Vortex power

Fossil fuel power plants generate ample waste heat that can be used to make more electricity. Many modern plants have been capturing this heat and increasing the efficiency of the plants. A novel idea of a retired engineer hopes to create a huge vortex of warm air to cause a change in pressure at the bottom in order to drive a turbine-generator.

The concept for creating a vortex, like a tornado, is based on the fact that air, when heated, will expand, become lighter and rise up. As the air rotates and goes up, the pressure at the bottom of the vortex becomes lower. As surrounding air enters at the bottom, and the difference in pressures then drives a turbine generator to produce electricity.

The diameter and height of the vortex make a difference in how much energy can be produced. A vortex that is 200 meters in diameter and goes up 10 kilometers into the air could have the production capacity of 200 MW, Louis Michaud, the engineer, said. He envisions power plant owners to set up vortex-building equipment at existing facilities to make use of the waste heat and increase the overall electricity-production efficiency of the power plant.

A combined-cycle natural gas power plant takes the heat byproduct from burning natural gas and makes steam to run a turbine generator. Doing so increases the efficiency of a power plant from the 40 percent range (simple-cycle design) to just over 60 percent (combined-cycle design).Michaud claims that his vortex station could make use of the waste heat a second time and boost the efficiency by another 20 percentage points.

For his prototype project, he plans to build a much smaller one that goes up 15 meters into the air and shows how it could turn a turbine. Michaud hopes to produce enough results to prove the technology concept by the end of the summer of 2013.

There have been fancy ideas like capturing the energy packed in a lightning – enough to power the needs of the planet’s denizens many times over! But what material can withstand the heat of a lightning? How can it be stored? Many questions but that does not stop people from dreaming. After all so much energy going waste every moment as lightning strikes. There have also been those who want to trap high-energy cosmic particles… Ultimately, it will be the analysis of energy input to that output. Let the most bizarre idea ignite!

Lo, presto and waste dissapears!

Just close your eyes and picturise the amount of waste we humans are spewing out every moment. Take plastic bags for instance: 1 trillion bags are produced every year and 3.5 tonnes by weight are discarded every year! It takes around 1000 years for a bag to degrade! Obviously, every one of them we have made is still around!

E-waste is another growing class of waste. Around 50 million tones are discarded every year. This could go up by 500 percent in another decade, says the UNEP! Recycling is one way out but complete recycling is still a distant hope.

Hopefully, research is on to tackle this problem. A team of U.S. scientists at University of Illinios says it has developed a class of biodegradable electronics technology that could be utilized for a wide range of products — from consumer devices to medical implants — and that ultimately would dissolve completely, leaving no environmental impacts.

The technology has been used experimentally to make transistors, diodes, temperature sensors, and solar cells that degrade completely in even tiny amounts of water, the researchers say. The devices are encapsulated in silk, enabling manufacturers to alter the rate of dissolution based on the structure of the silk used. According to John Rogers, leader of the research team, the technology could be used for a myriad of electronic devices that end up in landfills; for environmental monitoring equipment, such as sensors used in oil spills; and for medical implants needed for short-term diagnostic or therapeutic functions.

That still leaves us with all the plastic…

Carbon comes in handy in producing fuel!

A soil bacterium called Ralstonia eutropha has a natural tendency, whenever it is stressed, to stop growing and put all its energy into making complex carbon compounds. Now scientists at MIT have learnt a trick by which they have fooled the bacteria into making fuel instead.

They've tinkered with its genes to persuade it to make fuel -- specifically, a kind of alcohol called isobutanol that can be directly substituted for, or blended with, gasoline. In its natural state, when the microbe's source of essential nutrients (such as nitrate or phosphate) is restricted, it will go into carbon-storage mode, essentially storing away food for later use when it senses that resources are limited.

What it does is take whatever carbon is available, and store it in the form of a polymer, which is similar in its properties to a lot of petroleum-based plastics. By knocking out a few genes, inserting a gene from another organism, and tinkering with the expression of other genes, the team of scientists were able to redirect the microbe to make fuel instead of plastic.

