Image by redgoober4life via FlickrCold weather is the bane of electric cars, or so I've heard from many naysayers (those that don't believe the EV is here to stay). You've heard the arguments! They range from range anxiety to cold weather performance to excessive recharge time etc. etc. These arguments are falling like dominos as the onslaught of electric car manufacturing spreads from California, to China, from Japan to Sweden. Now Volvo, known for making the safest cars in the world, has blasted the cold temperature argument of the naysayers.
Testing it's beautiful, brand new, all electric C30 in artic conditions, Volvo has already knocked down the biggest domino. After this everyone will know that electric cars will no longer be considered the domain of warmer climes. The Artic is a cruel teacher, as this writer can attest from his time spent in the north, but the students at Volvo have learned their lessons very well. 80 to 90 km distance in artic conditions, and that is just the first model.
Click here to watch this northern beauty in action!
Editors note:Carbon Sciences Inc (CABN-OTC) is developing a new breed of "Nano-Reactor" that should revolutionize the nascent carbon capture and conversion industry allowing for the commercialization of converting carbon emissions (from coal and oil fired industries and from natural gas ie: from landfills) directly into usable gasoline, "without" using high energy heat.
The company has already demonstrated it's technology works, and expects to have a working reactor by the end of Q3 2010. The sector is now referred to as Gas to Liquids or "GTL" and it is growing. The company's president, Byron Elton, was recently interviewed by Ally Velchie on CNN Business and that interview can be found at: http://www.carbonsciences.com/01/youtubeplayer.html
NEWS RELEASE GTL Technology is Best Candidate to End USA’s Addiction to Petroleum and Provide 100% of Needed Transportation Fuel
Santa Barbara, CA - June 22, 2010 - Carbon Sciences, Inc. (CABN), the developer of a breakthrough technology to transform greenhouse gases into gasoline and other portable fuels, today asserts its belief that Gas-To-Liquids (GTL) fuel technology is key to the United States goal of energy independence following the release of the Annual Energy Outlook 2010 projections from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
“The crisis that our country faces is how to obtain the quantities of liquid fuel required to maintain our standard of living and drive future growth without using petroleum, foreign or domestic,” stated Byron Elton, CEO, Carbon Sciences. “The EIA predicts that world energy consumption will skyrocket 49 percent over the next 25 years. Of all the alternative fuel technologies under development, GTL technology is the only one with the ability to significantly replace petroleum and provide the nearly 140 billion gallons of gasoline we use each year,” added Elton.
Gas-to-liquids is a refinery process that converts natural gas and other gaseous hydrocarbons into longer chain hydrocarbons such as gasoline. Carbon Sciences announced earlier this year a patent filing for a breakthrough CO2 based GTL technology to transform greenhouse gases into liquid, portable fuels.
“The use of natural gas and carbon dioxide as the feedstock for our transportation fuels offers significant advantages over petroleum,” stated Elton. “The US has over 2,000 trillion cubic feet of known, but unexplored, natural gas reserves. Our CO2 based GTL technology, when fully commercialized, can be used to produce enough gasoline for the US for 47 years without competing with current natural gas consumption of 25 trillion cubic feet, and without using a teaspoon of oil,” he added.
Many companies, including all the major oil companies have been increasing their investments in the GTL sector. Royal Dutch Shell has invested $19 billion dollars in Pearl GTL in Qatar, the world’s largest GTL plant.
“The ongoing disaster in the Gulf is a wakeup call to the United States, and the world, that we must develop alternative, domestic sources of cleaner transportation fuels that will fit into the existing infrastructure, supply chain and vehicles,” added Dr. Naveed Aslam, Chief Technology Officer for Carbon Sciences.
To imagine a world without petroleum and learn more about Carbon Sciences' breakthrough technology, please visit www.carbonsciences.com
About Carbon Sciences, Inc.
Carbon Sciences, Inc. is developing a breakthrough CO2 based gas-to-liquids technology to transform greenhouse gases into liquid portable fuels, such as gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Innovating at the forefront of chemical engineering, we are developing highly scalable clean-tech processes to produce liquid fuels from naturally occurring or human-made greenhouse gas emissions. From sources such as natural gas fields, refinery flare gas, landfill gas, municipal waste, algae and other biomass, there is an abundant supply of inexpensive feedstock available to produce large and sustainable quantities of liquid fuel to replace petroleum for global consumption, thereby eliminating our dependence on petroleum. To learn more about the Company, please visit our website at http://www.carbonsciences.com.
