emissions
Platinum For Fuel Cells Gets Cheaper
The D
OE laboratory I work for recently published some promising results of one of our fuel cell experiments. Researchers with the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Houston recently found a way to get platinum to be more conductive. It doesn’t sound like much, but this is big for fuel cell technology. Anders Nilsson, one of the scientists involved explained that although fuel cell technology has been around for the past 100 years or so, it hasn’t been able to make any strides in the technology.
First, a little background on fuel cells. Fuel cells are the way we create energy from hydrogen. A fuel cell creates electricity from a chemical reaction involving oxygen and hydrogen. One of the most exciting things about fuel cell technology is that the only byproducts are two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, also known as water! Platinum is currently the best catalyst we have to use with fuel cells. However if you’ve looked at the price of platinum recently, you know that the costs can be astounding for even just a plain platinum ring.
Many researchers have looked for ways around using a commodity as high priced as platinum for fuel cells. In 2008, researchers at Wuhan University in China found a way to bypass the platinum catalyst used in most fuel cells. They used a nickel anode and a silver cathode, and a powerful polymer membrane that can withstand the harshly acidic environment of the fuel cell. This acidic environment is the main reason that the high-cost precious metals are necessary in the first place. This polymer membrane has not yet proved to be even close in performance to platinum, but has proven that the idea itself has potential.
Carbon Trading Scams – Who are you paying to reduce your footprint?
Ever bought a plane ticket and seen the little banner that says ‘offset your carbon emissions here’, or seen a company claim to be ‘carbon neutral’? More often than not, they are buying carbon credits.
Carbon footprints are all the rage right now, so much so that a whole new industry is being built on carbon credits or carbon offsetting as companies attempt to reduce their carbon emissions to look more green. I liken this to a way for people to make money off of the environmental movement by making a commodity out of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and trading it on the open market. And its not just Carbon Dioxide, just about every harmful emission is traded to some extent. This is ridiculous in so many ways it makes my head spin.
This can be great for small, specialized use, such as paying extra on your electric bill to use [and pay for the production of more] renewable energy sources such as wind farms, but as so often happens, it has been abused.
Since there is no regulating body or standard, anything from a dead mango grove to your backyard garden can be traded on the market for a profit. From oil companies generating electricity from illegal natural gas flaring in Nigeria (and thus claiming $1.5 million in offset credits a year), to chemical companies building $5 million incinerators to claim $500 million worth of destroyed HFCs (that they created).
Where it really hits the fan for me is how it can justify people living the same way they always have, with a huge carbon footprint, they only have to buy their way out of it and can be ‘carbon neutral’. I liken it to buying a ticket into heaven by paying for absolution rather than changing ones behavior, by paying into the system, one is supporting the renewable energy movement, and therefore gets a wash.
