Future Energy eNews

November 2023 Vol.24

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Greetings!

Thanks to everyone who responded to our Cyber Monday sale. Such sales, in keeping with our mission statement, keep our nonprofit going without fund-raising donation drives. Your testimonials on how you benefit from our bioenergetic products are also encouraging and gratifying too.

Only a few weeks ago, New Scientist reported (21 Oct. 2023) that the world’s largest offshore wind farm is now powering up, with the first turbine beginning to send power to the UK. The plan is for https://doggerbank.com/ to install 277 wind turbines offshore and generate almost 5 GW of electricity. However, credit must be given to the world’s largest onshore Gansu Wind Farm in China with its 10 GW of generated power (20 GW planned), surpassing India and the US.

This month, our Story #1 is about transforming the waste gas CO2 into a fuel like ethanol using a tin-based electrocatalyst with 80% selectivity by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Nature Energy also published it as well. This seems to be a welcome trend since two other CO2 storage related stories have surfaced this past week too. A Federal award for the University of Wyoming to study underground CO2 storage and also Heirloom is doing Direct Air Capture (DAC) in California aiming at one gigaton (Gt) by 2035. IRI gives Heirloom the thumbs up for the billion ton goal. This particular planet needs to do some serious geoengineering in the multi-gigaton range to at least reach 40 Gt as soon as possible, just to simply offset the same amount sent into the atmosphere EACH year! Luckily, lots of companies and nonprofit organizations are taking up the gauntlet that IRI has been promoting for years, and a video to boot à https://tinyurl.com/ClimateVideoValone. If you are convinced, you may also join the bandwagon and sign our online Gigaton DAC Petition: 

Story #2 is interesting since it is based in the cold US state of Nebraska. Years ago, I saw a photo of San Francisco from the air around the early 1900s where almost every rooftop had one of these Solar Water Heater panels mounted on them, until they disappeared along with the subway system there. Now it is a “carbon-free system” to service 400 or so freshman at Creighton University. IRI also contributes to this movement by selling a “Solar DIY Heat Panel” which is easy to build plans from New York State for free hot air (we have built more than one which can be located on a southern facing wall ).

Story #3 is also an emerging trend to free us from the dependence on lithium-ion batteries that are prone to starting fires and is in short supply. It is a sodium-ion battery from Sweden that is less expensive too. The company is called Northvolt https://northvolt.com/products/cells/sodium-ion/ and has a gigafactory just south of the Arctic Circle.

Story #4 is like a view into the future. Seeing a multipurpose EV charging station that is a self-powered high-capacity electric vehicle charging system that operates without adding to grid load is a welcome addition to the roadway. The Wind & Solar Tower generates 234,154 kilowatt hours of electricity per year, which is enough to power an EV for 810,000 miles https://windandsolartower.com/about/.

Story #5 is fresh from the Brussels European Hydrogen Week where Honda unveiled its Fuel Cell Stack Module that apparently can be used in heavier vehicles, including the A330 from Airbus as an auxiliary power system . Of course other companies are also getting in on the action, such as R&D Dynamics with an Airbus UpNext contract and ZeroAvia. Cleaner skies are coming soon to a city near you .

Tom Valone, Editor

SciTech.com November 2023

A recent breakthrough in CO2 reduction research involves a newly developed Sn-based catalyst that efficiently produces ethanol, representing a significant step forward in renewable energy technology.A mechanistic study showed that this Sn1-O3G could respectively adsorb *CHO and *CO(OH) intermediates, therefore promoting C-C bond formation through an unprecedented formyl-bicarbonate coupling pathway. Moreover, by using isotopically labeled reactants, the researchers traced the pathway of C atoms in the final C2 product formed over the catalyst of Sn1-O3G. This analysis suggested that the methyl C in the product comes from formic acid whereas the methylene C was from CO2.