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"Carbon Sciences is the furthest along in the CO2 to fuel business"USA Today
Editors note:Carbon Sciences Inc (CABN-OTC) is developing a new breed of "Nano-Reactor" that should revolutionize the nascent carbon capture and conversion industry allowing for the commercialization of converting carbon emissions (from coal and oil fired industries and from natural gas ie: from landfills) directly into usable gasoline, "without" using high energy heat.
The company has already demonstrated it's technology works, and expects to have a working reactor by the end of Q3 2010. The sector is now referred to as Gas to Liquids or "GTL" and it is growing. The company's president, Byron Elton, was recently interviewed by Ally Velchie on CNN Business and that interview can be found at: http://www.carbonsciences.com/01/youtubeplayer.html
Article:
Until now, Carbon capture, and storage has been the high fruit for a number of new companies rushing to get even a small piece of the growing, multibillion dollar industry of cleaning up our coal, oil and natural gaspower plants, as well as the millions of businesses who dump carbon into the atmosphere every day. But what if you could not only capture that carbon, but turn it into a usable product with an immediate market?
A small California company, Carbon Sciences Inc. has announced a truly ground breaking technology that, not only utilizes the carbon being released from these entities, but actually turns it into usable fuel, much like mother nature does over a million years, but doing it a lot quicker. Actually, within hours of the carbon capture. Basically, they say they can convert dirty air and dirty water, into an immediately usable fuel such as methanol, gasoline, jet fuel or diesel, doing what mother nature does, only a million times faster.
Needless to say, I was very intrigued by the market potential of such a process. Multi-Billion dollar markets in renewable energy and carbon reduction, heretofore two separate markets, could bring this small company immense wealth in the coming years, if the technology allows commercial application on a large scale, so I dug a little further.
Carbon Sciences recently announced it had invented a nano-scale reactor that functions like a highly efficient artificial microorganism that contains a proprietary enzyme process and serves a single purpose – to absorb CO2 molecules and excrete fuel molecules.
This nano reactor, called Smart Particle, is the key to achieving a fast reaction time and industrial scale up of the company’s CO2-to-Fuel process. The patent application for Smart Particle Technology contains the detailed design of Smart Particles as well as a proprietary manufacturing process where they self-assemble in solution without any external nano-manufacturing.
What I found most interesting is that, other companies racing to perfect similar processes, are utilizing immense heat to produce the same result. Up until now, high heat was necessary to do this. What Carbon Sciences appears to have is a ground breaking process that completely eliminates the need for generating high heat to complete the process and thereby eliminating the need for energy to produce energy. It is truly a novel idea with huge potential around the world. Carbon Sciences will be targeting the markets in the USA and China in it's initial push for a share of this market.
Click on this graphic for an enlarged (readable) version.
For a video, explaining the process, the Bio-Catalytic conversion and the Nano Reactor, click on: video
The CEO of Carbon Sciences Inc., Byron Elton, explains his company's focus, and the new process in this interview.
Applying Carbon Sciences' patent-pending technology in a laboratory scale prototype last year, the company successfully transformed a stream of CO2 gas into methanol fuel. The demonstration prototype uses Carbon Sciences’ innovative bio-catalytic process to break down CO2 and water, then combines the carbon and hydrogen to form methanol, a low level liquid fuel. The resulting methanol is directly usable as a fuel, or it can be used to build higher-level fuels such as gasoline, butanol and jet fuel. In January the company announced that is now able to produce gasoline directly from their process.
After successfully completing technology design and simulations, Carbon Sciences submitted a patent application, “A Bio-catalytic Process and System to Transform Carbon Dioxide into Methanol” to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on February 17, 2009.
According to Beacon Equity Research [.pdf], Carbon Sciences is developing a breakthrough technology for transforming harmful carbon dioxide emissions into the basic fuel building blocks required to produce gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel and other portable fuels. Carbon Sciences program plan is to use CO2 as a feedstock for producing portable fuels and simultaneously address the world’s energy and environmental challenges. The firm’s technology takes CO2 from coal-fired power plants and other large CO2 emitters and transforms it into portable fuels.
From the companies officers:
We always wanted to produce high-level fuels, such as gasoline, but knew that additional steps would be required to reach this goal. Now, we have the way to go directly to gasoline.
The United Nations’ IPCC estimates that the cost of simply capturing CO2 for applications, such as underground sequestration or transformation into products, can range from $45 to $73 per ton of CO2. This cost is perhaps the single biggest economic barrier to any large-scale CO2 applications, such as carbon sequestration. However, by being able to use a raw CO2 flue gas stream in our CO2-to-Fuel technology, we are no longer dependent on the success or commercial availability of carbon capture systems. In addition, unlike bio fuels based on growing plants to absorb CO2 from the air, our CO2-to-Fuel process is an industrial process that can produce fuel in minutes to hours, not months to years, to meet the demands of the world.
