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http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/04/12/navy-ends-big-oil/

The U.S. Navy Just Announced The End Of Big Oil And No One Noticed
Author: Justin "Filthy Liberal Scum" Rosario April 12, 2014 10:59 am

This article was originally posted on proudtobeafilthyliberalscum.com

Surf’s up! The Navy appears to have achieved the Holy Grail of energy independence – turning seawater into fuel:

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 new fuel is initially expected to cost around $3 to $6 per gallon, according to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which has already flown a model aircraft on it.

Curiously, this doesn’t seem to be making much of a splash (no pun intended) on the evening news. Let’s repeat this: The United States Navy has figured out how to turn seawater into fuel and it will cost about the same as gasoline.

This technology is in its infancy and it’s already this cheap? What happens when it’s refined and perfected? Oil is only getting more expensive as the easy-to-reach deposits are tapped so this truly is, as it’s being called, a “game changer.”

I expect the GOP to go ballistic over this and try to legislate it out of existence. It’s a threat to their fossil fuel masters because it will cost them trillions in profits. It’s also “green” technology and Republicans will despise it on those grounds alone. They already have a track record of trying to do this. Unfortunately, once this kind of genie is out of the bottle, it’s very hard to put back in.

There are two other aspects to this story that have not been brought up yet:

1. The process pulls carbon dioxide (the greenhouse gas driving Climate Change) out of the ocean. One of the less well-publicized aspects of Climate Change is that the ocean acts like a sponge for CO2 and it’s just about reached its safe limit. The ocean is steadily becoming more acidic from all of the increased carbon dioxide. This in turn poisons delicate ecosystems like coral reefs that keep the ocean healthy.

If we pull out massive amounts of CO2, even if we burn it again, not all of it will make it back into the water. Hell, we could even pull some of it and not use it in order to return the ocean to a sustainable level. That, in turn will help pull more of the excess CO2 out of the air even as we put it back. It would be the ultimate in recycling.

2. This will devastate oil rich countries but it will get us the hell out of the Middle East (another reason Republicans will oppose this). Let’s be honest, we’re not in the Middle East for humanitarian reasons. We’re there for oil. Period. We spend trillions to secure our access to it and fight a “war” on terrorism. Take away our need to be there and, suddenly, justifying our overseas adventures gets a lot harder to sell.

And if we “leak” the technology? Every dictator propped up by oil will tumble almost overnight. Yes, it will be a bloody mess but we won’t be pissing away the lives of our military to keep scumbags in power. Let those countries figure out who they want to be without billionaire thugs and their mercenary armies running the show.

Why this is not a huge major story mystifies me. I’m curious to see how it all plays out so stay tuned.

UPDATE:

People have been asking for more details about the process. This is from the Naval Research Laboratory’s official press release:

Using an innovative and proprietary NRL electrolytic cation exchange module (E-CEM), both dissolved and bound CO2 are removed from seawater at 92 percent efficiency by re-equilibrating carbonate and bicarbonate to CO2 and simultaneously producing H2. The gases are then converted to liquid hydrocarbons by a metal catalyst in a reactor system.

In plain English, fuel is made from hydrocarbons (hydrogen and carbon). This process pulls both hydrogen and carbon from seawater and recombines them to make fuel. The process can be used on air as well but seawater holds about 140 times more carbon dioxide in it so it’s better suited for carbon collection.

Another detail people seem to be confused about: This is essentially a carbon neutral process. The ocean is like a sponge for carbon dioxide in the air and currently has an excess amount dissolved in it. The process pulls carbon dioxide out of the ocean. It’s converted and burned as fuel. This releases the carbon dioxide back into the air which is then reabsorbed by the ocean. Rinse. Repeat.

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That's pretty good. At first I thought it was a basic fuel cell but the technology is different. I hope it all comes together as this could be something very big.

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SAW THIS ARTICLE DIDNT POST IT
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This isnt new and was done by big oil 15 years ago.....why didnt you hear about it ??? ......Golly if people could produce fuel ...wouldnt need BIG OIL !!!