While the team is focusing on getting the microbe to use CO2 as a carbon source, with slightly different modifications the same microbe could also potentially turn almost any source of carbon, including agricultural waste or municipal waste, into useful fuel!

The team has demonstrated success in modifying the microbe's genes so that it converts carbon into isobutanol in an ongoing process. In continuous culture, substantial amounts of isobutanol was obtained. Now, the researchers are focusing on finding ways to optimize the system to increase the rate of production and to design bioreactors to scale the process up to industrial levels.

That's something -- getting the oldest (and original) inhabitants of the planet to spin gold from straw, no fairy tale! In this case, the straw was making things too hot for the planet!

Electric skies

Aircraft are the new frontier in electric vehicles, according to a new study. More energy-dense batteries, lighter components and more efficient power electronics are making plug-in airplanes a reality. In what is a record manned electric air speed of 202.6 mph in a 16 minute flight was achieved recently.

Though only small companies and entrepreneurs are currently making fully electric airplanes, larger manufacturers such as Boeing Co. and Airbus are investigating how to electrify portions of aircraft operations as the push for bigger, faster and farther yields to cheaper, quieter and greener. Among the tweaking being tried is the auxiliary power unit in commercial aircraft. The device, usually located in the tail, is a generator that provides electricity to the plane when it's on the ground and gives power to start the main engines. It usually runs off a small turbine, but airline manufacturers are developing battery and fuel cell auxiliary power units to reduce their emissions and curb fuel use on the ground.

Another target is electrifying how planes move on the ground. Most aircraft taxi using thrust from their engines. At low speeds, this is tremendously inefficient; jet engines on an airliner can use 5 megawatts of energy, but a comparable electric drive system would use 2 kilowatts while producing no pollution and minimal noise. Boeing and Airbus are experimenting with electric landing gear that allow aircraft to turn, taxi and reverse on their own power without a truck to push the plane back from the gate. These systems can also integrate regenerative braking so that the energy from slowing a landing aircraft could charge batteries.

But yes, as a new technology, there are the hurdles. For instance, storing the electrons needed to power an airplane also carries its own unique risks, as poorly cooled high-technology batteries can catch fire or explode. Well, for a race that has come a long way from flintstones and bullock carts, nothing seems impossible.

Bad morphs into good!

We just can’t stop throwing up carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So why not try using it in a way that cancels out the gas in the air? Better still; why not integrate the gas into a sustainable form of energy production? That is exactly what a research team at the Freiburg Materials Research Center has done. They have developed a new system for producing methanol that uses CO₂ and hydrogen.

In order to produce methanol, the carbon dioxide is combined with hydrogen in a high pressure environment, a process known as hydrogenolysis. New catalyst systems and methods for accelerating the chemical reaction even more are among what the team is studying.

They currently use the metal oxides copper, zinc, and zirconium dioxide as catalysts, enabling the reaction to happen at lower temperatures. In this way, the gases don't have to be heated as much. Together the catalysts form a so-called mixed system of surface-rich porous solid matter with defined properties. If the catalysts consist of nanoparticles, their activity is increased even more.

Methanol can be used as an environmentally friendly alternative for gasoline. When used as an alternative to gasoline, methanol is less dangerous and less harmful to the environment than conventional fuels. In around two years, the researchers aim to be able to produce methanol on a mass scale according to this technique. Then the CO₂ will be filtered out of the waste gas stream of a combined heat and power plant and used to produce methanol. 

When methanol is burned in a motor, CO₂ is released again. If the same molecule were used twice, it would theoretically be possible to use 50 percent less CO₂ to create the same amount of energy. The amount of methanol that could be converted from 10 percent of the yearly CO₂ emissions in Germany would cover the country's yearly fuel needs. Capturing waste gases from power plants and filtering out the CO2 which then can be converted to methanol... sounds like a legitimate next step. But is it?

Bacteria grids!