—Byron Elton, CEO of Carbon Sciences
We are very excited about these new processes. Our end-to-end CO2 to fuel system will have several modules. We have determined that one of these modules can function as a standalone system for use by a sizable part of the energy industry for the production of gasoline. Inquiries from potential strategic partners have further validated our decision to focus on this module. We are anticipating a shorter than normal development cycle for this module and are hoping to achieve commercialization in less than one year.
—Dr. Naveed Aslam, Chief Technology Officer
Carbon Sciences hopes to develop a commercially-attractive package by the third quarter of 2010 and are exploring a "strategic partnership" to take the process--and the company--to the next phase. They have also applied for DOE technology funding under the category of "Innovative Concepts for Beneficial Uses of CO2".
Disclosure: I bought some Carbon Sciences Stock on Friday, as it spiked while the markets were in full fear mode. I thought I'd get in before the rush. Sure, it's a penny stock, but so was RIMM at one time. If it only goes to .50 our profit will be 500% in a very short time frame.
Housing! It was a great store of value. The largest investment for most average worker or small business owner, in their lifetime. An investment that was guaranteed to increase in value and many staked their futures on the simple premise that "they are not making any more land". House values climbed.
Over the past 40 years, whole neighborhoods were built almost over night in suburbs from California to Florida across the south and Midwest. Houses got bigger, more extravagant and much more expensive. From the 1970's through 2006, investors small and large either built or bought up surplus houses as stores of value. To a lesser extent, it occurred in Canada as well from Ontario to BC. For many boomers, it was their "piggy bank" where one could go, year after year, and re-mortgage to obtain more and more goods, cars, computers, college tuition, you name it. Some made fortunes in real estate. Those days are gone and they are not coming back any time soon. Almost no one expected such a spectacular housing crash.
Deutsche Bank reported Wednesday that the number of U.S. homeowners who's mortgages will be more than the value of their homes, will double to 48% in 2011 from 26% in March this year. The number of homes is a staggering 25 million!
If you bought a house in the past 4 years, it was equivalent to settling down on the beach when the tide is out. When the tide came in, these homes (read mortgages) were under water. So much for the piggy bank. It has been smashed to smithereens by the gluttons of wall street who have, for the most part, been saved by your tax dollars.
"Homeowners with the riskiest mortgages taken out during the housing boom have seen the greatest erosion in equity, in part because they were "affordability products" originated at the housing peak", Deutsche said. "They include sub prime loans, of which 69 percent will be underwater in 2011, up from 50 percent in March".
This also from the Bank: "Regions suffering the worst negative equity are areas in California, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Massachusetts and West Virginia". "Las Vegas and parts of Florida and California will see 90 percent or more of their loans underwater by 2011", it added. This is in direct contrast to some of the more hopeful opinions coming out in the past few weeks but those are mostly from the housing industry trying to put some lipstick on this pig. Deutsche Bank hasn't pulled any punches in it's analysis. It is a complete knock out blow to many homeowners. There is one group, however, who stand to benefit from this catastrophe. It is generation Y.
in 2007, my son and his wife were planning their wedding for Sept 2008 and asked me what my opinion was for buying a home. I told them that they should wait until "at least" 2010 or 2011 before they should even start to look. I felt at that time, and I told them, that housing prices would come down from 30-50%, maybe more. They were astounded at this advice as they, like so many others, were of the opinion that you should get into the housing market as soon as possible as housing prices (they assumed) never fell. They argued that, if they wait, it will cost that much more to get into the market and they will have to save up a greater down payment. I asked them if "If you could reduce the cost of purchasing by 30-50%, isn't that a great down payment on your house? This generation is in the housing market drivers seat, and most don't even know it.
I am glad they took my advice, even though I wish I was wrong. The days of storing value in your home are gone for the foreseeable future. Housing, instead of being an investment, has been brought back to where it originated. It is simply shelter! If you or your children are going to invest in a house in the near future, then shop, shop, shop! shop for location (always the most important issue) shop for value, shop for price and shop for mortgage rates. Above all, don't expect any quick return. It may take 10 years to see stored value in any home bought this year.
Remember, "Look after the pennies, and the dollars will look after themselves"!
Image by redgoober4life via FlickrCold weather is the bane of electric cars, or so I've heard from many naysayers (those that don't believe the EV is here to stay). You've heard the arguments! They range from range anxiety to cold weather performance to excessive recharge time etc. etc. These arguments are falling like dominos as the onslaught of electric car manufacturing spreads from California, to China, from Japan to Sweden. Now Volvo, known for making the safest cars in the world, has blasted the cold temperature argument of the naysayers.
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