+++++++++++++

  1. Carbon Recycling: Mining the Air for Fuel - National Geographic News
    news.nationalgeographic.com/.../110811-turning-carbon-emissions-into-fuel/
    Aug 10, 2011 ... But science has long known that it's possible to recombine carbon from CO2 with
    hydrogen from water to make hydrocarbons—in other words, ...
  2. Carbon dioxide turned into hydrocarbon fuel - 02 August 2002 - New ...
    www.newscientist.com/.../dn2620-carbon-dioxide-turned-into-hydrocarbon-fuel.html
    Aug 2, 2002 ... A way to turn carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons has caused a big stir ... tried
    before to make hydrocarbons by mixing carbon with hydrogen gas ...
  3. Reactor uses sunlight to make hydrocarbon fuel - Phys.org
    phys.org/news/2011-01-reactor-sunlight-hydrocarbon-fuel.html
    Rating: 3.7 - 3 votes
    Jan 12, 2011 ... Researchers have developed a reactor that can rapidly produce fuel from
    sunlight, using carbon dioxide and water, plus a compound called ...
  4. Reverse Combustion: Can CO2 Be Turned Back into Fuel? [Video ...
    www.scientificamerican.com/.../turning-carbon-dioxide-back-into-fuel/
    Sep 23, 2010 ... "You take electricity and combine CO2 with hydrogen to make ... In fact, the
    problem with turning CO2 back into a hydrocarbon fuel is not so ...
  5. A Cheaper Way to Make Fuel from Carbon Dioxide | MIT Technology ...
    www.technologyreview.com/.../a-faster-and-more-efficient-way-to-convert-carbon-dioxide-into-fuel/
    Dec 4, 2013 ... Making carbon dioxide by burning hydrocarbons is easy. A pair of novel catalysts
    recently made by researchers at the University of Illinois at ...
  6. CO2 Recycling and Energy Independence
    www.americanenergyindependence.com/recycleco2.aspx
    By recycling CO2, America would be building the technology now for a
    sustainable hydrocarbon future. The idea of recycling CO2 to make synthetic
    fuels is not ...
  7. Holy Grail of Fuel? Scientists Make Synthetic Gas from Air and Water ...
    www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/scientists-make-gas-air.html
    Oct 19, 2012 ... IV: The carbon dioxide and hydrogen are reacted together to make a
    hydrocarbon mixture, the reaction conditions being varied depending on ...
  8. Carbon dioxide turned into hydrocarbon fuel - Free Republic
    www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/726555/posts
    Jul 31, 2002 ... A way to turn carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons has caused a big stir at an ... The
    hitch is probably that making hydrocarbon fuel from CO2 ...
  9. [PDF]
    Electrochemical Conversion of Carbon Dioxide to Hydrocarbon Fuels
    www.ems.psu.edu/~elsworth/courses/.../2010/.../co2_electrochem.pdf
    The potentially viable method of CO2 electrolysis to hydrocarbons could .....
    Making this LCOE more competitive to other conventional power generation
    systems.
  10. Invention – hydrocarbon fuels produced directly from solar energy ...
    blogs.howstuffworks.com/.../invention-hydrocarbon-fuels-produced-directly-from-solar-energy/
    Aug 16, 2010 ... The key is to use both the heat and the electricity that the sun can provide to
    make both hydrogen (from water) and carbon monoxide (from ...
Edited by Steven Gaal
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UPDATE ALTERNATIVE FUELS 4/19/14

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

An Abundant and Inexpensive Water-Splitting Photocatalyst With Low Toxicity
Apr. 16, 2014 — Researchers in Japan have discovered a new photocatalyst, Sn3O4, which facilitates the production of hydrogen fuel from water, using sunlight as an energy ... full story
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That's pretty good. At first I thought it was a basic fuel cell but the technology is different. I hope it all comes together as this could be something very big.

Yeah. I don't think it's going to scale down to automobiles (unless SUV or up :P ), as it takes 39,000 gallons of seawater to make 1 gallon of this jetfuel...but for the likes of CVNs or large warships, it's probably going to be a saver in the near future.

