Sub's Alternative Energy Thread

[WstateU]

Getting away from lithium?

NASA May Have Just Cracked the Code for Replacing Lithium in Batteries: 'Double or even triple the energy'

[SubGod22]

Progress

Real World Test Shows All-Electric Big Rigs Can Go Farther and Charge Faster

An industry research non-profit has found that battery-electric big rigs have doubled their range and charging speed numbers in just 2 years of operation.

In conducting a real-world test on 21 freight trucks for three weeks, North American Council for Freight Efficiency (NACFE) found this lighting-fast innovation occurring across the market for battery-electric big rigs

This includes models from Ford, Daimler, Tesla, Volvo, and General Motors.

“This gives us real data, real-world experience to look into the future a bit — and I think the future of battery electric commercial trucks is bright,” said Mike Roeth, NACFE’s executive director.

While the NACFE’s 2023 report didn’t contain weight details for the trucks involved, which Roeth admits was frustrating since weight affects range, he confirmed that each of the 21 vehicles was hauling average freight for the shipping company who owned it, and included trailers full of produce or bottled water, and international freight on shipping containers.

The exciting part of the data is the range and charging times were bang in the zone of what Roeth told Canary Media is known as the “sweet spot in… medium regional haul return-to-base,” and represents the largest part of trucking routes within states and encompasses around 300 miles of movement.

The Daimler eCascadia electric tractor-trailer, for example, averaged 322 miles per day which consisted of 26 deliveries.

[SubGod22]

For First Time, Water Produced by Sunlight to Be Even Cheaper Than Tap Water

In a topline that’s rare to see these days, a US-China collaboration has created the cheapest and fastest way to purify seawater yet discovered by science.

The prototype of the passive solar-powered desalination tool can produce 4-6 liters of clean water per hour, and the designers believe a scaled-up version could sustain a coastal household in sunny climes year-round.

For as much as natural resource managers, city planners, and climate activists warn about droughts becoming more severe in the future, the solution has always been staring us in the face.

Only 3% of the Earth’s water is fresh, an amount that, along with technology, has already enabled the human race to reach nearly 8 billion members. By contrast, 68% of the Earth’s surface, and 97% of its water, is undrinkable.

Seeking to exploit that unending reservoir of potential, a team from MIT and Shanghai Jiao Tong University developed a desalination still about the size of a briefcase that utilizes “thermohaline” circulation similar to the ocean itself.

Thermohaline circulation is described by NASA as the “Great Ocean Conveyor Belt” and occurs when water in the polar regions becomes more saline due to evaporation and sea ice melt.

After this, the denser water forces its way to the depths of the polar oceans, pushing the less-saline, colder water of the deeps out toward the tropical oceans. In essence, it’s a giant current, but one that moves much slower than the wind-driven currents.

Leave it to the nerds at MIT to come up with something like this that could be massively beneficial down the road.

[1972Shocker]

What Our Oceans Say about Global Warming

https://www.americanthinker.com/arti...l_warming.html

Guy K. Mitchell, Jr. is the author of a book titled Global Warming: The Great Deception — The Triumph of Dollars and Politics Over Science and Why You Should Care. It placed #3 on the "Wall Street Journal's" Top Ten Best Selling Book list in April 2023. www.globalwarmingdeception.com

About the Author: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Guy%20...B93XNZHQ/about

Mr. Mitchell became interested in the man-made global warming hypothesis in 2017. He has spent the last four years conducting extensive investigations into scientific research dealing with the subject, as well as the reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In addition, he has spent several years studying spectroscopy, quantum mechanics, and atmospheric physics to understand how the first principles of science in each of these fields impact the analysis of the global warming hypothesis.

Sound sort of like science to me, but what do I know.

[SubGod22]

Another way to create something out of unusable waste. It can also be used to restore soil damaged by over-farming or overuse of fertilizers.

Researchers Invent Way to Turn Harmful Mine Waste into Healthy Soil

An Australian-Canadian science and engineering team has discovered a way of turning mine waste into arable soil that is already being used to grow maize and sorghum.

‘Tailings’ is the official industry term for mineral waste leftover after separating away all the useful metals from mined material. Typically toxic from heavy metals and unusable for anything else because of this, tailings are kept in storage facilities to prevent them from polluting groundwater or farmland.

