Should have put it in Owensboro, Kentucky. For all the tax dollars we put to work, like it or not, https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/2019/06/11/mitch-mcconnell-reelection-elaine-chaos-kentucky-projects-scrutinized/1418351001/

Hard to believe this has a round trip efficiency of 60%. Creating liquid gas is very inefficient, although making cryoliquifiers in hypercompact form could be a real help. We have found that hydrogen gas is being introduced as a turbine coolant: It's properties of lubricity and heat exchange can't be beat, so maybe this is being used in compresssor and turbine systems for liquid gas. More likely the increases of efficiency are in the banks of large and small turbine generators to handle variable electric loads. Even a very small intermittently used turbine could rival the efficiency (exergy) of the big boys. Apparently the key is to optimize the production of a ratio of liquid to gaseous cold air, and use both effectively in turbine generators, see https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/20/10/770/pdf Now you're debating nuclear energy. Highview promotes its system as a means of reducing wear and tear on nuclear components during the rampup and rampdown of energy (experienced in France to produce load following). Now the plant can operate at continuous levels; Cold water from the sea or river plus heat from the cooling tower provide the heat/cold sinks for LAES, and you've positioned a facility from shutdown to repositioning for another 40 years. Wish this came in time for Oyster Creek!

Coppicing is important for windrow development and conservation against sanddrifts, and low tilth (more roots and overall tree density to conserve water and vital soil fungi). This comes at the expense of the desire to reduce tree density to provide for taller, more lumber-marketable trees. But between different tree cultures growing together at different heights, and a more rapid harvest schedule overall, I'd say we'd have healthier, more marketable harvests. Note the coppices have higher branch density and stumps preserved over successive generations. More sites for burrowing and nesting animals, better leaf coverage of the ground. I'd say this offload from nature has benefits for nature.

No this study is not rubbish. Sadly, Euro-diesel has turned out to be an expensive fraud in bigger ways than the study shows. Particulates, famously associated with diesel, are a bigger cause of heat island and global warming in all prabability than CO2 alone. Your GCC records glacial melts as far away as Tibet from dropped particulates (what do you think makes sunsets so red?). NOx is a powerful greenhouse gas, and you may add to this the decline in performance and service of diesels, which tolerate engine knock due to lack of maintenance, as well as drive train burnout of lubricating fluid that we see so often among those old tractor trailers on my turnpike. What about the emissions costs of recommended warmups and cooldowns? Note the energy and emissions costs per kilogram of manufactured aluminum v. steel, as well as magnesium. How does structural value comport to weight? Your best best for lifetime vehicle efficiency by mass is probably stainless steel, which varies in grade, workability, and serviceability, not aluminum. Certainly not mild steel, but unless we see a full fledged recycling program of Al and SST, we may not realize ultimate energy economies over mild steel, which becomes junk with paint melted into the iron. Noguidance here for vinyl resins, fiberglass or graphite. European refineries are much smaller and less consolidated than in the US, adding to inefficiency, as does the tilt toward lower grade, higher sulfur feedstock (the refineries must get rid of the sulfur, if the gas stations don't). What would help is the use of cogen to heat refineries and provide shift steam, which would add about 8% to useable feedstock. One more thing. I can assure you VW builds rust buckets, which are no help, if such cars really are the Euro-standard.

But the pipeline is not needed and probably never was. Thawing ice means tankers can operate direct to platform. The Alaska Pipeline was a frankly political project, promising that oil would traverse no foreign soil to get to market. That is, until you consider Canada, and the soon discovered desire to serve the midwest rather than California with oil that was then clearly lacking. On the other hand, the oil could have been exported to Japan in exchange for trade concessions, which was also discussed during the Nixon Administration. And could be in the cards today.

Yes it was methanol for the V2, and by the way, liquid ammonia for the Bell X-1, the first plane to break the sound barrier. But just how much of the new project is Brazilian ecoboosterism for their favorite crop and fuel?