A wide variety of microbes can send electrons into, or accept electrons from, conducting materials. Most organisms internally generate energy by coupling the addition of electrons to one molecule with their removal from another. But some microbes must cooperate to generate the energy for life, swapping molecules or electrons with other species. Research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 4 suggests the some bacteria do indeed build electricity-conducting grids in the wild.

Microbes use conductive minerals as electric wires for transferring electrons between each other, the team found.

The researchers tested a variety of solutions containing the soil bacteria Geobacter sulfurreducens and Thiobacillus denitrificans, which thrive by eating acetate and nitrate respectively, when they can find a spare electron or two. When the scientists placed either of these microbes alone into a solution containing the two compounds, nothing happened. Nor did the situation improve when both types of microbes were put together into this solution of their favorite foods, suggesting the organisms lacked the ability to directly transfer electrons between them.

But when the scientists added magnetite, an electricity-conducting iron-based mineral, the bacteria got to work eating, cooperating merrily by shuttling electrons back and forth via the magnetite grains. And, although the same effect could be had by adding the rusted red iron mineral hematite, which is a poor conductor, the resulting microbial growth was much smaller and slower (and non-existent when nonconductive aluminum minerals were tried).

Lessons out there for us energy-hungry humans? Meanwhile, here is a question for you: could energy rations be a good option in an energy scarce scenario?

Cloud computing can help cut emissions

Major companies could reduce their carbon emissions by as much as 50 percent and significantly increase energy efficiency by shifting to cloud computing, according to a new report.

In an analysis of UK, French, and U.S. firms that have used cloud computing for at least two years, the Carbon Disclosure Project calculated that by 2020 U.S. companies with annual revenues of more than $1 billion can save $12.3 billion in energy costs and achieve carbon reductions equivalent to 200 million barrels of oil a year if they shift to shared data networks.

The report said that large UK companies could achieve annual energy savings of £ 1.2 billion if they move to cloud computing.

Cloud computing — in which data can be stored, managed, and processed on external servers as needed — allows companies to buy less hardware and also improves efficiency and flexibility. According to the report — which was conducted by the independent firm Verdantix and sponsored by AT&T — large companies plan to accelerate their adoption of cloud computing from 10 percent to 69 percent of their IT spending by 2020.

Reinventing transformers

These are times of immense upheavals, not only political. Change in the way we think, change in the way we work, innovate and build. Leading this movement are researchers innovating technology. People like Alex Huang who is working to revamp aging power grids into something more like the Internet—a network that might direct energy not just from centralized power stations to consumers but from any source to any destination, by whatever route makes the most sense.

Huang, a professor of electrical engineering at North Carolina State University, is reinventing the transformers that currently reduce the voltage of the electricity distributed to neighborhoods so that it’s suitable for use in homes and offices.

Conventional transformers handle only AC power and require manual adjustment or bulky electromechanical switches to redirect energy. What he wants is a compact transformer that can handle DC as well as AC and can be electronically controlled so that it will respond almost instantaneously to fluctuations in supply and demand.

His first transformer had silicon-based components, but silicon is too unreliable for large-scale use at high voltages. So Huang has pioneered the development of transformers with semiconductors based on compounds of silicon and carbon or gallium and nitrogen, which are more reliable in high-power applications. He expects to have a test version of the silicon-carbon transformer ready in two years.

Huang’s transformers would make connecting a solar panel or electric car to the grid as simple as connecting a digital camera or printer to a computer. Isn't that what renewable dreams are made of?!

Magnetic discovery

Researchers at the University of Michigan have made a discovery about the behavior of light that could change solar technology forever. Stephen Rand, a professor in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Physics and Applied Physics and William Fisher, a doctoral student in applied physics, discovered that light, when traveling at the right intensity through a material such as glass that does not conduct electricity, can create magnetic fields that are 100 million times stronger than previously thought possible.

The result is an “optical battery, which could lead to “a new kind of solar cell without semiconductors and without absorption to produce charge separation”, according to Rand.