Might be interesting to see some figures on it's power potential compared to "ordinary" jetfuel, though. The model they used it on was only a 2-stroke engine, not a regular jet engine...

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5 Things to Know About How Corporations Block Access to Everything From Miracle Drugs to Science Research

http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/5-things-know-corporations-block-access-everything-miracle-drugs-science-research/

Should a company be able to patent a breast cancer gene? What about a species of soybean? How about a tool for basic scientific research? Or even a patent for acquiring patents (see: Halliburton)?

Intellectual property rights are supposed to help inventors bring good things to life, but there’s increasing concern that they may be keeping us from getting the things we need.

In this wild and contested jungle of the law, which concerns things like patents and copyrights, questions about the implications of allowing limited monopolies on ideas are making headlines. Do they stifle innovation? Can they cause the public more harm than good? Trillions of dollars are at stake. Companies known as “patent trolls” are gobbling up patents, then going on lawsuit sprees and extracting fees against infringement. Corporations are using intellectual property law to squash competitors and block our access to things as vital as lifesaving drugs, to place restrictions on things as intimate as parts of the human body. Third World countries are kept from accessing essential public goods related to everything from food security to education.

Surely, the producers of new ideas should be able to profit from their creations. But furious debates over what should be protected and who should profit are calling attention to the many things that are going wrong in this area. For example, a recentfront-page story in the New York Times detailed how diabetics are being held hostage in America by companies that follow Apple’s playbook to lock patients into buying expensive, patented products that quickly become obsolete. If you don’t buy the product, you don’t miss getting the new iPhone. You may die.

Intellectual property rights have come under intense scrutiny, a trend on display at a recent conference in Toronto on innovation and society, “Human After All“, sponsored by the Institute for New Economist Thinking (INET) and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), where I moderated a panel on the topic. Let’s take a look at some of the burning questions and issues in play in this debate.

1. Why Do We Have Intellectual Property Rights?

The notion of giving inventors exclusive rights for a limited time goes back to the medieval era. The first patent in America was granted in 1641 to one Samuel Winslow, who came up with a new way to make salt. Patents could cover both tangible objects and also intangible stuff like methods and ideas. The U.S. Constitution has something to say about patents, namely this:

“The Congress shall have power … To promote the progress of
and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries…”

Notice the reasoning: We the People, through our representatives, grant intellectual property rights so that we can move knowledge forward — not enrich a few people at the expense of everyone else.

The question of whether ideas themselves should be protected by patents troubled some of the Founders, who saw the potential for abuse. In an 1813 letter, Thomas Jefferson observed that unlike objects, ideas inherently want to be shared: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

Intellectual property rights have expanded quite a bit since Jefferson’s day. The Industrial Revolution saw brutal battles over inventions associated with things like the steam engine where the public good was often sacrificed to individual and corporate profits. In the early nineteen twenties, US patent law was revised to favor corporate interests. In 1930, the U.S. began to allow patents for living organisms with the Plant Patent Act. The Motion Picture Association of America, as it emerged, took a hard line on intellectual property and fought for broad protections. As new industries like biotechnology and nanotechnology popped up, companies and individuals sought additional protections for technology. The growth of the Internet set off a yet another wave of intellectual property rights related to patents and copyrights.

Today, what we have is a giant mess, a system plagued by bad actors and bad faith that has often become a means for corporations to smash competition and block human progress rather than advance knowledge. More time and energy is spent by companies coming up with new ways to sue each other than coming up with new ideas (think: Apple v. Samsung). The public purse is picked as taxpayer-funded investments in research are appropriated by profit-making companies. Our patent system fuels inequality by socializing the risk associated with research and discoveries while privatizing the gains. Meanwhile lawyers, as you might expect, are making out like bandits.

2. Patents Have Exploded Since the 1980s.

If you talk to some of the bright-eyed folks in Silicon Valley, America is on an innovation roll. Since the 1980s, the number of patents sought has soared, and the pace is accelerating. Over the last two decades, businesses have increasingly used patents to sue or threaten to sue other companies to get them to pay licensing fees. 2012 was quite a year for patents: the number of court cases increased 29 percent in that year alone, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Costs associated with the litigation come to billions per year.

