Lifeboat Foundation

— Energy Info

Media Contact: Jennifer Kalez

SALEM – A public partnership with the Oregon Department of Energy, Oregon Department of Land Conservation & Development, Oregon State University’s Institute for Natural Resources, and the U.S. Department of Defense has published new educational materials that will help local governments, Tribes, communities, policymakers, agencies, energy developers, and other stakeholders access important information and considerations for potential renewable energy in Oregon.

Continue reading “New Interactive Tool and Report Connects Oregon Renewable Energy Potential with Important Development Considerations” »

Stir this silicon-based powder into water, and hydrogen will bubble out, ready for immediate use. Hong Kong company EPRO Advance Technology (EAT) says its Si+ powder offers an instant end to the difficulties of shipping and storing green energy.

This is the second powdered hydrogen advance we’ve learned about this week, designed to solve the same problems: transporting hydrogen is difficult, dangerous and expensive, whether the costs are for cryogenic cooling in a liquid hydrogen system, or for compression to around 700 times the normal sea-level air pressure.

Continue reading “Another hydrogen transport powder emerges, promising double the density” »

New electrocatalysis electrodes have been created that are simpler and cheaper than conventional ones, and can substantially increase the efficiency of water splitting. Decorated with chiral molecules like helicenes, these devices double the activity of the oxygen evolution reaction, the bottleneck of the process, and improve its selectivity.

‘With electrocatalysis, we [can] use electrons from renewable sources [like solar and wind] to produce clean chemicals and fuels,’ explains Magalí Lingenfelder from the Max Planck–EPFL laboratory for molecular nanoscience and technology, in Switzerland, who led the study. In this work, her team focused on the oxygen evolution reaction. ‘It’s the bottleneck of water splitting,’ she says. ‘We wanted to increase its performance with cheap, simple solutions.’

Physics World

To get around this problem, Kanté and colleagues utilized photonic crystals. These are periodic structures, which, like electronic semiconductors, have “band gaps” – frequencies at which they are opaque. Like graphene in electronics, photonic crystals generally contain Dirac cones in their band structures. At the vertex of such a cone is the Dirac point, where the band gap closes.

Australian scientists say they’ve made a “eureka moment” breakthrough in gas separation and storage that could radically reduce energy use in the petrochemical industry, while making hydrogen much easier and safer to store and transport in a powder.

Nanotechnology researchers, based at Deakin University’s Institute for Frontier Materials, claim to have found a super-efficient way to mechanochemically trap and hold gases in powders, with potentially enormous and wide-ranging industrial implications.

Mechanochemistry is a relatively recently coined term, referring to chemical reactions that are triggered by mechanical forces as opposed to heat, light, or electric potential differences. In this case, the mechanical force is supplied by ball milling – a low-energy grinding process in which a cylinder containing steel balls is rotated such that the balls roll up the side, then drop back down again, crushing and rolling over the material inside.

Circa 2014

After decades of experiments, U.S. Navy scientists believe they may have solved one of the world’s great challenges: how to turn seawater into fuel.

The development of a liquid hydrocarbon fuel could one day relieve the military’s dependence on oil-based fuels and is being heralded as a “game changer” because it could allow military ships to develop their own fuel and stay operational 100 percent of the time, rather than having to refuel at sea.

Continue reading “Goodbye, Oil: US Navy Cracks New Renewable Energy Technology To Turn Seawater Into Fuel, Allowing Ships To Stay At Sea Longer” »

Shockwaves caused by asteroids colliding with Earth create materials with a range of complex carbon structures, which could be used for advancing future engineering applications, according to an international study led by UCL and Hungarian scientists.

Published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team of researchers has found that diamonds formed during a high-energy shock wave from an asteroid collision around 50,000 years ago have unique and exceptional properties, caused by the short-term high temperatures and extreme pressure.

The researchers say that these structures can be targeted for advanced mechanical and electronic applications, giving us the ability to design materials that are not only ultra-hard but also malleable with tunable electronic properties.