In solar cells, the light goes into a material, gets absorbed and creates heat. Here, we expect to have a very low heat load. Instead of the light being absorbed, energy is stored in the magnetic moment. Intense magnetization can be induced by intense light and then it is ultimately capable of providing a capacitive power source.

The catch is that this occurs when you read that the light needs to be focused to 10 million watts per square centimeter to realize the effect. Sunlight isn’t this intense on its own, but new materials are being sought that would work at lower intensities.

Materials will provide the key to many cutting edge solutions of tomorrow, for sure.

A rare wisdom

We have written quite a bit about rare earths, perhaps making our readers wonder if they really rare! Well, the rare part is actually that which allows for economical extraction. And why this attention on rare earths (RE) is simply because the world of tomorrow we plan to build on clean energy will lean a lot on these rare elements. Whether it be wind farms or CFLs and LEDs, or electric vehicles, they depend on REs.

A massive wind turbine has 40-meter-long blades made from fiberglass, towers 90 meters above the ground, weighs hundreds of metric tons, and relies on roughly 300 kilograms of a soft, silvery metal known as neodymium—a rare earth. This element forms the basis for the magnets used in the turbines. The stronger the magnets are, the more powerful the generator.

An interesting article in Scientific American looks at the whole laborious process of extraction of rare earths. Found with other ores, Chinese companies supplying them employ acid to dissolve them out of ore rock that often also contains radioactive elements like thorium, radium or even uranium.

Intensive boiling with strong acids—repeated thousands of times because the elements are so chemically similar—finally separates out the neodymium, dysprosium or cerium. The whole slew of rare earth elements are a challenge to separate because of their chemical similarity—and they are never found alone. Processing costs are high and water and energy intensive.

Geologists have found deposits in Australia, Canada, Mongolia, Vietnam and even Greenland. Perhaps it is wiser before opening up pristine places to look at recycling options given the mountain loads of electronics we discard today. So also, research is working at how best to use as little of these REs or maybe even some alternatives. Whatever it be, recycling will have to be part of the solution.

Freeze it, ship it & forget it

Storing and shipping natural gas by trapping it in ice--using technology being developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy--could cut shipping costs for the fuel, making it easier for countries to buy natural gas from many different sources, and eventually leading to more stable supplies worldwide.

The technology traps natural gas in the form of methane hydrate, in which methane, the main component of natural gas, is confined within cage-like ice crystals.

Conventional technologies for making methane hydrate take hours or days: they involve mixing water and the hydrocarbon in large pressurized vessels. The new approach forces water and methane through a specially designed nozzle that creates the methane hydrate "almost instantaneously," says Charles Taylor, the lead researcher on the project at the DOE's National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh. As the mixture exits the nozzle, it quickly forms hydrate, which looks like snow.

Making methane hydrate involves mimicking the high pressure and low temperatures at which it forms in nature, typically deep under the ocean. (Huge reserves of methane hydrate exist in places such as the Alaskan North Slope, both threatening to become another source of greenhouse gases and potentially offering a huge source of natural gas.)

Once the ice crystals form, they keep the methane confined even if the surrounding pressure is lowered, so the methane hydrate can be shipped at atmospheric pressure as long as it's kept frozen. The snow-like hydrate can be packed into cubes and loaded into the refrigerated ships, boxcars, and trucks now used to ship frozen food at -10 °C. That temperature is far easier and cheaper to manage than the -162 °C required for LNG. While the methane hydrate can burn, the methane is released slowly enough that it's not explosive.

Now that's smart thinking for you. Transport costs and leaks are among the major concern of gas supplies.

Cheaper fuel cells

Creating catalysts that can operate efficiently and last a long time is a big barrier to taking fuel-cell technology from the lab bench to the assembly line. The precious metal platinum has been the choice for many researchers, but platinum has two major downsides: It is expensive, and it breaks down over time in fuel-cell reactions.

In a new study, chemists at Brown University report a promising advance. They have created a unique core and shell nanoparticle that uses far less platinum yet performs more efficiently and lasts longer than commercially available pure-platinum catalysts at the cathode end of fuel-cell reactions.