Michele Boldrin and David Levine, authors of Against Intellectual Monopoly, have noted that in a single four-year period, from 1997 to 2001, patent applications leapt by 50 percent. Meanwhile, the number of lawyers working on intellectual property in America went from 5,500 to nearly 22,000.

But are we really getting so much more creative with all these patents? Boldrin and Levine don’t think so. It appears that the number of patents has grown not because there is more innovation, but simply because the number of things that could be patented grew.

As economists William Lazonick and Oner Tulum have pointed out, changes in the law have allowed certain parties, like venture capitalists, to grow rich on patents at the expense of the public. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 made it easier for companies, particularly those in biotech, to profit from the results of government-backed research done in universities. Seen an ad for Botox lately? Lazonick and Tulum point out that Botox is a drug whose medical applications were developed in taxpayer-funded universities in the 1960s. In 1983, something known as the Orphan Drug Act allowed companies like Allergan, which got hold of Botox, to commercialize certain kinds of drugs that were developed for use in a small population when additional properties of the drugs were discovered. In 2013, Botox generated $1982 million in revenues for Allergan, of which 54 percent were for therapeutic uses that your doctor prescribes and 46 percent were for the cosmetic uses that the company advertises.

3. Intellectual Property Rights Can Block Innovation.

One of the biggest arguments in favor of robust intellectual property rights is that they are supposed to drive innovation, giving big rewards to those who come up with new ideas. But a growing list of experts, such as Boldrin and Levine, counter that this is nonsense. “Intellectual monopoly is not a cause of innovation,” they write, “but it is rather an unwelcome consequence of it.” They argue that in young, dynamic industries, intellectual monopoly doesn’t play a major role — it’s only when the ideas run out that companies become obsessed with having the government protect the old ways of doing business.

In other words, an explosion in patents could be a sign that a country is getting less innovative, not more.

Boldrin and Levine provide numerous examples in their book of how patents shut down innovation, from a steam engine patent that may have delayed the Industrial Revolution by a couple of decades to the Wright brothers American patent on the airplane which forced innovative work in the industry to move to France.

More recently, Heidi Williams examined work done in the area of human genome sequencing by the Human Genome Project (a public entity) and also by Celera (a private company). Williams concluded that Celera’s intellectual property rights claims resulted in a persistent 20-30 percent reduction in subsequent scientific research and product development.

Economist Petra Moser states that if you look at history, intellectual property laws have always had the potential to squelch progress:

============ “Overall, the weight of the existing historical evidence suggests that patent policies, which grant strong intellectual property rights to early generations of inventors, may discourage innovation. On the contrary, policies that encourage the diffusion of ideas and modify patent laws to facilitate entry and encourage competition may be an effective mechanism to encourage innovation.”

==============

4. The Public Is Getting Harmed and Cheated.

It’s increasingly clear that taxpayers are getting ripped off, particularly in areas like in pharmaceuticals. Through entities like the National Institutes of Health, the federal government pays for basic research that gets plundered by corporations that make tremendous profits (and then, of course, lobby to have their taxes reduced). Companies like Apple expect the U.S. government to protect their intellectual property rights all over the world, yet they assiduously avoid paying taxes. Considering the fact that iPhones, for example, would not exist without taxpayer-funded research in everything from touchscreen technology to GPS, this is especially maddening.

Battles between companies and sovereign countries are heating up. Eli Lilly and the Canadian government are gearing up for a showdown since the Canadians took away the company’s rights to two popular new drugs, one for attention-deficit disorder and another for psychotic illness. Despite the fact that countries are supposed to have the right to set their own domestic laws for rules of medicine patents, big corporations are increasingly able to get around them and effectively challenge national policy. Free trade pacts have become a prime vehicle for this. The much-debated Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade pact being negotiated between North American and Asian countries and backed by President Obama, has provoked outrage because it would enhance drug company profits by protecting patents on drugs and medical procedures while blocking less expensive generic drugs. The fear is that powerful corporations will blow right past the laws of individual countries and use patents in ways that pose serious human rights questions.

