New Nanomaterial Offers Efficient Hydrogen Production – Just Add Light
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Hydrogen Central.
These are the first two paragraphs.
A new nanomaterial catalyst needs only light to convert ammonia into hydrogen, its developers have said.
Made of inexpensive raw materials, the catalyst was developed by a team from Rice University in Texas, Syzygy Plasmonics Inc., and Princeton University in New Jersey.
I am not surprised, as I am a great believer in the power of catalysts.
In Hydrogen Fuel Cells Could Get A Lot Cheaper With Newly Developed Iron Catalyst, I wrote.
In the early 1970s, I worked with one of ICI’s catalyst experts and he said, that improvements in this area will be large in the future.
Increasingly, I see his prediction being proved right, in the varied fields, where catalysts are used.
It may be over fifty years ago, but then scientific truths don’t fade away and die. They just sit there quietly waiting to be rediscovered.
It is worth looking at the Syzygy Plasmonics web site.
Under a heading of Deep Decarbonisation For Chemical Manufacturing, this is their mission statement.
Syzygy is commercializing a deep-decarbonization platform dedicated to cleaning up the emissions-heavy chemical industry. We use breakthrough technology pioneered in the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at Rice University to harness energy from LED light to power chemical reactions. This new technology has the potential to partially or fully electrify the chemical industry, shifting it to renewable electricity, and cost-effectively reducing its carbon footprint.
The energy transition is here. The time to act is now.
That is some mission statement! But possibly one to expect from Houston.
Editorial: Our jobs Are Bound Up With The Future Of Four Hydrogen Atoms And One Carbon
The title of this post, is the same as that of this long and reasoned editorial on the Houston Chronicle.
It is definitely a must-read.
This is the last few paragraphs.
As this editorial board has argued before, the energy transition to address climate change offers opportunities that Houston should embrace. Hydrogen’s potential for the Houston region is to give new life to infrastructure we have, to take the emissions out of fossil fuel, to spur a revolution in materials and to sustain the jobs of well-paid oil and gas workers.
It won’t be easy to realize that promise. But few big things are.
“I am an American scientist brought up in the Midwest during the Sputnik era,” Smalley, with less than a year to live, told Congress in his 2004 speech, “and like so many of my colleagues in the U.S. and worldwide, I am a technological optimist. I think we can do it.”
Richard Smalley was a joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of buckminsterfullerene.
I suspect Buckminster Fuller himself, who is very much one of my heroes, would have been a believer in renewable energy.
The Texas Bullet Train
In the past, I have spent quite a few hours driving the long distances around Texas.
This article in Global Rail News is entitled Progress For Texas’ High-Speed Railway.
Texas Central Railway is proposing a high speed rail line between Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, with the following characteristics.
- 240 miles long.
- Stations at Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.
- Routed along major infrastructure corridors like Interstate highways and freight railways.
- Ninety minute journey time.
- A train every thirty minutes.
- Based on Japanese Shinkensen technology.
- Wikipedia mentions, that the line could open as early as 2020.
- Possibility of expansion to Austin and San Antonio.
- Fluor Corporation, which is a very large engineering and construction company, headquartered in Texas, is involved in the design.
There’s more here on the Texas Central web site.
There’s also an appraisal of the line in this article in Dallas News, which is entitled Proposed Routes for Dallas-Houston High-Speed Rail Revealed.
Some points from the article.
- Dallas would like the railway to connect to their extensive DART light rail system and perhaps even terminate at Dallas Union station.
- A construction cost of $10 billion is given.
- An in service date of 2021 is given.
Dallas certainly seems in favour of the project.
Conclusion
There certainly seems to be a degree of good will and support for this project.
Being Texas, they just had to label it a bullet train, but I’m more surprised that they seem to use railway instead of railroad.
The Anonymous Widower 