The chemistry known as oxygen reduction reaction takes place at the fuel cell's cathode, creating water as its only waste, rather than the global-warming carbon dioxide produced by internal combustion systems. The cathode is also where up to 40 percent of a fuel cell's efficiency is lost, so "this is a crucial step in making fuel cells a more competitive technology with internal combustion engines and batteries," said Shouheng Sun, professor of chemistry at Brown and co-author of the paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The trick, as a team member explained, was in molding a shell that would retain its shape and require the smallest amount of platinum to pull off an efficient reaction. The team created the iron-platinum shell by decomposing iron pentacarbonyl [Fe(CO)5] and reducing platinum acetylacetonate [Pt(acac)2], a technique earlier reported in a 2000 Science paper.

The result was a shell that uses only 30 percent platinum, although the researchers say they expect they will be able to make thinner shells and use even less platinum.

Computer gives birth

Scientists last week created life as “the first self-replicating species… whose parent is a computer.”

The single cell of yeast with a complete set of artificial DNA functions and looks exactly like a natural cell of yeast. The team assembled a set of DNA one million units in length that directly mirrored an actual strand of yeast DNA. They then replaced a regular yeast cell’s DNA with the artificially created DNA.

Spearheaded by Dr. Craig Venter and his team of scientists at the J Craig Venter Institute, the project has far reaching implications in the field of science and ethics. However, this breakthrough could revolutionize not only the medical but also energy industry.

Using the knowledge and controlling the entire genome of the cells, it would be possible to create and engineer a cell that builds an extremely high yielding biofuel, or create a cell that could suck up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Even guzzle oil spills maybe! All it requires is designing an organism for a specific function.)

Synthetic Genomics was founded back in 2005 to commercialize Venter’s work, and has been focusing on a variety of applications for its genetic technology, including creating algae-based biofuel. The startup is claimed to have successfully engineered algae to secrete hydrocarbons similar to intermediary strains in a [oil] refinery.

But like all revolutionary inventions, this one too has ethical implications. What guarantee does one have that these artificial life forms wont turn into Frankensteins? For instance, what if they gobble up all the carbon leaving nothing for plants?!

All that will come later. For now, we can just chew on that bit of DNA – are we fit as creators?

Blinding energy

Scientists at LHC early on Tuesday watched the first images of collision of a pair of protons traveling at a third of the speed of light! That is an achievement for physicists.

The protons had been travelling in opposite directions around the collider's 17-mile track since ten days and on collision released 7 trillion electronic volts (7 TeV) of energy—three times more than the previous record.

Dubbed the world's largest scientific experiment, scientists hope the machine can approach on a tiny scale what happened in the first split seconds after the Big Bang, which they theorize was the creation of the universe some 14 billion years ago.

CERN used powerful superconducting magnets, cooled to almost zero temperatures, to force the two beams to cross, creating collisions and showers of particles. When collisions become routine, the beams will be packed with hundreds of billions of protons, but the particles are so tiny that few will collide at each crossing.

LHC operators plan to run the $10 bn collider almost continuously over the next 18 to 24 months. Fears of the earth and more being swallowed by any black holes created in the process of the collisions have been rubbished as the blackholes are very small and exists for a fraction of a second.

Why do particles weigh? If the Higgs particle is responsible, can we see it? Or will it, like God, remain unseen??! The answers provided by the discoveries of the LHC will revolutionize our understanding of how the universe works, and eventually tap yet another source of energy. Just try imagine what could be done with 7 TeV at hand! If we could harness it, store it and use it! That will take time. For now it is the world of physics that awaits ‘breaking’ news.

When stoves generate power!

Everyone knows black carbon is bad for human health and the planet’s too. And developing world is where black carbon is generated most. But two scientists have come up with an idea to turn this adversity into a boon. The Third World may well win the race to reduce emissions!

Burning of biomass is how more than a half of the population of Asia meet their energy demands. Indoor air pollution kills about 1.6 million women and children every year, according to WHO.

