This topic covers issues related to energy generation, conversion, transportation and consumption and how the industry is addressing the challenge of energy efficiency in general.
innovations-report provides in-depth and informative reports and articles on subjects ranging from wind energy, fuel cell technology, solar energy, geothermal energy, petroleum, gas, nuclear engineering, alternative energy and energy efficiency to fusion, hydrogen and superconductor technologies.
Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California-Berkeley study.
“There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,” says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. “These strategies are not sustainable.”
Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek, professor of civil and environmental eng
A new study of the carbon dioxide emissions, cropland area requirements, and other environmental consequences of growing corn and sugarcane to produce fuel ethanol indicates that the “direct and indirect environmental impacts of growing, harvesting, and converting biomass to ethanol far exceed any value in developing this energy resource on a large scale.” The study, published in the July 2005 issue of BioScience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), uses the “eco
How sunny is it outside right now – not just locally but all across Europe and Africa? Answering this question is at the heart of many weather-related business activities: solar power and the wider energy sector, architecture and construction, tourism, even health care. Today accurate and continent-wide scale measurements of ground radiances are provided every 15 minutes by ESA’s Meteosat Second Generation satellite.
Integrating this information with the business practices of solar
University of California, Berkeley, researchers have invented a variation on the standard electronic transistor, creating the first “nanofluidic” transistor that allows them to control the movement of ions through sub-microscopic, water-filled channels.
The researchers – a chemist and a mechanical engineer – predict that, just as the electronic transistor became the main component of microprocessors and integrated circuits, so will nanofluidic transistors anchor molecular pr
What if all the vehicles now on the road in the United States were suddenly powered by hydrogen fuel cells? Stanford researchers say in a June 24 article in the journal Science that such a conversion would improve air quality, health and climate–especially if wind were used to generate the electricity needed to split water and make hydrogen in a pollutionless process.
Similarly to how gas is pumped into tanks, hydrogen would be pumped into fuel cells, which rely on chemistry, not
Neste Oil’s new, proprietary NExBTL technology for producing biodiesel marks an important step forward in efforts to meet the growing demand for this type of fuel, as it offers not only valuable production-related benefits, but also results in a fuel with excellent product properties, particularly at low temperatures.
Various companies have experimented with the idea of combining a natural raw material with an oil refining process to produce a biofuel capable of competing with hyd