to water.  That opens the possibility to produce alcohol without the energy input for heating the water and alcohol mix to drive the alcohol out in the separation.  That would be a substantial energy input savings for ethanol production.

Dr. Nair with Graphene Sheet - Image from the University of Manchester

Graphene is one of the wonders of the science world, it’s the thinnest known material in the universe and the strongest ever measured. It conducts electricity and heat better than any other material. It is the stiffest one too and, at the same time, it is the most ductile.

The UN team studied membranes from a chemical derivative of graphene called graphene oxide. Graphene oxide is the same graphene sheet but it is randomly covered with other molecules such as hydroxyl groups OH-. The graphene oxide sheets are stacked on top of each other and form a laminate.

The researchers prepared such laminates that were hundreds of times thinner than a human hair but remained strong, flexible and are easy to handle.  Then when a metal container was sealed with such a film, even the most sensitive equipment was unable to detect air or any other gas, including helium, to leak through.

Graphene Sheet Water Filter Prep. Click image for more info, or see the Science link above for complete details.

When the researchers tried the same with ordinary water, they found with complete surprise that it evaporates without noticing the graphene seal. The water molecules diffused through the graphene-oxide membranes with such a great speed that the evaporation rate was the same independently whether the container was sealed or completely open.

Experiment leader Dr. Rahul Nair explains this way, “Graphene oxide sheets arrange in such a way that between them there is room for exactly one layer of water molecules. They arrange themselves in one-molecule thick sheets of ice, which slide along the graphene surface with practically no friction. If another atom or molecule tries the same trick, it finds that graphene capillaries either shrink in low humidity or get clogged with water molecules.”

Professor Geim follows up with, “Helium gas is hard to stop. It slowly leaks even through a millimeter-thick window glass but our ultra-thin films completely block it. At the same time, water evaporates through them unimpeded. Materials cannot behave any stranger. You cannot help wondering what else graphene has in store for us.”

Dr. Irina Grigorieva who also participated in the research points out the process advantage, “This unique property can be used in situations where one needs to remove water from a mixture or a container, while keeping in all the other ingredients.”  The idea has impressive dewatering potential.

Dr. Nair throws in the ‘proof’ positive with, “Just for a laugh, we sealed a bottle of vodka with our membranes and found that the distilled solution became stronger and stronger with time. Neither of us drinks vodka but it was great fun to do the experiment.”

The vodka experiment made it to the research paper.  Yet the team members are not offering visions of use in distilleries in particular, or offer any immediate ideas for applications.  But we can just be certain serious attention is being given to the paper by ethanol researchers.

The basic research the UM team is doing does prompt a comment, albeit quite humble from Professor Geim, “The properties are so unusual that it is hard to imagine that they cannot find some use in the design of filtration, separation or barrier membranes and for selective removal of water.”

The graphene filters are not on the market or anticipated any time soon.  The production cost of graphene for such a use isn’t even suggested or known but the research pathway to find out is now here.  But the lifetime of this the new “filter” if such a term will do for now, looks to be very long indeed.  And cutting the cost of heating the whole of the water and alcohol mix to get the water out is mostly removed, an awful lot of alcohol production that isn’t economic now, would be.

It’s very significant good news for the alterative renewable fuel folks.  There’s lots more here than just ethanol potential, getting the water out cheaply is going to have lots of applications.

This contrasts with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) standing record of never approving a new reactor design.  The December 2011 “approval” by the NRC of the Westinghouse AP1000 is not a new reactor at all; rather it’s a next generation design of existing technology.

Clearly U.S. Federal government is working at cross-purposes.  A fine, expensive and consumer and industrial damaging mess is sure to ensue.

The DOE has new cost-sharing arrangements with private industry to support design and licensing activities.  With considerable astonishment, taxpayers are going to be funding one agency to pay the fees of another.  Make that Astounded.

Small Modular Reactor Samples. Click image for the largest view.

The good news, aside from the circumstances is the DOE intends ultimately to fund up to two designs for small modular reactors (SMR) through a cost-shared partnership, which will support first-of-a-kind engineering, design certification and licensing.  The draft Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is now out to solicit input from the industry for preparing a full FOA that’s aiming at a reactor deployment date about 2022.