Where will the energy come from to run this? It occurred to me that an obscure nuclear reactor concept called CAESAR would do. This uses compressed and decompressed steam to moderate neutrons. Apparently it could exploit enough delayed neutrons to a)allow spent nuclear fuel to provide meaningful quantities of neutrons within a small space in a given time, and b)cause meaningful increased fission of this fuel before a critical mass explosion occurs. But I have found no proposals on how to harness the energy of this intermittently expanded steam. There, now you have one. Note, the stoichiometric increase of the reactants sustains the piston mechanically. But I think some variation of a Wankel type rotary engine would be mechanically more efficient and expose less lubricant to the reaction chemistry.

Just my opinion, but when you have to rely on carpools to get to work, that's what Adam Smith called "fast hurtling backward" in terms of living standards. This all came about because our major cities are too dense to support their inner city transit and rail and bus lack the convenience of cars. San Francisco is rapidly becoming a social hellhole and an expensive one. The California High Speed Rail has been foisted on residents as some sort of solution, but what does SF have to do with LA, Las Vegas, or California? People will revolt and move to the suburbs.

As ethanol is usually not produced dry, and is quite wet in fermentation, we should see this fuel, wet ethanol, promoted for turbo-engines as a booster in a separate tank.

The ash borer is so named because it attacks American Ash, the stuff of baseball bats. The tree is also threatened by a fungus. We hope UGA is on that case: The Ash is vital to the Northeast.

At last, Ireland rules the world, and Ukraine gets independent from Russia. Unless Russia dumps vodka gasoline on the world first.

Nuclear waste separation, which is a lot like rare earth processing, relies so much on complex organics and pH balance, the field resembles biotechnology anyway. Look at this, http://www.acsept.org/AIWOpdf/AIWO1-12-Nash.pdf The pdf mentions that pH is difficult to control, but bacteria can make this easier in many ways, including self balancing solvent environment and self selecting by survival and reproduction. This is just exciting. Bioremediation will have to be underway soon anyway at many rare earth mines.

At least isobutanol and dioxalane can replace nuisance MTBE and ethylene bromide, among two nuisance additives to supposedly clean the air. We would not necessarily resort to corn stover, though. Legumes had been researched a while ago for butanol, and processing of wood saccharides would make use of much waste timber, actually encouraging the optimal growth of woodstands to lock up carbon, and improve timber harvest economies. Now would algae be even more adaptable to producing the specialty sugars and alcohols to make isobutanol raw materials more of a go?

Very nice, but how cheap is it? Dioxalane is already used to stick those plastic labels on plastic soda bottles, adding much to consumer recyclability. This stuff is similar to THF and other furans, which can be biosynthesized and added to a mixture of alcohol and gasoline to produce p-series fuels. These dioxanes sound much better though, at producing the high octane levels needed to make this type of fuel a go.

Molten salt reactors should receive much more attention if only because of bureaucratic dawdling in reprocessing nuclear material. MSR's can use 100% reprocessed waste with very low purity. Do something people: At least keep nuclear material in service if you are taking years to decide where to bury it. We have already invested billions in nuclear research, so it is pointless to treat nuclear as just another "free enterprise" concern when we have already invested the money, like it or not. However, my impression is that MSR contingents are more in the spirit of free enterprise than our ponderous, governmentalized university system, which is probably invested in boiling water and fuel rods. Am I on to something here?

From the diagram above, I estimate this biohydrogen system gives 100% greater range than an equivalent Dalton mass of gasoline, and is the only way ethanol can compete on mileage with gasoline. Very attractive is that this system does not use dry (anhydrous) ethanol, which is an added energy expense at the distillery. Add together some new fermentation techniques, such as the addition of KOH/KCl to the fermentate (a 60% increase of ethanol production) and you really could have sustainable fuel in parts of the world.