The smoky cooking fires could be replaced with low-cost stoves which convert rice husks or other biomass to a clean gas. A cheap and simple stove to do this job is ready. Fuelled by unwanted waste – the 150 million tonnes of husks discarded in rice-growing regions each year – the stove turns this free, low-energy fuel into a greenhouse-neutral gas that burns with a clear blue flame.

However, a key to the efficiency of the stove is a small electric fan that drives a stream of air through the smouldering rice husks. This produces the gas mixture which the stove then burns, just like a normal gas cooker. To drive the fan you need electricity, and where does on get that in villages that still are outside the grid?

An idea tested before in fridges but working in reverse was put to test. Turn the heat from the stove into sound waves that could in turn be used to produce enough electricity to run the fan. The stove became the electrical power source! This also means the stove can be used to light up these homes!

Read more about the amazing scientists here.

All the world needs is a few such simple, brilliant ideas and climate change and energy paucity could be things of the past, right? So, what's your big idea?

Plants show the way

University of Central Florida professor Henry Daniell has developed a groundbreaking way to produce ethanol from waste products such as orange peels and newspapers. His approach is greener and less expensive than the current methods available.

Daniell's breakthrough can be applied to several non-food products like sugarcane, switchgrass and straw.The technique uses plant-derived enzyme cocktails to break down orange peels and other waste materials into sugar, which is then fermented into ethanol.

Producing cellulosic ethanol -- ethanol that comes from wood or the non-edible parts of plants, is tricky. Depending on the waste product used, a specific combination or "cocktail" of more than 10 enzymes is needed to change the biomass into sugar and eventually ethanol. Orange peels need more of the pectinase enzyme, while wood waste requires more of the xylanase enzyme. All of the enzymes Daniell's team uses are found in nature, created by a range of microbial species, including bacteria and fungi.

This finding is significant as it is cheap and also results in lesser emissions than conversion of corn starch into ethanol (which produces more greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline does.)
It also makes good use of abundant waste.

Tobacco was chosen as an ideal system for enzyme production for several reasons. It is not a food crop, it produces large amounts of energy per acre and an alternate use could potentially decrease its use for smoking.

Meanwhile, scientists in France have transformed the chemical energy generated by photosynthesis into electrical energy by developing a new biofuel cell.

Photosynthesis is the process by which plants convert solar energy into chemical energy. In the presence of visible light, carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H20) are transformed into glucose and O2 during a complex series of chemical reactions.

Researchers at the Centre de Recherche Paul Pascal (CNRS) developed a biofuel cell that functions using the products of photosynthesis (glucose and O2) and is made up of two enzyme-modified electrodes.

The cell was then inserted in a living plant, in this case a cactus. Once the electrodes, highly sensitive to O2 and glucose, had been implanted in the cactus leaf, the scientists succeeded in monitoring the real-time course of photosynthesis in vivo. They were able to observe an increase in electrical current when a desk lamp was switched on, and a reduction when it was switched off.

Furthermore, the researchers showed that a biofuel cell inserted in a cactus leaf could generate power of 9 μW per cm2. Because this yield was proportional to light intensity, stronger illumination accelerated the production of glucose and O2 (photosynthesis), so more fuel was available to operate the cell. In the future, this system could ultimately form the basis for a new strategy for the environmentally-friendly and renewable transformation of solar energy into electrical energy.

Remember, after two billion years of evolutionary improvements, photosynthesis only converts about one percent of the solar energy falling on leaves into chemical energy and even taht depends on soil quality, water and nutrients availability. Will technology beat Nature in this game? Any bets?

Cheap, abundant and efficient

Researchers at IBM have increased the efficiency of a novel type of solar cell made largely from cheap and abundant materials by over 40 percent. According to an article published in the journal Advanced Materials, the new efficiency is 9.6 percent, up from the previous record of 6.7 percent for this type of solar cell, and near the level needed for commercial solar panels. The IBM solar cells also have the advantage of being made with an inexpensive ink-based process.