The DOE’s FOA seeks applications for two grants, estimated to total $452 million over five years. The funding anticipates paying up to half the cost of developing and deploying perhaps two small modular reactor designs.

The tooth gnashing fact is that’s not going to be enough money and it leaves all but the chosen one or two designs at a major disadvantage.  This after the Solyndra debacle and others has thoughtful observers realizing that bureaucrats are picking the winners before the competition starts.  That is a terrible policy; a huge waste of resources and the best design is sure to be left out when historic experience is considered.  It will be a lobbyist’s game any moment now.

At issue are small, compact reactors of around 300 MWe and lower in capacity, a third or less of the size of the typical commercial nuclear power plant built so far.  These kinds of plants could potentially offer a range of features in terms of safety, construction and siting as well as potential economic benefits.  But if only one or two are chosen the circumstances for users will be limited or force excess costs to make a mandated choice instead of an optimal one for the situation.

At this size reactors are modular or have a ‘plug and play’ nature, which means they could be made in factories and transported to generation sites.  That manufacturing approach over a custom build method offers economies of scale reducing both capital costs and construction times. The small size could make them suitable for small electric grids and markets that cannot support large reactors costs, production or regulatory expense.

Bravely, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu described the funding as a “significant step” in designing, manufacturing, and exporting small modular reactors.  It takes courage to come out with what is obviously a poorly thought out policy.  Yet, the bravery may be driven by the Congress abandoning its responsibility to organize the law in a fashion that resembles common sense.

Chu is bright enough and has enough outside the beltway experience to understand and say, “America’s choice is clear – we can either develop the next generation of clean energy technologies, which will help create thousands of new jobs and export opportunities here in America, or we can wait for other countries to take the lead.”

Meanwhile – the NRC remains embroiled in a managerial mess.  The commissioners and the Chairman are still at odds, and the oversight of the media has disappeared, the Congress along with it. There is no reasonable expectation anything of consequence is going to happen any time soon, and it’s an election year as well.

There is a lot at stake if such a plan proceeds.  Westinghouse is developing its own 200 MWe SMR, and the information has escaped that Westinghouse’s approved AP1000 nuclear reactor design was supported through a cost-shared agreement with DOE.  This information leads one to suspect that Westinghouse may be looking for a quick taxpayer funded catch up.

There is a long list of technologies with potential. (See Brian Wang’s page at NextBigFuture.)

NuScale Power Inc’s 45 MWe NuScale reactor and Babcock & Wilcox’s 160 MWe mPower should both be eligible, too. The NRC is currently involved in pre-application activities on both designs in anticipation of a design certification application for the NuScale reactor in the first months of 2012, followed by one for the mPower design towards the end of 2013.  These one should think, are the leaders.

The list of good ideas out there is grand, covering three major technologies.  The light water reactors list includes Babcock & Wilcox, NuScale Power Inc., Westinghouse and Holtec’s Inherently Safe Modular Underground Reactor at 140 MWe.

The high temperature gas-cooled reactors are coming from AREVA’s Antares, General Atomics model called Gas Turbine Modular Helium Reactor and Pebble Bed Modular Reactor Ltd.’s reactor named conveniently, the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor.

The liquid metal cooled and fast reactor list is equally impressive.  Here are GE Hitachi’s Nuclear Power Reactor Innovative Small Module, Hyperion Power Generation’s Hyperion Power Module and Toshiba’s – Toshiba 4S for Super Small, Safe and Simple.

That’s 10, add in a couple of thorium fueled ones and that would be a dozen.  The Feds expect to give one or two 40% of a billion dollars head start.  How is that going to work out for the country?

Wouldn’t it be better to just completely revamp the NRC?

Admittedly the DOE must be under stress from the machinations over at the NRC.  And from a government mind, that plan might seem great.  For the rest of us it looks like a waste from the start and a market distortion for decades, perhaps centuries to come.

Ugh.

