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Category: energy – Page 200

Purple is the new black.

Purple bacteria are poised to turn your toilet into a source of energy and useable organic material.

Household sewage and industrial wastewater are very rich in organic compounds, and organic compounds can be very useful. But there’s a catch: we don’t know of any efficient way to extract them from the eww goo yet. So these resource-laden liquids get treated, and the material they contain is handled as a contaminant.

New research plans to address this problem — and by using an environmentally-friendly and cost-efficient solution to boot.

Continue reading “Purple bacteria turn sewage into hydrogen fuel” | >

Jackson continues by saying that blue hydrogen is “at best an expensive distraction, and at worst a lock-in for continued fossil fuel use” which would derail goals that the country and the world have set for decarbonizing the economy. He takes particular issue with the fact that oil and gas companies have asked the UK government for decades of subsidies while also claiming that blue hydrogen will be inexpensive to produce. “If the false claims made by oil companies about the cost of blue hydrogen were true, their projects would make a profit by 2030,” he told The Guardian.

Recent studies have questioned blue hydrogen’s low-carbon bona fides.

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Researchers are studying adding carbon capture technologies to vehicles so that the CO2 can be sequestered or recycled into renewable hydrocarbon fuels.

According to senior researcher of the study; “This technology really doesn’t have any major hurdles to making it work,”

When people talk about how to eliminate vehicles’ carbon dioxide (CO2) emission, often the conversation often focuses on electrifying cars, trucks and buses. Yet cargo and tanker ships, which are responsible for 3% of all CO2 emissions, are rarely a part of the discussion.

Now a Northwestern University research team offers a practical way to make ships CO2 neutral—or even CO2 negative—with CO2-capturing solid oxide fuel cells. After “burning” traditional carbon-based fuels, the fuel cell generates concentrated CO2 that can be stored on-board the ship. From there, the CO2 can either be sequestered or recycled into a renewable hydrocarbon fuel.

Continue reading “The case for onboard carbon dioxide capture on long-range vehicles” | >

DP World has completed testing of the Boxbay fully automated container storage system at its Jebel Ali terminal in Dubai, accomplishing more than 63,000 container moves since the facility was commissioned earlier this year.

The facility, which can hold 792 containers at a time, exceeded expectations, delivering faster and more energy-efficient than anticipated, the Dubai-headquartered terminal operator said.

The solar-powered system stores containers in slots in a steel rack up to eleven high. DP World claims Boxbay delivers three times the capacity of a conventional yard in which containers are stacked directly on top of each other, reducing the footprint of terminals by 70% and energy costs by 29%. Boxbay delivered 19.3 moves per hour at each waterside transfer table to the straddle carrier and 31.8 moves per hour at each landside truck crane.

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Scientists at Australia’s RMIT investigating the massive untapped potential of wave energy have come up with a novel design for a convertor they say operates with far greater efficiency than comparable solutions, and which they hope could open the door to widespread commercial use of the technology. The team’s prototype employs a novel dual-turbine design that sidesteps some common technical issues, and proved capable of harvesting twice the energy from waves as current designs in early experiments.

The idea of capturing energy from ocean waves has been around for centuries, and recently we’re starting to see modern machines designed for these purposes take to the seas in some interesting forms. This includes rotating systems that extract power from vertical and horizontal movement, blowhole-like generators that capture energy as waves push water and air through concrete chambers, and squid-like generators with buoyant arms that rise and fall with the motion of the waves.

One of the more common approaches to harnessing wave energy is known as a point absorber buoy, which consists of a flotation device on the surface that is tethered to the seabed. As the buoy moves up and down with the passing waves, it drives an energy converter mechanism built onto the tether partway below the surface. This might be a geared drivetrain that uses the linear motion to spin a flywheel and generate power, as seen in some experimental designs.

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FORT SILL, Okla., Aug. 17 2021 — The U.S. Army has completed a directed-energy maneuver short-range air defense (DE M-SHORAD) “combat shoot-off” — its first development and demonstration of a high-power laser weapon. As part of the DE M-SHORAD combat shoot-off, the Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO), alongside Air and Missile Defense Cross Functional Team, Fires Center of Excellence, and the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command, took a laser-equipped Stryker vehicle to Fort Sill, Okla. At the combat shoot-off, the Stryker faced a number of realistic scenarios designed to establish, for the first time in the Army, the desired characteristics for future DE M-SHORAD systems.

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Researchers have developed prototype technology that can double the power harvested from ocean waves, in an advance that could finally make wave energy a viable renewable alternative.

The untapped potential of ocean wave is vast—it has been estimated that the power of coastal waves around the world each year is equivalent to annual global electricity production.

But the challenges of developing technologies that can efficiently extract that natural power and withstand the harsh ocean environment have kept wave energy stuck at experimental stage.

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Despite strong support from the FAA, the airline industry, and aerospace companies, the U.S. Senate ceased funding the development of a supersonic airliner in 1971. Two years later, the FAA banned supersonic flight over land, a prohibition that remains to this day.

The Concorde went on to serve various destinations, including some in the United States, flying at supersonic speeds only over water. That continued until 2,003 when British Airways and Air France retired their fleets, together amounting to just 12 aircraft. (Fourteen production aircraft were manufactured, but one was scrapped in 1,994 and another crashed in 2000.)

While the Concorde successfully overcame the technical hurdles standing in the way of supersonic passenger service, it succumbed to economics: The cost of fuel and maintenance was especially high for these planes. A new generation of aeronautical engineers and entrepreneurs are, however, keen to once again take on the technical, environmental, and economic challenges.

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Using hydrogen for transportation is criticized by many. It would not be as energy-efficient as batteries, and a recent study even pointed out that producing it can be more pollutant than just burning the natural gas from where it is extracted. One of the main hurdles involving it is storage: putting the gas in a tank demands a lot of energy. E for Electric discovered a “solid-state hydrogen fueling” thanks to Sandy Munro and told us more about Plasma Kinetics, the company that developed it.

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