----- Original Message ----- From: "hkhenson" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 9:17 PM Subject: Re: biofuels and Li Batteries.
> At 01:00 PM 1/13/2009, "Dan M" wrote: > >>I agree, but bioengineered fuels are not ethanol. There are algae that >>exist right now that produce aviation fuel with 1000x the efficiency of >>ethanol. > > I have a hard time with this statement. Corn comes fairly close to > 3% sunlight to fixed carbon. If you lose 2/3rd of it in the process > of making ethanol, then it's still 1% efficient. 1000x would mean > you are getting ten times as much energy out as is going into the > process. That's against the law. I suppose over a year corn could > be less than 0.1% efficient, but you would still be talking about > 100% efficient conversion of sunlight to fuel. > > snip > >>No, there are breakthroughs in many fields that are never mass marketed. >>What I am saying is that we don't know until we know. In my own career, >>there have been many times, before I ran an experiment, I was pretty sure >>I >>knew how something would work, but it didn't, and I had to scramble. Take >>for example, scaling up the recent Stanford breakthrough of increasing the >>Li-I battery capacity 10x. > > Is that possible from an energy standpoint? Lithium Ion batteries > currently are 25 times worse than gasoline. So a 10x improvement > would be 2.5 times less energy than gasoline. But gasoline gets 65% > of the mass that goes into tapping it for energy from the air. Thus > a Li-I battery with this kind of performance would be darn near as > energetic as a tank full of gasoline and oxygen. Have a URL for this > report? > Might be these: http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=67454 http://gcep.stanford.edu/research/factsheets/liion_battery_cathodes.html http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071219103105.htm http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/nanowire-010908.html http://www.intomobile.com/2008/01/02/stanford-researchers-develop-super-long-lasting-lithium-ion-battery.html http://www.powerpulse.net/story.php?storyID=19901 xponent Easy Bake Oven Maru rob _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