International Petroleum Exchange Board

The answer to the headline question is – both.  But for nearly everyone the impact of swings in the oil market is serious business.  Cook gives us a very good view of what’s going on inside the market and what drives it.  The short answer from his article is again both, but what is interesting is the prediction of a bust and a recovery – all in the coming eleven and one half months.

Here we’ll summarize the market aspects that Cook outlines for making his case.

Oil is priced in dollars worldwide, so whatever the U.S. government, in particular the Federal Reserve, is doing is going to affect world prices.  Simply put the principle is futures contract traders are electing to choose between owning the dollar as a currency or the oil as an asset.  With that in mind, note that the WTI (West Texas Intermediate) or Brent (actually a combination of oil sourced from the Brent, Forties, Oseberg and Ekofisk fields called BFOE) used by the press and media are minor parts of the world crude market, but the chemistry is used as a benchmark to price the long list of other crude oils.

In the market there are major participants, the sellers and buyers naturally and investors and speculators trying to game the market for safety or profit.  Generally, and so far at least the sovereign oil companies and the Big Oil majors operate at such a scale that they don’t really have to put much money at risk by their standards in order to acquire enough cargoes to move or support the global market price via the BFOE market.

Those big sellers and buyers routinely buy and sell futures contracts in order to insure themselves against a rise or fall in the dollar price.  The market also permits participants to use market contracts for offloading the risk of owning commodities and turn the known to occur future transactions into currency.  It’s a very important part of the market and should work to find the real price, smooth out aberrations and keep the industry finances liquid and able to raise cash or hold oil as an asset.

Here is Cook’s main lesson to folks not inside the industry – in the case of a deliverable exchange futures contract; a price is set for delivery of a standardized quantity of a particular specification of a commodity at a particular location within a specified period of time. If that contract is held open until the expiration date and time then there will indeed be a spot delivery and payment against documents at the original price as set forth by the market exchange’s contractual terms.

This – Almost – never happens, unless the physical market price – which is set by physical supply and demand – is actually at that price at that specific point in time.

Instead when the physical price is lower or higher, then the futures contract will be closed out through a matching purchase or sale of a futures contract to counter the original futures contract and a profit or loss will be taken.  Factually only industry participants can take a supertanker loaded with oil.

The delivery aspect of oil markets is somewhat different than say eggs, corn or lumber.  Those kinds of commodities have found their way to the driveways of inattentive commodities speculators.  But for oil, the broker is responsible to the trading exchange for letting an investor or speculator with no capability of making or taking delivery hold a position into the last month before delivery.  If a broker blows it the exchange officials will ensure such positions are liquidated.

But the industry, investors, and speculators have a new participant – Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and structured investment products created to invest in commodities.

Goldman Sachs invented the ETF, whose Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI), enabled investment in a basket of commodities – of which oil and oil products was the greatest component.  Investors in the new fund were offered the means to exchange the perceived risk of holding dollars with inflation, for taking on the risk of holding commodities. Over the ensuing twenty years the business has boomed, bringing huge amounts of cash worldwide to the oil market and other commodities.

All that money lured in new players and the news making way to park money is to buy a tanker full of oil from a seller and sell it at a future date, while using the market to hedge out any losses.  The main impact is that oil is unseen inventory to the market until someone hedges the risk off.  This isn’t illegal or even a bad idea.  Stocking up is both a smart move for consumers and it’s been a perfectly legitimate financial strategy through history.

The driver for these isn’t greed as regular people expect.  It’s fear, plain and simple.  The U.S. has been busily “printing up” cash since 2008 at incredible rates and the inflation, or more accurately the devaluation of the dollar has been far behind the printing press.  These investors are driven not by making a profit, but by avoiding a loss on the dollars.  There’s lots of oil around, enough to satisfy demand and fill all those tanks and tankers.

Speculators do have a roll, to be sure, but they are most noticeable when they come to the market in a large rush driven by greed and drive a quick price spike.  You can be sure those already in the market are going to cash in and set up for the inevitable price fall.

Commodities markets are driven by expectations, and expectations are heavily influenced by emotions.  It’s often said markets are irrational means to get to a rational end.  Supply, demand and for the past few years the dollar, the medium of the exchange of value, all play major rolls.

