Green Collar Blog

Don't take my word for it, take the word of Exxon-Mobile, the world's largest publicly-traded oil company.  In an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday titled Exxon Struggles to Find New Oi l, states:

 

In its closely watched annual financial report released Tuesday, the company said that for every 100 barrels it has pumped out of the earth over the past decade, it has replaced only 95.

 

It's a conundrum shared by most of the other large Western oil-producing companies, which are finding most accessible oil fields were tapped long ago, while promising new regions are proving technologically and politically challenging. 

 
Peak Oil has come and gone, and still our vaunted congress is doing everything they can to keep their head in the sand and let the oil companies write our energy policy.  

In a related story, Japan just announced a plan to build the fastest high 

speed train in the world (310 mph).  Imagine a 310 mph train connecting Boston and Chicago.  You would be there in 3 hours - less time than getting to Logan, parking, getting frisked in security, waiting around for an hour, waiting for the weather to clear, the plane to be de-iced, waiting in line on the tarmac, waiting for our baggage, and renting a car - and ou would walk upstair in a train station in downtown Chicago, not 25 miles out in the suburbs.  According to Smart Planet :

The new line, which [will run between Tokyo and Nagoya] is estimated to cost about $64 billion, will extend for about 178 miles. The company expects trains running on it to reach speeds up to 310 miles per hour. The line will cut travel time between the two cities by 40 minutes. 

Meanwhile in America, we apparently want no part of this green wave of the future.

 On the flip side, Florida governor Rick Scott announced today that his state would be rejecting $2 billion in federal funds to build a proposed high-speed rail line linking Tampa to Orlando. Scott, a Republican elected in last November’s election, will be the third Republican governor to return funds allocated for high-speed rail.

John Kasich of Ohio and Scott Walker of Wisconsin have also rejected high-speed rail funds, citing cost overruns.

 

 What is going on here?  Asia is cleaning our clock on the infrastructure and industries of the 21st .  Make no mistake, we are going to be installing high speed rail in this country...the difference is that we are going to be importing it all from overseas...same for wind turbines and solar solutions.  We'll probably even import the jobs to install all of our green infrastructure because Americans won't know how.

So I don't often write about brand new research, as Green Collar generally focuses on green products that are already in the market solving problems for businesses, but this is very interesting.

 Chemical engineers from Purdue have defined a way to release the hydrogen from seawater.  According to SmartPlanet's summation of how it works:

 using 90 percent bulk aluminum and 10 percent liquid metal alloy, consisting of gallium, indium and tin.  The gallium dissolves the aluminum, allowing it to react with the oxygen in the seawater. The hydrogen atoms break free from the water molecule. The end product is aluminum hydroxide, which can be recycled back into aluminum.

So all of that energy released and it turns back into aluminum....pretty sweet.

Now, you still need to make a lot of aluminum (which requires a ton of energy), you still need to recycle the aluminim hydroxide (uses tons of energy), and huge hunks of aluminim and gallium (literally weighs tons), so transporting it will require a lot of energy.

With all of that said, if they can bring this to scale, it would substantially reduce the amount of carbon released by the shipping industry, and that's a good thing.