Converting solar or wind into carbon-based ‘fossil’ fuels might seem anything but green, but when you start with carbon dioxide — which can be dragged out of the air — it’s as green as it gets. The technology that makes it economically feasible isn’t available yet, but a recently published paper presents nice step forward in the effort to not just sequester carbon dioxide, but turn it into a useful fuel that is part of a carbon-neutral future.
adminIn the quest for renewable fuels, scientists are taking lessons from a humble bacterium that fills our oceans and covers moist surfaces the world over. Cyanothece 51142, a type of bacteria also called blue-green algae, produces hydrogen in robust fashion, and scientists have found that it taps into an unexpected source of energy to do so.
Katie HerzogReaders of The New York Times were treated to a deeply touching essay this week by Piers Sellers, a NASA astronaut and climate scientist who was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Sellers wrote: This diagnosis puts me in an interesting position. I’ve spent much of my professional life thinking about the science of climate change, which is best viewed through a multidecadal lens. At some level I was sure that, even at my present age of 60, I would live to see the most critical part of the problem, and its possible solutions, play out in my lifetime. Now that my personal horizon has been steeply foreshortened, I was forced to decide how to spend my remaining time. Was continuing to think about climate change worth the…
Energy Politics | Environment and Sustainability | Future TechnologyToday Google announced their exciting proposal to redevelop four sites in Mountain View, California. Designed by Bjarke Ingels at BIG and Thomas Heatherwick at Heatherwick Studio, the new headquarters will be the first time Google will design and build their offices from scratch. The concept is simple and genius: instead of building permanent structures with […]
Stormy space weather sweeping across the equator is threatening vital power grids in regions long considered safe from such events, ground-breaking new research reveals.
Renewable fuels from pyrolysis bio-oil has been created by researchers. Pyrolysis bio-oil is produced by rapidly heating the forest residues in an oxygen-free environment and then rapidly cooling the products formed. By co-gasification with black liquor, a renewable fuel is produced.
A proposed recovery technique for oil extraction not only outperforms existing drilling and recovery techniques, but also has the potential to sequester more carbon dioxide in the process.