The expectation of Mr. Cook, and in part your humble writer, is that supply is more than adequate with little sign of major shocks, consumption demand seems to be declining in the large markets of the U.S. and the EU with some increase in the developing markets.  Little risk here.  The risk lies in the expectations of the dollar and the effect of all that stockpiled oil sitting in tanks and tankers and the cash worried to be in oil or might wish to be back in dollars.  Lots of risk here, and reactions by the market based in reality of producers and consumers will respond.

For consumers, a short price bust might be very good news if a price fall doesn’t trigger a production drop followed by a price boom.

With the market basics covered we’ll link again to Mr. Cook’s article.  The article explains the application of the points raised above, explains how ETFs and other instruments are both consumers in some situations and producers in others. Plus he rolls in some of the expectations, including his own to get to his conclusion.  It a very long read, and there is a long following of entertaining comments.

Lastly, the markets exist to manage risk, not to make sales or buy products.  In a proper operation the price for sales is the last month’s market closing price with a bit of adjustment.  When the sellers and buyers start chasing the price changes they inevitably follow fear and set higher and lower prices, which reduces both production and demand.  Still, over time the market will average out to what the commodity is worth to both buyers and sellers.  Sometimes it just takes a very long time.

For a comparison, the common quote for the amount of iron mined in history is a cubic mile or 147,197,952,000 cubic feet.  Now platinum is more rare, the oft-heard quote is mining over history has turned out 25 cubic feet, a block 5 feet on each side, about 1/15 the amount of gold.  That’s a massive difference.

Curiously with the world economy slowed down the price of platinum is lower than gold, a situation that will not last when the economy does pick up either by demand or a drop in gold’s price from an increase in confidence.  The main industrial use is catalytic converters for automobiles – and increasing global automobile demand in emerging markets with an interest in pollution control will likely move prices higher.

Meanwhile palladium may become harder than platinum to acquire.  Russia produces 50% of palladium’s annual supply and Russia has been selling off strategic stockpiles.  In simple terms, the use of Russian palladium stockpiles for current use will turn up later as reductions of the amount available to the market.

Gold Platinum & Palladium Nuggets Shown Left to Right. Click image for the largest view.

For now these are “cheap” as platinum trades 31% below its February 2008 high of $2,273 and palladium is trading 38% below its all-time high of almost $1,100 in January 2001.  That brings us to:

An Aalto University in Finland research team has developed a new and significantly cheaper method of manufacturing fuel cells by preparing nanoparticle metal catalysts for fuel cells by using atomic layer deposition (ALD).  The ALD method requires 60% less of the noble metals than current methods.

Docent Tanja Kallio at Aalto said, “This is a significant discovery, because researchers have not been able to achieve savings of this magnitude before with materials that are commercially available.”

The most commonly used fuel cells cover the anode with expensive noble metal powder, which reacts well with the fuel.  The Aalto study’s ALD method can cover the anode much thinner and more evenly than current production methods, which lowers costs and increases quality.

Palladium Preparation for ALD. Image Credit: Adolfo Vera, Aalto University. Click image for the largest view.

The Finn’s idea is to develop better alcohol fuel cells using methanol or ethanol as their fuel. It’s easier to handle and store alcohols than trying to use hydrogen. In alcohol fuel cells, it is also possible to use palladium as a catalyst.

As we noted above, for now platinum is about twice as expensive as palladium.  This means that alcohol fuel cells using palladium would offer a more economical product to the market.

Fuel cells are very efficient and can create electricity that produces very little or even no pollution, making more energy and requiring less fuel than other devices of equal size. They are also quiet and require low maintenance, because there are no moving parts.

When catalyst breakthroughs come and production costs can be lowered, fuel cells are expected to power electric vehicles and replace batteries, along with other jobs. Despite their current high price, fuel cells have already been used for a long time to produce energy in isolated environments, such as spacecraft.

The Aalto team’s results, published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C. are based on preliminary testing with fuel cell anodes using a palladium catalyst. The Aalto team believes commercial production could start in 5-10 years.

Now if someone would find a huge palladium and platinum supply this would go big.