5. Things Don’t Have to Be This Way.

While we certainly want to promote new ideas and to reward creativity, many feel that intellectual property laws aren’t the best way to do this. As Levine has written:

==========“It is a long and dangerous jump from the assertion that innovators deserve compensation for their efforts to the conclusion that patents and copyrights, that is monopoly, are the best or the only way of providing that reward.”

======

Several of the economists I spoke to at the INET/CIGI conference, such as Italian economist Giovanni Dosi and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, have suggested other ways of rewarding inventors, such as prizes. Stiglitz has pointed out that prizes, as opposed to patents, could help reward research that might not be commercially profitable, like developing a cure for AIDs, or other urgent global problems.

Clearly the notion of public benefit has to be vigorously defended in discussions of intellectual property rights. There are many ways the public good get a better deal. The government, for one, could claim rights to revenues for ideas and inventions that were funded with taxpayer money. Or it could force companies like Apple that benefit from such research to pay their share of taxes. So far, the government has not exercised its muscle because there is an imbalance of power between public and private sector.

We need to recognize that science and technology grow by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection blocks exactly what it’s supposed to enhance: ideas that help us live better. The intellectual property system needs to be reevaluated so that social and economic progress aren’t hampered by laws that only reward the few, and the public good becomes a top priority.

=====

Lynn Parramore, AlterNet

Edited by Steven Gaal
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Please don't pollute this thread with your negative conspiracy claims please, Steven.

OK ...so you believe this a positive ?? RIGHT ??

==========================

The best-kept conspiracy in Australian history

On top of the awkward fact that the Aboriginal population grew strongly right through the whole period it was supposedly subject to genocide, there is another oddity about the Stolen Generations. Why did this not become a public issue before Peter Read emerged on the scene in 1981? If, as the Human Rights Commission claimed, its origins went back to 1910, why didn’t earlier Aboriginal activists make a fuss? At the high point of Aboriginal radicalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the attempt to put an end to Aboriginality by removing children never received a mention in any major agenda of Aboriginal political grievances.

During the lead-up to the successful 1967 constitutional referen­dum to give the Commonwealth powers in Aboriginal affairs, not one of the political activists campaigning for reform mentioned stolen children as an issue to be rectified. In 1970, neither the ten-point Policy Manifesto of the National Tribal Council, nor the Platform and Program of the Black Panthers of Australia, nor the 1972 Five-Point Policy of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy at Parliament House, Canberra, or any other political manifesto of the time, mentioned stolen children, let alone the genocide that Aborigines had purport­edly been suffering for the previous 60 years. Aboriginal activists of that era proved very adept at gaining attention from the news media and very capable of articulating their case. Black Panthers spokesmen included Gary Foley, later a university lecturer, Paul Coe, subse­quently a barrister, and Dennis Walker, son of one of Australia’s leading literary figures. They and their colleagues were politically astute enough to mount the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawns of Parliament House — an inspired piece of political symbolism — yet could not recognize the genocide and child stealing taking place right beneath their noses.

A greater mystery is that some of the best-known of an earlier generation of Aboriginal activists had been in an even better position to see what was going on. In the 1940s and 1950s, William Ferguson, Walter Page and Pearl Gibbs actually served as directors of the Aborigines Welfare Board of New South Wales, one of the very organizations then purportedly committing genocide. Yet they never realized what was happening. Of all people, they were the ones who should have identified it first. How could they possibly have missed it? If the Stolen Generations story was true, then at that very time, right across Australia, in all states and territories, scores of white welfare officials, backed by parliamentarians and senior public ser­vants, were forcibly removing Aboriginal children to put an end to Aboriginality. How did these hundreds of white people, for a period of more than 60 years, maintain the discipline needed to keep the whole thing so quiet that Aboriginal activists like Ferguson, Page and Gibbs were oblivious to its existence? Why did no one leak the truth? A conspiracy on this scale must have been the best-kept secret in Australian history. On these grounds alone, the inherent implausibil­ity of Read’s thesis should always have been self-evident.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

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Stolen Generations - the definition

The central charge made by the advocates of the Stolen Generations is as follows:

Children were forcibly removed from indigenous Australians as young as possible for the immediate purpose of raising them separately from and ignorant of their culture and people, and for the ultimate purposes of suppressing any distinct Aboriginal culture, thereby ending the existence of the Aborigines as a distinct people.