I would imagine the dibenzyltoluene conveys interest because the hydrogenated/dehydrogenated components can mass separate (stack, like water in a hot water tank), apparently low toxicity (we know toluene, unlike benzene, can be metabolized), good heat capacity (need to efficiently utilize heat to free hydrogen), dielectric usage as a capacitor (ever consider a battery-like activated hydrogen storage system in which this fluid is a virtual electrolyte with a small heated interface?), low flammability, high boiling point, low water solubility -- all of these must be issues that have prevented the miracle H2 storage medium car from being developed. As for the U-238 thing, thorium has been presented for a quite adequate auto energy system (beta particles split H from H2O)

Where do they top up with propellant? The moon, of course, or simply asteroids, laced with solar wind. The first chemical analyses of Apollo moonrocks produced xenon and krypton 'by the bucket'. There is also a lot of helium which tempts exploration of helium 3 for fusion. Solar flares produced glassy lunar dust over billions of years which probably incresed glass entrapment and high surface area for the gases. But icy asteroids may have even deeper and more thorough penetration of the gases.

How would OPOC disallow the injector geometry? My understanding is that injection through holes in the cylinder walls is now possible with new mettalurgy. That's a few degrees of freedom to advance the ACE concept. Apparently the key is not to activate the injectors at exactly the same time. But maybe for the effort some preheating within the injectors themselves will be the ultimate key to controlling mixing and viscosity.

Beware the smell of fish, not brine. Once again an industry will kowtow to the endless mantra of Chinese growth and consumer demand. Following Beijing's policies of hoarding copper and even frozen pork, the Communist government may be in the position, even as we speak, of hoarding and running up the price of lithium. This is simply done through statist policies of alternatively redirecting savings into T-bills, and then liquidating them presently to paper over their economy's cash flow problems and capital flight. This is an economy which has been estimated to use as much as 8% counterfeit currency to assist growth, and which has managed to increase the public debt to GDP ratio to US levels, with a far poorer and far more accounting-dishonest system than here. Next news will be a catastrophic steel glut: The Economist estimates that 2 yrs Chinese coal use equals the UK's in the entire history of the industrial revolution. This is a very poor time to gauge the real value of anything -- money, GHG, or lithium.

What they are talking about? Another lose-lose government boondoggle, as Keynesian stimulus is largely a myth, and most likely one here for a variety of reasons: Government underwriting will likely cause bigger financial losses than the purported money gains claimed here, EV's will displace ICE cars, so there will be job loss in one sector to benefit another, Jobs of regular mechanics will be shifted to EV techs, but where is the net benefit to the driver and the employee? Unless you are defining personal income and spending power in arcane terms, Where is the energy coming from to power these vehicles? Where is British EV manufacturing capacity? And my favorite, If the UK can't get a handle on its immigration and job growth problem, who can afford either to buy these cars orfoot the subsidies (I am assuming that private enterprise should be able to solve supply demand issues on its own).

You can pay for the 3 injectors with an OPOC on a single cylinder--that's 2 or 4 cylinders on one to two borings. Or maybe just use a two-stroke piston, with some heat regeneration at the exhaust (which would go a long way with the so called "constant volume" step of the heating. With the cost of emissions control and electronics, I'm not sure injectors are that costly.

HG, sounds like you are talking about barge traffic, which runs at precisely the moderate rates to make your scheme attractive. Flettner rotors could take advantage of the low profiles and long travel times of the barges. Similar rotors under the hull could reduce flow resistance, particularly in upstream movement.

We have an ethylene glut in the US as it is, and little need to process more conventional petroleum for what we need. The source is oil/gas liquids. The "selectivity" described in the above article seems fairly meaningless within a complex refinery or FT operation, and there are numerous FT variants more specifically attuned to gas and shale oil feedstock. This may be more suited to coal conversion to fuel, but I have my doubts that lower coal grades will pass muster due to sulfur contamination, despite the seeming low cost of the catalyst. On the other hand there is an an approach called chemical coupling that might be adaptable to produce heat and hydrocarbons in the same pot.

I beg your pardon, but transformers are already "air cooled", as I notice from the fans mounted on the step-down transformers in my locality. Where this would be very useful is in my personal computer, whose parts could be smaller, better configured, longer lived in the battery, and better surge protected. Better fan service and a compact liquid cooling system would be a help. Or at least I would have better confidence that some viral transient or web failure is not actually caused within my hardware.