Aug
5
The Hydrogen Economy Might Have Gotten Real Legs
August 5, 2008 | 4 Comments
I have been quite unimpressed by the “hydrogen economy” concept because of the difficulty in storing and transporting the smallest atom. I can live with the other attributes as careful engineering can cope. I still have reservations about regular folks handling such a volatile fuel. This is moderated by the reports out of MIT from [...]
Jul
30
A New Method to Extract Hydrogen Everywhere
July 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I don’t spend much time on hydrogen production methods, as they are so far stunningly expensive even though some new ones are very efficient. One thing is certain; humanity will need free hydrogen to make good use of the planet’s resources and work responsibly with the carbon cycle. Another point made to me about hydrogen [...]
Jul
11
A Bacterium that Makes Hydrogen from Cellulose
July 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Elizaveta Bonch-Osmolovskaya and her colleagues at the Winogradsky Institute of Microbiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences discovered the rare archaeon, a kind of ancient bacteria called Desulfurococcus fermentans, in the Uzon Caldera on the Kamchatka Peninsula, an isolated spit of land in eastern Siberia that is full of volcanoes and their remnants. D. fermentans [...]
Jun
30
A Fuel Cell Breaks Out
June 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The U.S. Department of Defense has adopted the Dupont and SFC Smart Fuel Cell AG product as the “M-25” with the announcement that the M-25 is already deployed. The M-25 is a Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) that uses the Dupont fuel cell technology with the expertise of SFC in manufacturing and fuel cell control [...]
Jun
26
Going Beyond Quantum Physics for Energy
June 26, 2008 | 8 Comments
There’s a devil for the current physics thinking being developed in New Jersey. The new thinking is to release the energy from the electron spin of an atom rather than try to manipulate the nucleus by splitting it in fission or merging them in fusion. Simply put, the notion is harvest the release of the [...]
Jun
3
Getting to the Best Source of Fuel
June 3, 2008 | 1 Comment
The ratio that matters, carbon to hydrogen, has a new technology for getting free hydrogen to combine with carbon to make fuels. To recap, wood has a carbon to hydrogen (C:H) ratio of 10 to 1 or wood has 10 carbon atoms for each hydrogen atom. Coal boosted the C:H ratio way up to 2 [...]
May
20
The Next Fuel Craze May be Methanol
May 20, 2008 | 2 Comments
The week before last saw the Basques offer they have a fuel cell that can be fueled by methanol. With in a day I had received multiple notices that MIT in Massachusetts and Sharp of Japan were also in the hunt for methanol fuel cells. There is a lot of valuable “why” in [...]
May
9
Is Hydrogen On Demand the Coming Thing?
May 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Yesterday we looked at a method of releasing hydrogen from methanol. Today we’ll look at releasing hydrogen from formic acid.
Hydrogen in a pure state is terribly problematic. It’s a gas requiring high pressures to compress to small volumes, it has to be super cooled to get to a liquid state, and being an [...]
May
8
Is Methanol the Up and Coming Alcohol For Fuel?
May 8, 2008 | 5 Comments
Methanol is the smallest of the alcohols, with one carbon atom, four hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, which is parked between the carbon and one of the hydrogen atoms. The oxygen atom is the only difference between methanol and methane the main part of natural gas. Methanol also known as wood alcohol, is [...]
Apr
30
The Biggest Electricity User Is . . .
April 30, 2008 | 1 Comment
The past few years have seen the U.S. State of California come up short on electrical power generation. Not a huge, but a seriously annoying and disruptive set of events. More illustrative might be the events currently going on in South Africa.
While rich in hard minerals like gold, palladium, platinum, coal, diamonds and [...]