Or in the words of the Australian National University historian Peter Read:

Welfare officers, removing chil­dren solely because they were Aboriginal, intended and arranged that they should lose their Aboriginality, and that they never return home.[1]

According to Australia’s Human Rights Commission, this amounted to genocide:

The policy of forcible removal of children from Indigenous Australians to other groups for the purpose of raising them separately from and ignorant of their culture and people could properly be labelled ‘genocidal’ in breach of binding international law.[2]

Using the above works as its sources, the SBS television series First Australians encapsulated the charge for a popular audience:

Between 1910 and 1970 an estimated 50,000 Aboriginal children were removed from their families. Most were aged under five.[3]

[1] Peter Read, ‘Clio or Janus? Historians and the Stolen Generations’, Australian Historical Studies, 33, 118, 2002, p 57

[2] Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry Into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children From Their Families, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, April 1997, p 275

{3}Episode Five: “An Unhealthy Government Experiment”, First Australians: The Untold Story of Australia, script by Beck Cole and Louis Nowra, SBS Television, 2008

Edited by Steven Gaal
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================

Tuesday, April 29, 2014
EU Project Uses Sun to Turn Water and CO2 Into Jet Fuel
US Navy also recently turned
seawater into jet fuel.

Activist Post

An EU-funded research project called SOLAR-JET has produced the world's first "solar" jet fuel from water and carbon dioxide (CO2). Researchers have for the first time successfully demonstrated the entire production chain for renewable kerosene, using concentrated light as a high-temperature energy source.

The project is still at the experimental stage, with a glassful of jet fuel produced in laboratory conditions, using simulated sunlight. However, the results give hope that in future any liquid hydrocarbon fuels could be produced from sunlight, CO2 and water.

European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science Máire Geoghegan-Quinn said: "This technology means we might one day produce cleaner and plentiful fuel for planes, cars and other forms of transport. This could greatly increase energy security and turn one of the main greenhouse gases responsible for global warming into a useful resource."

The process

In a first step concentrated light - simulating sunlight - was used to convert carbon dioxide and water tosynthesis gas (syngas) in a high-temperature solar reactor (see picture above) containing metal-oxide based materials developed at ETH Zürich. The syngas (a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide) was then converted into kerosene by Shell using the established "Fischer-Tropsch" process
Although producing syngas through concentrated solar radiation is still at an early stage of development, the processing of syngas to kerosene is already being deployed by companies, including Shell, on a global scale. Combining the two approaches has the potential to provide secure, sustainable and scalable supplies of aviation fuel as well as diesel and gasoline, or even plastics. Fischer-Tropsch derived fuels are already certified and can be used by existing vehicles and aircraft without modifications of their engines or of fuel infrastructure.

Background

The four-year SOLAR-JET project was launched in June 2011 and is receiving €2.2 million of EU funding from the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7). The SOLAR-JET project brings together research organisations from academia and industry (ETH Zürich, Bauhaus Luftfahrt, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), Shell Global Solutions and management partner ARTTIC).

In the next phase of the project, the partners plan to optimise the solar reactor and assess whether the technology will work on a larger scale and at competitive cost.

Finding new, sustainable sources of energy will remain a priority under Horizon 2020, the seven-year EU research and innovation programme launched on Jan. 1, 2014. In the call Competitive Low-Carbon Energy published on December 11 last year, the Commission proposed investing €732 million over two years in this area. The call includes a topic on the development of the next-generation technologies for biofuels and sustainable alternative fuels.

Press release source:
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-481_en.htm?locale=
Edited by Steven Gaal
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  • 2 months later...

