Lifeboat Foundation

Devices made of readily available oxide and carbon-based materials can produce clean hydrogen from water over weeks — according to new research (Nature Materials, “Long-term solar water and CO₂ splitting with photoelectrochemical BiOI–BiVO 4 tandems”).

The findings, co-led by Dr Virgil Andrei, a Research Fellow at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, with academics at Imperial College London, could help overcome one of the key issues in solar fuel production, where current earth-abundant light-absorbing materials are limited through either their performance or stability.

Multiple BiOI and BiOI-BiVO 4 pixels on a device. (Image: Dr Virgil Andrei)

Italian company Energy Dome has opened the first of its remarkable grid-level energy storage plants. These “CO2 batteries” can store renewable energy over long periods and release it quickly, at less than half the cost of big lithium batteries.

Large-scale energy storage is going to be required on an epic scale all round the world, as green energy begins to take over the world’s power supply. Renewable energy is often generated at times and places where it’s not needed, and a variety of grid-level storage technologies are jockeying for various energy market niches, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

We took a close look at Energy Dome’s CO₂ battery technology last July, but here’s the guts of it: carbon dioxide expands dramatically when it moves to a gaseous state from a liquid state, which it’ll only settle in under pressures at least five times higher than the Earth’s atmospheric pressure. How much does it expand? Well, at room temperature, 2.5675 litres of liquid CO₂ kept at 56 atmospheres of pressure will expand into 1,000 litres of gaseous CO₂. That’s a factor of nearly 400.

Organic farmers are returning to an unusual tool in the fight against weeds — fire. Called ‘flame weeding’ the process involves either using a small, handheld flamethrower, or installing a pretty hardcore row of flamethrowers onto the front of a tractor and slowly driving through fields of crops singeing the weeds in between the rows.

Flame Engineering, Inc. specializes in developing and selling flame weeding equipment and says the technique is rooted in science. The company’s website explains that the technique is not about blasting the weeds to kingdom come, but rather about focusing on destroying cell structure.

Continue reading “Flame-Throwing Tractor Needs No Chemicals to Get Rid of Weeds” »

One day soon, buildings could become more energy-efficient—and environmentally sustainable—with insulating material developed from wood by researchers in Sweden. The newly-developed material offers as good or even better thermal performance than ordinary plastic-based insulation materials, according to researchers reporting recently in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Yuanyuan Li, an assistant professor at Wallenberg Wood Science Center, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, says that the new insulating material is an aerogel integrated wood which is made without adding additional substances.

Wood cellulose aerogels themselves are nothing new—researchers have been developing advanced types of aerogels and other composites for the last several years in the Wallenberg Wood Science Center at KTH—but Li says the new method represents a breakthrough in controlled creation of insulating nanostructures in the pores of wood.

In 2008, when gasoline was even more expensive than it is today, the world dreamed of cars that could run on nothing but air.

Circa 2021

Unlike other plasma jet engines, this new Chinese one can actually work in the atmosphere. This could prove revolutionary for the aerospace industry.

Japan is both power-hungry and fossil-fuel reliant making for a bad combination but that could all soon change. The nation has now successfully tested a system relying on the deep ocean that could provide a reliable steady form of renewable energy, according to a report by Bloomberg published Tuesday.

A project over ten years in the making

The invention comes from Japanese heavy machinery maker IHI Corp. The company has been developing a subsea turbine that harnesses the energy in deep ocean currents for over ten years.

Circa 2019

Robust quantum energy storage devices are essential to realize powerful next-generation batteries. Herein, we provide a proof of concept for a loss-free excitonic quantum battery (EQB) by using an open quantum network model that exhibits exchange symmetries linked to its structural topology. By storing electronic excitation energy in a symmetry-protected dark state living in a decoherence-free subspace, one can protect the charged EQB from environment-induced energy losses, thereby making it a promising platform for long-term energy storage. To illustrate the key physical principles and potential functionality of this concept, we consider an open quantum network model of a para-benzene-like structure.

A world severely blighted by plastic pollution is on track to see the use of plastics nearly triple in less than four decades, according to findings released Friday.

Annual production of fossil-fuel-based plastics are set to top 1.2 billion tonnes by 2060 and waste to exceed one billion tonnes, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Even with aggressive action to cut demand and improve efficiencies, plastic production would almost double in less than 40 years, the 38-nation body projects in a report.