Entrepreneurs have been trying for years to turn low-value wastes into high-value products. Waste plastic is among the lowest in value, and gasoline or diesel fuel the highest, but machines that carry out that conversion usually consume a lot of energy and get gummed-up by leftover materialthat they cannot convert. Now a company in Washington, D.C., is trying out a new way heating the plastic to a very carefully controlled temperature range, with infrared energy. The company, Envion, is expected to cut the ribbon on Wednesday morning on a $5 million plant that it says will annually convert 6,000 tons of plastic into nearly a million barrels of something resembling oil. The product can be blended with other components and sold as gasoline or diesel.
ExxonMobils sabotage of some 100 Texas oil wells in the past 17 years going so far as to plug up some wells with explosives means the worlds largest oil company could be liable for penalties of up to $1 billion, the Texas General Land Office says.
About 60 percent of the toxic water used to extract the natural gastouted in mendacious commercials by the natural gas industry as clean energyis left underground. The rest is stored in huge, open pits that dot the landscapes at drilling sites, before it is loaded into hundreds of large vehicles and trucked to regional filtration facilities. Such drilling has already poisoned wells in western Pennsylvania, Colorado, Alabama, Arkansas, New Mexico, Kansas, Montana, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wyoming. Those whose water becomes contaminated, including people living in towns such as Dimock, Pa., must have water trucked in to provide for their needs. Farm animals that have drunk the toxic mixture that has leeched from gas drilling sites have died. Cattle ranchers in Colorado, where drilling is occurring in close proximity, have reported that their livestock birthrates have gone down and animals are bearing deformed offspring.
The researchers extracted oils from Starbuck's spent coffee grounds, and went on to perform a standard transesterification process to convert the oil to biodiesel using methanol (a type of alcohol) and potassium hydroxide (a base for catalyzing the reaction).
What Nocera was demonstrating was a reaction that generates oxygen from water much as green plants do during photosynthesis--an achievement that could have profound implications for the energy debate. Carried out with the help of a catalyst he developed, the reaction is the first and most difficult step in splitting water to make hydrogen gas. And efficiently generating hydrogen from water, Nocera believes, will help surmount one of the main obstacles preventing solar power from becoming a dominant source of electricity: there's no cost-effective way to store the energy collected by solar panels so that it can be used at night or during cloudy days.
A new type of reflective coating can make solar panels far more efficient, soaking up nearly all available sunlight from nearly any angle, U.S. researchers said on Monday. Current solar panels -- which convert energy from the sun into electricity -- absorb only about two-thirds of available sunlight. But surfaces treated with a coating developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, can harvest 96.2 percent of sunlight.
Iraq has signed its first major oil deal with a foreign company since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, a spokesman for the Iraqi Oil Ministry said Saturday.
Ms Kuepper realised a new approach would be needed if affordable cells were to be made on site in poorer countries: "What started off as a brainstorming session has resulted in the iJET cell concept that uses low-cost and low-temperature processes, such as ink-jet printing and pizza ovens, to manufacture solar cells."
According to the DOT, Americans drove 12.2 billion miles less in June than they did in June 2007, a drop of 4.7 percent. That’s the largest monthly drop since the decline began in November.
A press release from the DOT says that, since November, Americans have driven 53.2 billion fewer miles than they did over the same period a year earlier, a drop that is more pronounced than the drop that occurred during the 1970s, a era marked by severe gas shortages.
In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost anything into oil.
Really.
"This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri. "This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming."