SEEN MUCH ON ABOVE POST #10 ?? supressed .......
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

New Chemical Process Could Make Ammonia a Practical Car Fuel

overThruster (58843) writes A phys.org article says UK researchers have made a breakthrough that could make ammonia a practical source of hydrogen for fueling cars. From the article: "Many catalysts can effectively crack ammonia to release the hydrogen, but the best ones are very expensive precious metals. This new method is different and involves two simultaneous chemical processes rather than using a catalyst, and can achieve the same result at a fraction of the cost. ... Professor Bill David, who led the STFC research team at the ISIS Neutron Source, said 'Our approach is as effective as the best current catalysts but the active material, sodium amide, costs pennies to produce. We can produce hydrogen from ammonia "on demand" effectively and affordably.'" The full paper. The researchers claim that a two-liter reaction chamber could produce enough hydrogen to power a typical sedan.

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News:140728:Maglev Generator Generates 1.8 kW Electricity from 40 W Input
From PESWiki
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The following is a translation by Alan Yim of http://www.chinatimes.com/newspapers/20140720000273-260114 published July 20, 2014 regarding Directory:Maglev Magnet Generator by Taiwan Edison Creative Technology Co., Ltd

Hi Sterling,

Here's the translation of another article from Chinatimes.com that mentions 40 W input to generate 1.8 kW output that I've mentioned before. Base on this article, I think the need for 40 W input is not just for start up but for the duration of the power generation. So this is essentially a QMoGen device. I believe the existence of the battery rack is to supplement the generator in case there is a momentarily load of larger than 1.8 kW (for instance a 2 kW boiler).

Maglev Generator Generates 1.8 kW Electricity from 40 W Input

B05A00_P_03_02_450.jpg

Inventor Teng successfully developed the world's first "maglev generator" which powered a light during the demonstration yesterday.

Taiwanese inventor Mr. Hon Gi Teng had led the R&D team for nearly three years to develop the "Maglev Generator" which is capable of electricity generation without relying on external energy. Preliminary estimates suggest that it can produce 43 kilowatt hours of electricity a day, far more than the consumption by an average home. It is expected to be in mass-production in a year. Teng claimed that the installation can result in an annual electricity bill savings of about $60,000 ($2,000 USD).

During the product launch event, Teng first started up a single "maglev generator disc" through a coil to power up a 110W light. Then he started up an array of 6 maglev generator discs that powered up a fridge and air-conditioner.

Teng stated that the generator utilized permanent magnets. Each generator disc (rotor?) has 12 magnets, using the magnetic principle of repulsion to generate power. The power generated is stored in the battery rack.

Teng also added that each generator unit has six 12-magnet generator discs. Each disc is capable of generating 300 W of electricity. If the generator operates 24 hours, it can generate 43 kW-h a day, which far exceeds an average daily home's use of 10-15 kW-h. The battery rack is capable of storing 7.2 kW-h of electricity as standby.

In fact, the company originally researched for more efficient wind power technology. But one day they encountered no wind. Teng thought, "Is wind really the only option?" The team then started venturing into using a motor to replace the wind turbine. Teng said that it only requires 40 W to power the motor. This invention is to use 40 W to generate 1800 W of electricity.

Teng said that currently they still have the design of the casing left to be accomplished. It was expected to be finalized in a year's time. They were currently negotiating with Hon Hai (Foxconn) for manufacturing. They have already gotten distribution networks in Germany, Japan, and Myanmar, of which Myanmar has an estimated monthly demand of 20,000 units.

Coverage
  • (This bullet points to the present page. Hence, there is no hyperlink.)
    B05A00_P_03_02_95x95.jpg
    Featured: Electromagnetic > QMoGen > Taiwan Edison >
    Maglev Generator Generates 1.8 kW Electricity from 40 W Input (Translation) - The "Maglev Generator" is capable of electricity generation without relying on external energy. Preliminary estimates suggest that it can produce 43 kilowatt hours of electricity a day, far more than the consumption by an average home. It was expected to be on mass-production in a year. (PESWiki; July 28, 2014)
See also

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