Japan extracts 'fire ice' energy resource from its seabed in 'world first' It looks like Japan may have a reprieve in its energy plight, after claiming it's the first country to extract methane hydrate "fire ice" from its seabed.
Officials say the plan is to have viable production technologies in place by 2018/19. The state-run Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (Jogmec) made the announcement 11 March, revealing that a year-long expedition to the watery depths had finally paid off. "It is the world's first offshore experiment producing gas from methane hydrate," an economy, trade and industry ministry official said to AFP, though other tests have been carried out before. Jogmec began drilling the seabed in January, and has just begun a so far successful two-week long extraction and production experiment to prove that the tricky substance's potential can be tapped into. The successful extraction has massive potential for Japan. International Security Observer » Shale Oil Revolution in America. How does it affect the world? By Jhelum Bagchi.
The World Energy Outlook’s forecast in October 2012 that the United States of America will overtake the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in oil production has initiated a new debate within the oil industry[i] – Will this lead to a fundamental change in global oil markets? Will the importance of the Middle East decline? How 3D printing could revolutionise the solar energy industry. During President Obama's recent state of the union address, I was particularly drawn to one specific comment he made.
The statement by the president I'm referring to was, "A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3D printing that has the potential to revolutionise the way we make almost everything. " 3D printing has been increasingly used to produce jewellery, dental work, prototyping and even creating human organs. However, as an energy strategist, I'm most excited about the potential for 3D printing to revolutionise solar panel and photovoltaic (PV) cell manufacturing. For starters, for those not familiar with 3D printing, it's the ability to make a three-dimensional "solid" object from digital design specifications. You may be asking why I'm so positive on its relationship to solar power. Well, that's easy. Another benefit is cost. Proposed Energy Exploration Sparks Worry on Ocean Canyons by Paul Greenberg. 21 Jan 2013: Report by paul greenberg “Your jaw’s gonna fricking drop,” the guy fishing next to me said, “when after, like, three minutes, you still haven’t hit bottom.”
These words were spoken to me last September as I dropped a three-pound weight and two globs of clam bait over the side of the party fishing boat Viking Star into an abyss few people know exist — an abyss that is re-emerging as a battleground in the fight for the world’s dwindling natural resources. I was fishing 150 miles off Long Island in a bioregion commonly referred to as “the Canyons” — a latticework of 70-odd, 1,000-15,000-foot deep trenches that filigree the periphery of the continental shelf from North Carolina to Maine.
National Grid readies new lightweight T-pylon - 18 Feb 2013. Researcher’s new solar reactor uses unique mirror to harvest the sun. The Sun, roughly 93 million miles away, is what powers everything for us on Earth in one way or another.
Unfortunately, we haven’t been very good at efficiently using its vast amounts of energy. Coal and oil work as decent energy sources, but if we could cut out the middle man to get hydrogen directly from sunlight on a meaningful scale, humanity would have it made. That’s what Erik Koepf, a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware, is working on. His solar reactor project produces hydrogen from a chemical reaction causing sunlight to split water, but its efficiency is still unknown. In March, he’ll be traveling to Zurich, Switzerland to test the reactor at full power for the very first time. This reactor uses zinc oxide powder on a ceramic surface that is then exposed to massive amounts of focused sunlight. Norwegians trap sunlight with microbeads, produce solar cells that are 20 times thinner, cheaper. Researchers from the University of Oslo have used a bunch of “wonderful tricks” to produce silicon solar cells that are twenty times thinner than commercial solar cells.
This breakthrough means that solar cells can be produced using 95% less silicon, reducing production costs considerably — both increasing profits (which are almost nonexistent at the moment), and reducing the cost of solar power installations. Standard, commercial photovoltaic solar cells are fashioned out of 200-micrometer-thick (0.2mm) wafers of silicon, which are sliced from a large block of silicon. This equates to around five grams of silicon per watt of solar power, and also a lot of wastage — roughly half of the silicon block is turned into sawdust by the slicing process. With solar cells approaching 50 cents per watt (down from a few dollars per watt a few years ago), something needs to change.
Now read: Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels.