#The Fossil fuel energy Industry Is Now Entering Terminal Decline It time to make the call fossil fuels are finished.
The rest is detail. The detail is interesting and important, as I expand on below.
and within 15 to 30 years not 50 to 100 we risk making serious and damaging mistakes in climate and economic policy, in investment strategy and in geopolitics and defence.
referring to the end of denial that climate change requires urgent, transformational economic change. While related, this is different.
It is now becoming clear wee reached a tipping point where fossil fuels will enter terminal decline, independently of climate policy action.
Given climate policy action is also now accelerating fossil fuels are double dead. To paraphrase Douglas Adams,
o long and thanks for all the energy I understand this is a very big call, especially in regards to timing.
Think of energy like you think about an iphone The first and most important driver is the argument
For over 100 years, energy markets have been defined by physical resources, supplied in large volumes by large,
The new emerging energy system of renewables and storage is a echnologybusiness, more akin to information and communications technology;
where prices keep falling, quality keeps rising, change is rapid and market disruption is normal and constant.
This shift to a echnologyhas many implications for energy, but the most profound one is very simple.
As a group of technologies, more demand for renewables means lower prices and higher quality constantly evolving for a long time to come.
prices would go up because the newer reserves cost more to develop, such as deep sea oil. They may get cheaper through market shifts,
Then we add in electric cars, which are now on the same path converting a staid, slow moving industry (traditional auto companies like GM) into a disruptive technology-driven one (innovators like Tesla).
Electric cars will accelerate the end of fossil fuels by joining with renewables to create a system shift,
both directly by using clean power to charge them and indirectly by driving battery costs down to create storage for distributed renewables.
This all then unleashes competition across sectors bringing new players to old industries. For example utilities facing the much discussed death spiral triggered by solar,
will find the motor vehicle fuels market very appealing. This would then unleash a huge political and commercial driver for growth in electric cars with the utility sector providing infrastructure to use their product
locking in customers with long-term supply deals backed by renewable power and lobbying for electric cars (to also protect the grid).
Within a decade, electric cars will be more reliable, cheaper to own and more fun to drive than petrol-fueled cars.
Then it will just be a matter of turning over the fleet. Oil companies will then have their Kodak moment.
Coal will already largely be gone, replaced by renewables. The incumbents won respond in time. They are steeped in their analysis that they are the underpinning foundation of the economy
which of course they have been. This is so deeply ingrained in their worldview they can see their error.
Energy is the essential foundation of the economy but we now have a better, cheaper way of producing energy.
Fast beats slow One of key competitive advantages the fossil fuel industry has had is the huge capital,
Firstly it created huge barriers to entry in the market a disruptive entrepreneur can build a coal power station,
They can play on the edges, like shale gas, oil trading or mineral exploration, but they can play the main game.
Thus action on climate change has stalled for decades. Both of these benefits are gone when you combine nergy as a technologywith most growth in energy demand being in developing economies.
With renewables already competitive today without subsidy in some markets and the above trends playing out,
it is inevitable that before long maybe a decade virtually all new electricity generation will be from renewables.
Add in the need to be clean not just for climate change reasons but for local air quality and the choice developing countries will face will be between large, old, dirty,
easy to finance, more convenient, popular and clean energy and transport that will get even cheaper over time.
So the very thing that the fossil fuel industry had relied on for its growth the rapidly expanding need for energy in the developing world is the very thing that will drive the competition to wipe them out.
But the assumptions pretty much everyone working with that without policy intervention the energy system will be dominated by fossil fuels in 2050
unpopular and dirty technology with increasing prices beat a disruptor that is cleaner, better, lower risk and falls in price every year?
instead paying out spare cash as dividends to shore up their stock price. With everyone doing this,
prices will fall, chasing the declining market, undermining the value of the fossil fuel industry, and reducing its political influence further.
All businesses, like humans, fight death. And fight they will, with all the considerable power they have.
So it will be messy and chaotic and not consistent around the world. But in the end, the fossil fuel giants have no strategy that involves fossil fuels
Other companies like utilities and auto companies, meanwhile, have great options like taking away a large share of the oil industry market with renewable powered electric cars.
They know that today we spend around twice as much on motor transport fuel as we do on electricity.
But big oil versus big utilities aligned with big auto is not the only disruptive impact for investors.
battery manufacturers, copper and lithium miners, electronics producers, software developers, electric engine makers, smart grid builders and, of course, solar and wind power manufacturers, installers and financiers.
Shell and Exxon don see Google and Apple as competitors, which is just why incumbents so often lose.
And electric car maker Tesla, producing less than 40,000 cars per year, is valued at over half of GM, which produces 9 million cars per year!
The market can smell death and knows that fast beats slow. For climate advocates and policy makers, nothing changes in their approach,
so they can claim credit. Climate advocates, whose main challenge is speed of action, don need to change their approach.
what most see as their greatest threat future climate change policy. It that competing energy products of renewables and batteries, in a system with electric vehicles, will behave as a disruptive technology always does,
delivering ever lower prices and ever higher quality in a decadeslong period of innovation and deployment,
which fossil fuels can match. Because of the nature of this transformation, there will be a wide variety of new business players entering the market from the side
The obvious example is utilities promoting electric cars as an enormous new market opportunity, which will assist them in avoiding the eath spiralthreat posed by the end of centralised generation.
and Google who are both developing battery and car opportunities, with a close eye on the technology integration opportunity.
versus previous technology-driven change, is that it has added the dimension of climate change, making the resulting transformation a very high priority for policy makers and an unbeatable source of public support for the disruptors.
#High-performance 3-D Silicon Anodes Made From Reed Leaves A low-cost approach to fabricating nanoporous silicon a potentially highly useful material for next-generation anode material in batteries,
and lowered operating voltage has been developed by researchers at Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, the University of Science and Technology of China,
and the South China University of Technology. The new approach, interestingly, doesn rely on exotic chemicals or processes,
but rather simply uses reed leaves (from the common plant), which can be transformed via simple calcination+magnesiothermic reduction.
The silicon anode that results features the 3-D hierarchical architecture of the reed leaf as well as an interconnected porosity+internal carbon coating.
just as it is required in advanced lithium-ion batteries. Even after 4, 000 cycles and at a rate of 10c, the anode achieved a specific capacity of 420 mahg-1. Here are some excerpts from a paper on the work:
As a living plant, reeds absorb silica from soil, and the silica accumulates around cellulose microcompartments.
Therefore, reeds are suitable natural reservoirs of nano-structured silica and its derivatives. Yet they are not only appropriate Si sources,
they also contain silica in a very favorable nanoscale arrangement. reed leaves exhibit well-defined sheetlike 3d hierarchical micro-structures,
which as we demonstrate can be transformed into a well-suited 3d highly porous hierarchical Si architectures. he topological architecture of the original silicates within the reed leaves is preserved extraordinarily well during the applied chemical and physical treatment steps.
Upon the purification from the dry reed leaves the three-dimensional structure only shrinks, but retains its mesoporous network.
It does not even change during the reduction to the final carbonized silicon network. iven the sustainable and facile nature of the synthesis procedure,
the described 3d porous Si-C nanocomposite has a great potential as a practical anode material for Li-ion batteries.
The new work is detailed in a paper published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition I
#Google street view Now Monitors Urban Air pollution Wee come to rely on Google street view for everything from roads to hiking paths to coral reefs,
but we may soon rely on it for something even more important mapping urban air pollution. Tech startup Aclima just announced a partnership with Google earth Outreach to equip Google street view cars with its mobile sensor platform.
The partnership launched with a month-long pilot program in Denver paired with a research partnership with the U s. Environmental protection agency,
and will soon roll out in San francisco. Together Aclima, Google, and EPA will empower people to eeurban air quality like never before,
and could turn Google maps into platform for mapping environmental air quality against public health standards. Google street view Maps Urban Air pollution Like Never Before Aclima equipped three Google street view vehicles for the Denver pilot program for a month-long system test during the DISCOVER-AQ study conducted by NASA and EPA.
The cars spent 750 hours of drive time gathering 150 million data points on nitrogen dioxide (NO2), nitric oxide (NO), ozone (O3), carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, black carbon
particulate matter and volatile organic compounds; which were correlated then with data from EPA stationary measurement sites.
So far, EPA has relied on an extensive network of these stationary devices in urban areas to measure harmful airborne pollutants
and determine if air quality meets or exceeds public health standards. While EPA monitoring network is designed to inform air quality regulation,
it was unable to provide street-level air measurements until now. nvironmental air quality is an issue that affects everyone,
especially those living in big cities, said Karin Tuxen-Bettman, Google earth Outreach Program Manager. his partnership with Aclima enables us to take the next steps in our pilot project to utilize Street view existing infrastructure
and test Google maps as an environmental sensing platform for mapping the environment. Aclima Denver air quality The Denver pilot returned interesting results.
For instance, NO2 levels were elevated during the 7: 00 a m. morning rush hour when 40,000 vehicles hit the road
but O3 levels were low because sunshine had started just its photochemical reactions. At 11:00 a m.,O3 concentrations reach their peak while NO and NO2 levels decrease from photochemistry and a thicker atmospheric boundary layer.
By 7: 00 p m.,O3 begins to decrease as photochemistry slows down but NO2 increases to a higher nighttime concentration.
and breathe in an entirely new way by integrating Aclima mobile sensing platform with Google maps and Street view cars, said Davida Herzl,
Aclima Cofounder and CEO. ith more than half of the world population now living in cities, environmental health is becoming increasingly important to quality of life.
Aclima Goes From Out On The Streets To Inside Your Home While the Google street view partnership could change the way we live
and breathe outside, Aclima is focused also acutely on how we live and breathe inside. The company came out of stealth in late June with a comprehensive real-time system to map
Aclima Sensory Science system connects stationary sensors with scalable hardware and software to generate billions of data points across multiple environmental factors,
and can monitor air quality either in one office building or across an entire city. For several years, 500 connected Aclima sensors have been monitoring air quality
and analyzing 500 million data points daily across a global network composed of 21 Google offices around the world.
Aclima Denver pilot program air quality data image via Aclima The data covers temperature humidity, noise,
light, and indoor emissions; and will be used by Google to evaluate environmental factors within their offices
and inform future workplace design decisions to boost employee health and productivity. e strive to create the healthiest and best possible work environments for Googlers,
said Anthony Ravitz, Google Real estate and Workplace Services. ur vision is to create buildings that seamlessly support the people who inhabit them.
Using Aclima science-driven sensor networks to map our indoor environmental quality is a big part of making that happen. a
#Latest drug technology could help reduce cost of carbon capture A novel class of materials that enable a safer cheaper
and more energy-efficient process for removing greenhouse gas from power plant emissions has been developed by a multi-institution team of researchers.
The approach could be an important advance in carbon capture and sequestration (CCS. The team led by scientists from Harvard university
and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory employed a microfluidic assembly technique to produce microcapsules that contain liquid sorbents encased in highly permeable polymer shells.
They have significant performance advantages over the carbon-absorbing materials used in current CCS technology.
and agriculture--for controlled delivery and release but this is one of the first demonstrations of this approach for controlled capture says Jennifer A. Lewis the Hansj rg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at the Harvard School of engineering
Lewis is also a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.
Power generating plants are the single largest source of carbon dioxide (CO2) a greenhouse gas that traps heat
According to the U s. Environmental protection agency coal-and natural gas-fired plants were responsible for one-third of U s. greenhouse gas emissions in 2012.
That's why the agency has proposed rules mandating dramatically reduced carbon emissions at all new fossil fuel-fired power plants.
But state-of-the-art processes are expensive result in a significant reduction in a power plant's output and yield toxic byproducts.
sodium carbonate a k a. kitchen-grade baking soda. The microencapsulated carbon sorbents (MECS) achieve an order-of-magnitude increase in CO2 absorption rates compared to sorbents currently used in carbon capture.
MECS provide a new way to capture carbon with fewer environmental issues says Roger D. Aines leader of the fuel cycle innovations program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and a co
Capturing the world's carbon emissions is a huge job; we need technology that can be applied to many kinds of carbon dioxide sources with the public's full confidence in the safety and sustainability.
Researchers at LLNL and the U s. Department of energy's National Energy technology Lab are now working on enhancements to the capture process to bring the technology to scale.
The emission-scrubbing potential of CCS is limited not to the electric generation sector; Aines says that the MECS-based approach can also be tailored to industrial processes like steel and cement production significant greenhouse gas sources.
These permeable silicone beads could be sliced a-bread'breakthrough for CO2 capture--efficient easy-to-handle minimal waste
and cheap to make says Stuart Haszeldine professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh who was involved not in the research.
Durable safe and secure capsules containing solvents tailored to diverse applications can place CO2 capture for CCS firmly onto the cost-reduction pathway.
MECS are produced using a double capillary device in which the flow rates of three fluids--a carbonate solution combined with a catalyst for enhanced CO2 absorption a photocurable silicone that forms the capsule shell
and an aqueous solution--can be controlled independently. Encapsulation allows you to combine the advantages of solid capture media
and liquid capture media in the same platform says Lewis. It is also quite flexible in that both the core
and associate professor of Earth and environmental engineering at Columbia University who was involved not in the research.
Lewis has conducted previously groundbreaking research in the 3d printing of functional materials including tissue constructs with embedded vasculature lithium-ion microbatteries and ultra-lightweight carbon-fiber epoxy materials s
#Flexible sensor lets humans detect magnetic fields The sensor on a soap bubble. IFW Dresden When it comes to navigating the world around us we have a lot more than just five senses.
The array of perceptive faculties we have is actually pretty impressive but what we don't have is called a sense magnetoception.
and insects to orient themselves in the physical world by detecting magnetic fields. This includes actual location altitude
We may be able to replicate magnetoception by way of an implant or external sensor--such as a new device developed by a team of researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Solid State
and Materials Research in Dresden Germany and the TU Chemnitz in close collaboration with partners at the University of Tokyo and Osaka University in Japan led by Dr Denys Makarov.
Make no mistake though--the function is not the least remarkable feature of this device.
The sensor is less than 2 micrometres thick and only weighs 3 grams per square metre --so light they can be laid on a soap bubble without breaking it.
The sensors are...imperceptible magneto-sensitive skin that enables proximity detection navigation and touchless control the paper's abstract reads.
The sensor on the palm of a hand (left) and crumpled into a tiny ball (right) IFW Dresden These ultra-thin magnetic field sensors readily conform to ubiquitous objects including human skin
and offer a new sense for soft robotics safety and healthcare monitoring consumer electronics and electronic skin devices.
At the moment the sensors don't provide tactile feedback to the user. Instead they are connected to an array of LEDS.
When the wearer moves the sensor close to a magnetic field the sensor is shown to be operational when the LED array lights up.
Although this might be a bit unwieldy for everyday human use it could be ideal for robotics.
The integration of magnetoelectronics with ultrathin functional elements such as solar cells light-emitting diodes transistors as well as temperature and tactile sensor arrays will enable autonomous and versatile smart systems with a multitude of sensing
and actuation features the team concluded. They hope their work will inspire a diverse number of devices that will benefit from a'sixth sense'magnetoception.
You can read the full paper online in the journal Nature e
#Stem cell-grown hair could help those with hair loss It's been theorised for years,
"said Alexey Terskikh, Ph d.,associate professor in the Development, Aging and Regeneration Program at Sanford-Burnham.
living in culture, these cells are not suitable for hair transplants, since they lost their ability to induce follicle formation.
A new technique developed by researchers at the University of Rochester, however, can make a surface hydrophobic without the use of coatings.
-and nanoscale structures onto the surface of metal--building on earlier work that used laser-patterning to absorb light to render metal black--creating a material that both absorbs light
"said Chunlei Guo, professor of optics in the University of Rochester Hajim School of engineering and Applied sciences.
a theory tested by covering the surface with the dust from a vacuum cleaner bag. Three drops carried away half the dust particles;
This type of solar panel would neither rust nor require much cleaning. There's still a little more R&d to do though,
as well as developing the technique to etch other materials, such as superconductors and dielectrics for the development of water-repellent electronics s
#Robots learn to cook by watching Youtube When it comes to teaching robots how to do things,
This is one of the key parts of figuring out machine learning: How can you program a robot
as researchers at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies are finding out,
is Youtube. More specifically, cooking tutorials on Youtube. By watching these videos, robots are able to learn the complicated series of grasping
and manipulation motions required for cooking by observing what humans do on the Internet.""We chose cooking videos
because everyone has done it, "said UMD professor of computer science and director of the UMIACS Computer Vision Lab Yiannis Aloimonos."
"But cooking is complex in terms of manipulation, the steps involved and the tools you use. If you want to cut a cucumber, for example,
"The robot uses several key systems in order to learn from Youtube videos. Computer vision, with two different recognition systems, allows the robot to visually process how the presenter grabs something,
artificial intelligence processes that information, and finally language parsing helps it understand spoken commands and translate it into an action.
In this way, the robot can gather individual steps from various videos and assign them rules according to its programming,
putting them together in the correct order.""We are trying to create a technology so that robots eventually can interact with humans,
It's a system that apparently works. According to the team's paper, the grasping recognition module had an average precision of 77 percent,
"We will have smart manufacturing environments and completely automated warehouses. It would be great to use autonomous robots for dangerous work--to defuse bombs
and clean up nuclear disasters such as the Fukushima event. We have demonstrated that it is possible for humanoid robots to do our human jobs."
"The team will be presenting their research at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial intelligence Conference in Austin, Texas, on January 29, 2015 1
#3d printed model heart helps doctors save a little girl's life We've seen several accounts of 3d printing being used to save the lives of patients
and out of Florida comes another such wonderful story. Cardiovascular surgeons at Miami Children's Hospital turned to 3d printing to print out a scale replica of a 4-year-old girl's heart
so they could plan for a complicated surgery to save the girl's life. She suffers from a congenital condition called anomalous pulmonary venous connection (TAPVC)
which basically means her veins pump blood to the wrong part of her heart causing breathing difficulties lethargy and a weakened immune system that left her sick often.
After a few band-aid surgeries that proved to be temporary fixes doctors knew they needed to come up with a solution.
Using the 3d printed model the doctors were able to plan a surgery that hadn't been performed before using parts from a donor heart
and she's recovering in the hospital. The story recalls a couple of other similar cases such as one at Morgan stanley Children's Hospital of New york-Presbyterian where last year doctors also practiced a complex heart surgery on a 3d model before operating on a baby
. 3d printing adds another element in caring for extremely complex conditions where surgical intervention is thought not typically possible pediatric cardiologist Nancy Dobrolet said in a release.
In Adanelie's case the 3d model provided us with way to create a surgical option for her survival.
It's another example of the miracles 3d printing is bringing to health care and if it isn't enough to give you all of the feels we don't know what will.
A physician holds the 3d model of a young girl's heart as he explains the operation to save her life.
#Lab-grown human muscle is a medical breakthrough The new kind of lab-grown muscle will allow the study of disease
led by Nenad Bursac, Duke university associate professor of biomedical engineering, and postdoctoral researcher Lauran Madden.""The beauty of this work is that it can serve as a test bed for clinical trials in a dish,
"Bursac said.""We are working to test drugs'efficacy and safety without jeopardising a patient's health."
The statins caused abnormal fat accumulation at high doses, while the clenbuterol had a narrow beneficial window for increased contraction--both
of which effects have been documented in humans. This could allow future physicians to tailor pharmaceutical treatments to individual patients."
"One of our goals is to use this method to provide personalised medicine to patients,
"We can take a biopsy from each patient, grow many new muscles to use as test samples
"The team is already working towards this goal--as well as towards growing the muscle tissue, not from a biopsy,
"There are a some diseases, like Duchenne Muscular dystrophy for example, that make taking muscle biopsies difficult. If we could grow working, testable muscles from induced pluripotent stem cells,
we could take one skin or blood sample and never have to bother the patient again,
#Flexible implant shows promise for paralysed humans EPFL/Alain Herzog Last year researchers at the Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne Switzerland successfully demonstrated a system that allowed completely paralysed rats to walk again.
The technology is now one step closer to clinical human trials with a flexible implant specifically designed to integrate with the patient's spine minimising the risk of rejection and further damage.
The implant called e-Dura is designed to be implanted directly onto the brain or spinal cord underneath the dura mater the membrane that encloses the brain and spinal cord.
This is in direct contrast to surface implants. These are rigid which causes frictional inflammation on the surrounding tissues when implanted long-term.
The team at EPFL has tested the implant in rats and has found that even after two months there was no tissue damage
This has demonstrated that the implant is both capable of performing its function and compatible with long-term implantation.
Our e-Dura implant can remain for a long period of time on the spinal cord or the cortex precisely because it has the same mechanical properties as the dura mater itself said study co-author and EPFL Bertarelli Chair in Neuroprosthetic Technology Stphanie Lacour.
This opens up new therapeutic possibilities for patients suffering from neurological trauma or disorders particularly individuals who have become paralysed following spinal cord injury.
EPFL The flexible silicon implant is covered in cracked gold conduction tracks that stretch with the silicon
while the electrodes a new composite made of silicon and platinum microbeads can be pulled in any direction.
These conduction tracks and electrodes convey electrical current to the spinal cord much as the brain does.
Meanwhile a fluidic microchannel in the implant delivers neurotransmitting drugs to reanimate the nerve cells beneath the injured tissue.
While this operates in concert to circumvent the injured site on the spine allowing the patient--theoretically--to use their limbs it can also be used to monitor electrical impulses from the brain in real-time allowing the researchers to accurately gauge the patient's intention to move before the signal is translated into motion.
The human trials may start as early as June of this year at a special facility called the called the Gait Platform housed in the University Hospital of Lausanne Switzerland.
The full study Electronic dura mater for long-term multimodal neural interfaces can be found online in the journal Science e
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