The new solar cells convert light into electricity using a semiconductor material made of copper, zinc, tin, and sulfur--all abundant elements--as well as the relatively rare element selenium (CZTS). The IBM solar cells could be an alternative to existing "thin film" solar cells. Thin film solar cells use materials that are particularly good at absorbing light. The leading thin film manufacturer uses a material that includes the rare element tellurium.

While total worldwide electricity demand will likely reach dozens of terawatts (trillions of watts) in the coming decades, thin film solar cells based on the rare tellurium will likely be limited to producing about 0.3 terawatts, while the new cells from IBM could produce an order of magnitude more power.

There sure is no stopping research on solar cells. After all, this is one source we can bank on for a few more billion years.

Playing with energy

Well, if energy is at the center of our concerns, wouldn’t it be simply great if we could produce work and move people and things at the expense of very little energy? For instance, simply teleporting, Star Trek style!

Quantum physics has been playing with this concept in the realm of information, and now a Japanese physicist believes he can teleport energy. According to MIT, The process of teleportation involves making a measurement on each one [of] an entangled pair of particles. He points out that the measurement on the first particle injects quantum energy into the system. He then shows that by carefully choosing the measurement to do on the second particle, it is possible to extract the original energy.

How could it impact our world, when and if this is achievable beyond theory? It could mean transporting people and goods across distances in a jiffy and without having to spend gallons of diesel or emitting tons of carbon!
It will take some ‘time’ before this is even accomplished in the lab, but is a comforting idea. An exciting one too!

Coal gassification goes deep

In Canada’s Alberta, a project is on to convert coal to gas at depths beyond 1000 metres – the deepest ever to generate power from coal--without digging it up.
Working at that depth could lessen the threat of groundwater contamination from the smoldering decomposing coal. If the technology can get at deeper layers of coal, it could allow access to more of the fossil fuel, whether that’s good or bad!

When the project starts up in 2015, Swan Hills hopes to generate 300 megawatts of power from its coal gas while selling over 1.3 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. The CO2 could be used by oil producers and ultimately stored in oil wells. This could result in the storage of 10 to 20 million tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2020.

The pilot produced excellent gas using a pair of adjacent wells spaced 50 to 60 meters apart, installed in the coal seam with the same directional-drilling techniques behind the accelerating production of natural gas from contentious shale deposits.

Oxygen is driven down the feed well and the coal seam is ignited, driving the temperature to 800 to 900 ºC and the pressure to almost 2,000 PSI. Under those pressures, the oxygen, coal, and saline water (present in the coal and also injected via the feed well) react to form a gas that is roughly one-third methane and two-thirds hydrogen, along with some carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. The gas is drawn to the surface via the adjacent production well, where the carbon monoxide is converted to hydrogen and CO2, and all of the CO2 is removed.

How the company managed to achieve gas flow between its wells, given the low permeability of coal squashed under 1,400 meters of rock, is not known. The standard mechanical method by which shale gas production is stimulated is the fracture of rock with high-pressure water.

Does such deep drilling into the earth cause tremors or tectonic shifts?? Do we know enough? Recently Sweden has dropped one of its geothermal projects after deep drilling caused fractures in neighbouring structures.

New materials

Using the process of selective doping of a material, North Carolina State University engineers have created a new material that would allow a fingernail-size computer chip to store the equivalent of 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text!

The process could also be used for boosting vehicles' fuel economy and reducing heat produced by semiconductors, and thus more efficient energy.

The engineers added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers, a 90percent size reduction that could boost computer storage capacity.

By introducing metallic properties into ceramics, engineers could develop a new generation of ceramic engines able to withstand twice the temperatures of normal engines and achieve fuel economy of 80 miles per gallon. And since the thermal conductivity of the material would be improved, the technique could also have applications in harnessing alternative energy sources like solar energy.

The discovery will aid the emerging field of "spintronics," which is dedicated to harnessing energy produced by the spinning of electrons. By manipulating the nanomaterial the electron spin can be controlled, helping to harness electron’s energy.

Materials are the promise of tomorrow. But will technofixes alone help?