VOA News
December 15, 2013
The United Nations predicts that the amount of electronic waste disposed of annually
worldwide will surge 33 percent by 2017.
The U.N.'s "Solvingthe E-Waste Problem" initiative issued a report Sunday saying that the weight
of electronic goods discarded every year worldwide would rise to 65.4 million metric
tons by 2017, with most of the growth coming from developing nations.
The alliance of U.N. organizations, grassroots groups and industry said China had
the highest volume of electrical goods put on the market last year, with the U.S.
ranking second. Taken together developing and emerging countries already produce
as much e-waste as the developed world.
E-waste - defined as anything with a battery or electrical cord - often contains
materials that are toxic to humans and the environment.
The study called for better monitoring of e-waste exports, saying a lack of consistent
reporting makes it difficult to formulate effective rules of the treatment of electrical
junk.
www.voanews.com/content/un-warns-of-hazards-of-electrical-waste/1810624.html
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MFSK64 image follows: Discarded television sets...
<EOT>
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Sending Pic:187x164C;
Internet:
There was a bit of
electrical waste in the air - probably my own high-voltage ignition of the oil
firing
<EOT>
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Algae Converted to Crude Oil in Under an Hour
VOA News
December 18, 2013
It used to take a million years to convert algae to oil, but
scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory (PNNL), say they have developed a process to
do the job in minutes.
In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae with the consistency
of pea soup is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor.
Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less
than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material
containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae.
While algae has long been considered a potential source of
biofuel, and several companies have produced algae-based fuels on
a research scale, the fuel is projected to be expensive. The PNNL
technology harnesses algae's energy potential efficiently and
incorporates a number of methods to reduce the cost of producing
algae fuel.
"Cost is the big roadblock for algae-based fuel," said Douglas
Elliott, the laboratory fellow who led the PNNL team's research.
"We believe that the process we've created will help make algae
biofuels much more economical."
The most important cost-saving step is that the process works
with wet algae. Most current processes require the algae to be
dried — a process that takes a lot of energy and is expensive.
The new process works with an algae slurry that contains as much
as 80 to 90 percent water.
"Not having to dry the algae is a big win in this process; that
cuts the cost a great deal," said Elliott. "Then there are
bonuses, like being able to extract usable gas from the water and
then recycle the remaining water and nutrients to help grow more
algae, which further reduces costs."
Other processes for converting algae to oil exist, but according
to PNNL, their process can continuously convert 1.5 liters of
slurry into biofuel per hour.
They say additionally their process eliminates the need for
complex solvents like hexane.
Instead, the PNNL team works with the whole algae, subjecting it
to very hot water under high pressure to tear apart the
substance, converting most of the biomass into liquid and gas
fuels.
The PNNL method requires a lot of heat and a lot of pressure,
which together causes what is called hydrothermal liquefaction
and catalytic hydrothermal gasification. While not cheap to
build, Elliott says the savings "on the back end more than makes
up for the investment."
"It's a bit like using a pressure cooker, only the pressures and
temperatures we use are much higher," he said. "In a sense, we
are duplicating the process in the Earth that converted algae
into oil over the course of millions of years. We're just doing
it much, much faster."
A biofuels company, Utah-based Genifuel Corp., has licensed the
technology and is working with an industrial partner to build a
pilot plant using the technology. The company has been working
with Elliott since 2008.
The research results were reported in the journal Algal Research.
