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Solar cells soon could be painted onto the sides of buildings or rooftops with nanoparticle inks, according to one chemical engineer.
The new nano-ink process could replace the standard method of manufacturing solar cells, which requires high temperatures and is relatively expensive, said Brian Korgel of the University of Texas at Austin.
Enough natural gas to heat every home in North Dakota through at least two brutal winters was burned off as an unmarketable byproduct in the state's oil patch in 2008. North Dakota produced a record 62.8 million barrels of oil last year, up nearly 18 million barrels from 2007. Natural gas, a byproduct of oil production, was pegged at 86 billion cubic feet — of which 26 billion cubic feet was "flared" because of the lack of collecting systems and pipelines needed to move it to market.
General Fusion's reactor design consists of 220 pistons that
simultaneously ram a metal sphere. This creates a shock wave inside the
sphere, so that plasma rings in the center create a fusion reaction.
But the first detailed assessment of more than 800 oil fields in the world, covering three quarters of global reserves, has found that most of the biggest fields have already peaked and that the rate of decline in oil production is now running at nearly twice the pace as calculated just two years ago.
Among the prime fodder of biomass scientists are hundreds of substances that aren’t bashful about giving off sinus-clearing scents. Yes, many of today’s biomass pioneers just love castoffs that reek.
Nissan will begin selling the first Leaf cars in the United States, Japan and Europe toward the end of 2010, adding two more models soon after.
Packers Plus's multistage fracturing drilling technology has opened up major new supply basins in Canada and the United States, potentially unlocking hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of new gas reserves in places like Horn River, Louisiana, Pennsylvania and even Quebec
The phase out of energy-wasting light bulbs begins on Sept. 1 in Germany. The unpopularity of the energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs that will replace them is leading consumers and retailers to start hoarding the traditional bulbs
Now, that may be a picture that gets some people excited, but not me. I know that unconventional shale gas wells deplete very rapidly, paying out 60 to 90% of their production in the first year. It takes a great deal of drilling to maintain overall production rates, and in a low-price environment like today's, the prospects for additional drilling are dubious. For the straight dope on the North American peak question, I turned to David Hughes, the now-retired Canadian geologist who is a bona-fide expert on North American gas. He pointed out that it has taken 33,000 successful gas wells per year to exceed the 2001 peak, and noted that rig counts are still well down from last year. (According to Baker Hughes, gas rigs operating in the U.S. are now down to 665, the lowest number since May 2002, and off 59% from September of last year.) It's hard to imagine how this will not result in diminishing supply, and Hughes expects we'll feel the effects some time in the next six to
Geothermal energy is the most efficient renewable energy alternative and is improving the fastest. Wind energy is second. + Fossil fuel technologies are no longer improving (in terms of efficiency) much - if at all. These technologies have likely reached their performance limits, though the government still spends far more on them. + Geothermal energy could become cheaper than fossil fuels with R and D spending of as little as $3.3 billion.
Bøhmer experimented with the concept for a decade, inspired by the simplicity of a solar device invented in 1767 by Swiss physicist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure. The cooker, which consists of two boxes nestled inside each other and topped with Plexiglas to trap the sun’s rays, has evolved from a homemade cardboard contraption to a $6 plastic version that went into mass production this spring.
The ambitious project, known as Desertec, is expected to cost $555.3 billion. It would generate inexhaustible and affordable quantities of energy across the Mediterranean -- and even on a global scale if necessary.
Section 526 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 had some strong implications for the Canadian oil sands. Section 526 targeted unconventional petroleum sources with greenhouse gas emissions greater than conventional sources. In other words, Section 526 prohibits the government from purchasing fuels with a higher carbon intensity than gasoline. On June 17, the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted for a bill that could put the oil sands back in our good graces. One amendment passed by a voice vote stated U.S. refiners would not be in violation of Section 526 by buying crude oil produced from Canadian oil sands.
In one of the closest Congressional votes since Barack Obama took office, the Cap-and-Trade energy tax bill was approved by a very thin margin, thanks to the defections of 44 Democrats who voted against the President and the House leadership. The final vote in the House was 219 for and 212 against. All but 8 Republicans stood firm for the American people and voted against this ghastly piece of legislation. All but 44 Democrats voted in favor of this onslaught on our money and our sources of income
The Nevada plant was supposed to be a showcase for SolarReserve: one of the largest solar plants in the world, using heat-transfer technology developed for space rockets by United Technologies.
THAI sounds a bit like something out of a science fiction novel. It involves drilling a hole into the oil sands, injecting oxygen and igniting a continuous underground burn or "fireflood." Over the course of several months, that fireflood slowly works its way through the oil sands reservoir, heating up the bitumen so it drains into a horizontal collector well. No digging. No huge mining equipment. Just a few pipes, some wellheads and a modest processing facility. THAI is still considered experimental by the oil sands industry, but Petrobank is so confident that it works, it’s forging ahead with two commercial-scale projects using THAI.
“There’s this feeling of ’here we go again’ with what happened last year,” Kloza said. “It hurts discretional spending. It leaves people to think about not taking those summer vacations.”
Gas prices added another 2 cents overnight, climbing to their highest level in more than seven months to $2.592 a gallon, according to auto club AAA, Wright Express and Oil Price Information Service. A gallon of gas costs 48.2 cents more than it did a month ago, but it’s $1.397 cheaper than last year.
This week, Goldman Sachs revised its forecast and predicted that oil would rally to $85 a barrel by the end of the year as the economy stabilizes and OPEC production cuts take hold.
The forecast assumes, however, that the Or
Deployment of flexible, printed photovoltaics, Konarka, a solar-cell startup based in Lowell, MA, has opened a commercial-scale factory, with the capacity to produce enough organic solar cells every year to generate one gigawatt of electricity, equiv
Nanopore arrays combine high power and storage capacity.
Plastic solar cells are lightweight, flexible, and, most important, cheap to make.
Whitesands is a pilot test of toe and heel air injection with a catalytic sleeve to improve upgrading the produced oil. If it succeeds as fully as hoped, it will permit production of the Alberta tarsands without mining or the use of external fuel.
Not only is ethanol proving to be a dud as a fuel substitute but there is increasing evidence that it is destroying engines in large numbers
If I am reading this right, we can now accept a full range of cellulose containing feedstocks that pass first through a pretreatment phase. Nothing is said about this except to say that it is mild and surely wet. This treated feedstock is then passed
The new study shows that burning biomass to produce electricity rather than converting it to ethanol (made from corn kernels or the other parts of the plant, so-called cellulosic ethanol) delivers 81 percent more miles per acre of transportation in e
The method, called catalytic hydrothermal gasification, creates natural gas out of algae - more quickly, more efficiently and at higher yields than other biofuel processes. Genifuel expects the process also requires less capital investment
In October 2008, Konarka opened the largest roll-to-roll flexible thin film solar manufacturing facility in the world, preparing for the commercialization and mass production of its solar material
The recent discovery of potentially vast oilfields buried beneath a thick layer of salt off the coast of Brazil has become a focus of excitement among many of the world’s big energy firms. Though the total size of reserves is not yet known, govern
Green charcoal is been made from cattails, also known as typha. This is great news and it appears that a whole lot of production issues have been solved to make it available as a cooking fuel.
The 100 megawatts unleashed by the station will supply about 40,000 households. That will far outstrip demand by Pope Benedict XVI and the 900 inhabitants of the 0.2 square-mile country nestled across Rome’s Tiber River. The plant will cover nine tim
You can also be certain that a lot of the recent demand has come from inventory restocking around the world because you may be sure that oil at $150 caused such inventories to be minimized. Right now they have had enough time to be maximized again.
