Oct
31
Butanol Reality Check – Cobalt Biofuels
October 31, 2008 | 10 Comments
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 atom ethanol. […]
Oct
30
Watching Catalysts Work
October 30, 2008 | 7 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 | 2 Comments
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 […]
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 […]
Oct
27
Fuel From Thin Air
October 27, 2008 | 10 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. […]
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