Energy Economy

The emerging Energy Economy marches on, with another potential breakthrough from a partnership between Dow Chemical and Cargill, the big ag company.

The two firms have figured out how to make plastic from corn. Most plastic is made from oil, with the exception of polypropylene, which is made from castor beans. As an interesting aside, in the oil crisis of 1973, the only plastic that did not suffer from huge price increases was polypropylene.

The new form of plastic is so similar to petroleum-based plastic that it is apparently hard to tell the difference. What's interesting is that among other things, the product is biodegradable. It also only takes a few months to create new raw material (i.e. corn) as opposed to millions of years to produce oil.

ITER is an international consortium that is planning to build a 500 megawatt fusion reactor by 2016. Fusion power is the holy grail of the energy industry because it uses relatively inexpensive fuel (hydrogen), creates little contaminated nuclear waste, and can generate large amounts of power.

Advanced engineering is underway, and one of the goals of the project is to use pre-qualified and off the shelf materials and components. The ITER fusion reactor will generate ten times more power than it needs to maintain the fusion reaction.

Here is a long article [link no longer available] that goes into some detail (very readable and not heavily technical) about cold fusion and a new approach to room temperature fusion that has been carefully checked by several different scientists and groups.

The single biggest problem facing the transition from fossil fuel powered cars to hydrogen-powered cars is the storage of hydrogen. The energy density of hydrogen (normally a gas, not a liquid) is much lower than gasoline, so you have to compress it at very high pressures to be able to store enough of it in a tank small enough to fit in a car. In other circumstances, hydrogen stored at high pressure would be called a bomb, so how you store hydrogen in an vehicle subject to occasional violent crashes is important.

The emerging Energy Economy continues to evolve in unexpected ways. A Minnesota farmer and researchers from the University of Minnesota have developed a method to generate electric power from a fuel cell that uses cow manure as the feedstock.

What you will rarely see in the mainstream media when they report on high gas prices is the booming new markets that are already emerging. This Wired article reports on the potential of ethanol as a fossil fuel replacement.

You can buy cars and trucks now that run on E85 fuel, which is 85% ethanol. In Illinois, where a lot of the corn that is used to produce ethanol is grown, the state is already buying E85 vehicles, and is about to start a statewide program to get more gas stations to install an E85 pump.

European scientists have developed a new way to manufacture thin, flexible solar cells that are so lightweight that they could be sewn into clothes. Sound dumb? Not if you have to lug around a bunch of AC chargers for your laptop, your cellphone, your iPod, your camera, your PDA, and all the other electronic junk we burden ourselves with these days.

The Roanoke Time business section reports that a GE plant here is hiring 30 new electrical engineers to meet growing demand for power inverters. Inverters convert DC power to the AC power needed by the electrical grid.

GE is a major supplier of industrial inverters, and the company reports strong growth in wind energy generation is driving the company expansion.

The Energy Economy continues to heat up--literally--as practical Stirling engines, powered by light, are getting an injection of technology. The Stirling engine was invented two hundred years ago, but it was hard to control, so it was largely a novelty item.

British researchers report that they have developed a new nanomaterial that stores hydrogen at low pressure. Hydrogen storage has been a primary obstacle to the development of a practical hydrogen-powered vehicle. To get enough fuel in a tank that will take a car a reasonable distance, until now, very high pressures were required.

The new nanomaterial absorbs hydrogen at high pressure but then stores the same amount of fuel at a lower pressure.

If you think the Hydrogen Economy (part of the emerging Energy Economy) is some distant pipe dream that your region can safely ignore for another twenty years, think again.

UPS is testing hydrogen fuel cell-powered delivery trucks in three different parts of the country.

An Indian researcher has discovered that passing a gas over specially designed carbon nanotubes can generate measurable amounts of electricity.

Windpower is a growing industry that is increasingly competitive with coal and oil-generated power. But current windmills have drawbacks, including the noise, potential danger to birds and wildlife, and complex mechanical design.

The Register reports on a new process to extract hydrogen from sunflower oil. It's potentially a breakthrough technology, because one of the drawbacks of hydrogen-powered cars is the difficulty of storing hydrogen. Using sunflower oil, scientists envision extracting hydrogen in real time from the oil while you drive your car.

I've talked in the past about the importance of the Hydrogen Economy and the potential it has to create new economic development opportunities, but I think a better term is the Energy Economy. As the price of gasoline, diesel fuel, and home heating oil rises, I don't think we're all going to end up shivering in the dark.