Hoping to save billions of dollars in such storage fees and remove the threat of disasters that occur when such facilities break down or are abandoned, a team from the universities of Queensland and Saskatchewan sought to see whether it was possible to convert this lifeless rock into healthy soil by returning microbial life to it.

“Tailings have no biologically friendly properties for growing plants. Roots and water cannot penetrate them, and soluble salts and metals in tailings can kill plants and soil microbes,” said Longbin Huang a professor at the Univ. of Queensland. “If you wait for nature to slowly weather the tailings and turn them into soil, it could take a couple thousand years.”

Using the Canadian Light Source (CLS), Huang and his team found a way to accelerate this process of repopulating the tailings with soil microbes.

The CLS is a giant synchrotron, a type of circular particle accelerator. It works by accelerating charged particles (electrons) through sequences of magnets until they reach almost the speed of light.

Using the CLS’s synchrotron light the scientists could visualize the detailed mechanism of how they were able to develop the organic-mineral interfaces and revitalize the tailings.

“We needed to use the SM beamline to unravel at the nanometer scale the immediate interfaces and how the minerals change, and how they interact with organics,” said Huang. “The facility access and the expert inputs of the beamline staff were critical to enable us to collect quality data and therefore to have reliable scientific evidence.”

[SubGod22]

Massachusetts Innovators Aim to Turn Ocean Plastic into Fuel - Right Onboard the Ship

Chemical engineers are pioneering a process to equip diesel ships with the onboard capacity to turn collected plastic garbage into fuel.

The result has been dubbed “blue diesel” and would save time, money, and emissions in both the trips necessary for ocean-cleaning vessels to reach the mainland to offload and in running fuel use.

Millions of tons of plastic enter the oceans every year and tend to accumulate in the ocean “gyres”—specific zones where several currents meet, but which can still be thousands of square miles.

Even though the ocean does the work of rounding up the trash for cleanup organizations like The Ocean Cleanup to then collect, it still requires a lot of time to sail back and forth from these gyres to offload plastic on land and to refuel.

Professor Nikolaos Kazantzis and Michael Timko at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts took a lot of inspiration and perseverance in their work of developing blue diesel from the fact that the chemical bonds of plastic and those of fossil fuels are essentially the same.

“Our research team is modeling a specialized reactor that converts harvested waste plastic using an innovative chemical process called hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL),” Kazantzis told Cambridge press last year. “This compresses the plastic at high temperature and high pressure into “blue diesel” (the name emphasizes its marine origins).”

Their work was funded by a two-year, $259k grant from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) 2026 Idea Machine competition.

Seems like it could be an efficient way of cleaning up the oceans and limiting the amount of fuel and time wasted going back and forth.

[Shockm]

Not So Green, After All? EV Battery Factory Demands Coal Plant For Power

A new electric vehicle (EV) battery factory in Kansas, funded by Panasonic with a $4 billion investment, is causing the state to delay the retirement of a coal-fired power plant due to its high energy demands. The factory, which aligns with the Biden administration’s push for EV adoption, is expected to require between 200 and 250 megawatts of electricity, equivalent to what a small city would consume.

Evergy, the utility serving the factory, expressed concerns about resource adequacy to the Kansas City Corporation Commission. To meet the energy needs of the factory, the utility intends to continue using the coal plant near Lawrence, Kansas, and postpone plans to transition some units to natural gas. This decision has drawn criticism from environmentalists.


https://www.ubergizmo.com/2023/10/ev...ant-for-power/

[SubGod22]

Breakthrough in Recycling EV Batteries Can Recover 100% of Aluminum and 98% of Lithium Thanks to Swedish Scientists

Swedish researchers say they have developed a new method of recycling batteries from electric vehicles that allows recovery of 100 percent of the aluminum and 98 percent of the lithium.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have presented the efficient way to recycle metals from spent batteries, and at the same time minimize the loss of valuable raw materials such as nickel, cobalt and manganese.

Furthermore, no expensive or harmful chemicals are required in the process because the researchers use oxalic acid—an organic acid that can be found in the plant kingdom.

