Energy Balance
Energy Balance is a series of essays on the matter of future energy
provision for the world, particularly against the backdrop of "Peak
Oil", which the author Chris Rhodes has dubbed the "Oil Dearth" Era
when supplies of the cheap light crude oil, on which the modern age
of globalisation has been built, begin to run-short. All aspects are
considered: pollution, nuclear power, nuclear waste, global warming
(and its reality), renewable energy, coal liquefaction, the myth of
the putatuive "hydrogen economy", biofuel production, and the
essential underlying solution of energy saving on a huge scale, by
relocalising civilization into smaller essentially self-sustaining
communities provided for by local farms and businesses.
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Posted 2 years ago
Rare earth (RE) metals find application in devices inlcuding wind turbines, hybrid and electric cars, LCDs, fuel cells, nuclear reactors and lasers. China controls some 97% of the world supply of REs,
Posted 2 years ago
Britain has decided to go all-out for wind-power. On Thursday, I flew over the massive off-shore Thanet wind-farm - one of the largest in the UK - in the English Channel off Foreness Point. The far
Posted 2 years ago
The conventional route to biodiesel consists of extracting oil from plants and converting it to the methyl esters of fatty acids that are present in the lipid-components, known as triglycerides. These
Posted 2 years ago
A new paper (1) published in the prestigious American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science and Technology, has put the cat among the pigeons over carbon capture and storage (CCS). It argues
Posted 2 years ago
On the 16th of July, China experienced its first major oil-spill. The Chinese incident was also caused by an explosion (this time during the transfer of oil from a tanker to a reserve owned by the Chi
Posted 2 years ago
I have just been sent a remarkable document entitled Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan. As the title implies, within its pages is a proposal for how Australia might be run without
Posted 2 years ago
A new method has been introduced for telling which strains of algae are likely to be any good for turning into biofuels based on Near Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy. The near infrared spectrum runs the r
Posted 2 years ago
In the latest issue of Chemistry World is a report describing the first synthetic cell . What has in fact been done is to insert a chemically synthesised genome into a bacterial cell. The M.mycoide
Posted 2 years ago
In his 2002 novel, Prey , the late Michael Crichton advanced a fictional scenario in which nanoparticles escaped from a lab and formed swarms in the desert with the drive and ability to kill humans a
Posted 2 years ago
One principal advantage of thin-film solar cells is that they use far less (maybe 1/100th the amount) of the semiconductor materials that are required to fabricate first-generation solar cells. The
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