Techno-Fix On The March

If you're looking for a few hopeful signs in this sadly diminished world, you could do worse than to visit Green Car Congress.

Interestingly, their name doesn't say it all. They don't limit themselves to cars. Far from it. It was at Green Car Congress that I first heard of the Green Goat hybrid switching locomotive.

Hybrids. They're not just for itty-bitty cars anymore.

Along with vehicles, they devote considerable time to motive power, be it batteries, fuel cells, synthetic hydrocarbons, or solar panels. It's what you might call a potpourri.

Allow me to demonstrate their diversity with a few intro graphs from the last couple of days...

Firefly Energy (earlier post) has received a US patent for a new carbon-foam lead-acid battery technology that it believes has the potential to revolutionize the existing global lead-acid battery market as well as serve applications such as hybrid electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids.

FireFly contends it can deliver lead-acid battery performance comparable to NiMH, but at about one-fifth the cost, and with greatly reduced weight compared to traditional lead-acid batteries.

...

Accelerated Composites, a San Diego, California-area startup, has designed a two-seat, three-wheel parallel hybrid—the Aptera—to achieve up to 330 MPG and sell for less than $20,000.

The Aptera hybrid is to be built from lightweight composites, and designed to deliver its 330 mpg in normal city and highway driving and demonstrate acceleration and handling similar to that of a Honda Insight.

...

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced that eight proposals for oil-shale research development and demonstration (RD&D) leases filed by six companies have been deemed eligible for continued consideration.

...

Degussa AG, a global leader in the field of specialty chemicals, is starting additional electrode production for large-volume lithium-ion batteries at the Li-Tech GmbH (SK Group) site in Kamenz/Dresden.

The Kamenz facility complements Degussa’s production capacities in China through the joint venture Degussa-ENAX (Anqiu) Power Lion Co. Ltd., Anqiu. (Earlier post.) The German site will target large-volume energy storage applications—such as batteries for hybrid vehicles.

...

Rentech has signed a Master License Agreement (MLA) with DKRW Advanced Fuels, a wholly-owned subsidiary of DKRW Energy, for the use of Rentech’s Fischer-Tropsch (FT) coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology.

Concurrent with the signing of the MLA, DKRW-AF’s wholly owned-subsidiary, Medicine Bow Fuel & Power LLC (MBF&P), signed an individual site license for its proposed integrated power and coal-to-liquids (CTL) project in Medicine Bow, Wyoming (earlier post).

...

Safe Hydrogen, LLC. of Lexington, Mass has been awarded $308,000 from the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust SEED Program (Sustainable Energy Economic Development), a division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC), to complete a three-year, $2.4-million DOE project designed to determine the functionality, cost and efficiency of Safe Hydrogen’s pumpable hydride slurry.

Safe Hydrogen has developed a pumpable magnesium-hydride-based fuel that releases hydrogen as needed.

A pumpable fuel rich in hydrogen would eliminate several key road blocks to wide spread adoption in transportation, including distribution infrastructure and storage safety and efficiency.

The slurry, both before and after yielding the hydrogen, is not flammable, safe to handle, easy to store and can use current pumps and tanks used for diesel fuel, gasoline or water. The slurry is reacted with water to produce the hydrogen required. The metal hydroxide byproduct is captured and recycled.

...

I don't know how they do it.

Diving a little further back, last November they mentioned the Eliica, the eight wheeled electric car from Japan, that does zero to sixty in four seconds.

That's very pleasant to think about.

posted by Justin on 01.18.06 at 10:20 AM





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