“So far, no one has managed to find exactly the right conditions for separating this much lithium using oxalic acid, whilst also removing all the aluminum,” said Léa Rouquette, PhD student in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. “Since all batteries contain aluminum, we need to be able to remove it without losing the other metals.”

In the Chalmers battery recycling lab, Rouquette and research leader Martina Petranikova showed how the new method works—taking the pulverized components in the form of a finely ground black powder and dissolving it in a transparent liquid – oxalic acid.

Rouquette produces both the powder and the liquid in something reminiscent of a kitchen mixer. Although it looks as easy as brewing coffee, the exact procedure is a unique scientific breakthrough. By fine-tuning temperature, concentration and time, the researchers came up with a new recipe for using oxalic acid, an environmentally friendly ingredient that can be found in plants such as rhubarb and spinach.

“We need alternatives to inorganic chemicals. One of the biggest bottlenecks in today’s processes is removing residual materials like aluminum,” says Martina Petranikova, Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers. “This is an innovative method that can offer the recycling industry new alternatives and help solve problems that hinder development.”

[asiseeit]

Slice it and justify it anyway you like but climate change is a hoax. So called scientists are awarded government grants for substantial amounts of money to fool the populations around the world. The scam is on the level of the covid virus maybe worse long term.

[SubGod22]

As I've said numerous times, it's not all about climate change and I couldn't care less about it.

There is something to be said about striving for a cleaner lifestyle down the road and finding ways to do it. One of the big knocks on these batteries have been the waste. The fact that they may be able to limit that and reuse important materials is a positive no matter if climate change is real or bullshit.

I understand questioning climate change. You should. But those of you that **** on anything that may lead to a cleaner future and a cleaner environment just because you hate the climate change talk crap crack me up.

Some of you sound like no science or advancements are to ever be trusted. Are some of these people motivated by climate change? Sure. If they actually come across ways to make things cleaner and cheaper is that bad just because of their motivation? Absolutely not.

[ShockerPrez]

As I've said numerous times, it's not all about climate change and I couldn't care less about it.

There is something to be said about striving for a cleaner lifestyle down the road and finding ways to do it. One of the big knocks on these batteries have been the waste. The fact that they may be able to limit that and reuse important materials is a positive no matter if climate change is real or bullshit.

I understand questioning climate change. You should. But those of you that **** on anything that may lead to a cleaner future and a cleaner environment just because you hate the climate change talk crap crack me up.

Some of you sound like no science or advancements are to ever be trusted. Are some of these people motivated by climate change? Sure. If they actually come across ways to make things cleaner and cheaper is that bad just because of their motivation? Absolutely not.

Yes.

I dont think you need to believe in climate change to want cleaner air, less trash and cheaper energy. I also believe that the hoopla around climate change is a grift of epic proportions, warping the minds of our youth and scaring them into voting away freedoms. I like hearing and reading about individuals arnd organizations that are actually pursuing scientific endeavors to address and improve technologies that will better the lives of people through hard work and creativity. These are completely different than orgs that exist solely to take gov grants in return for 50% kickbacks to political parties and a field full of trees and giving speeches to students on the dangers of climate change. I believe that our environment will continue to get better because people will continue to make inventions to do so, and people will choose them. . And in return they should get rich because they hit a home run, not because the government selected them.

[Atxshoxfan]

Government mandating technology that doesn't exist and spending tax payer money to develop that technology, is the problem. Take away government intervention and better, cleaner energy would never be an issue.

[Kung Wu]

As I've said numerous times, it's not all about climate change and I couldn't care less about it.

But you keep posting potential tech advances in a thread titled "Anthropogenic Global Warming". I think that's implicitly implying anthropogenic global warming is a real concern and is being solved. If you really don't care about human caused global warming and only care about tech that could lead to cleaner/safer living, shouldn't you post tech advances in a different thread?

[WuDrWu]

But you keep posting potential tech advances in a thread titled "Anthropogenic Global Warming". I think that's implicitly implying anthropogenic global warming is a real concern and is being solved. If you really don't care about human caused global warming and only care about tech that could lead to cleaner/safer living, shouldn't you post tech advances in a different thread?

Proving 2 things can be true at the same time.

[asiseeit]

Free markets are much better than government mandates to create better ways of doing things