Japanese researchers from the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO; Kawasaki City; www.nedo.go.jp), Waseda University, JX Nippon Oil & Energy Corp. (JX_NOE) and five other companies along with five more universities have developed an inorganic membrane that enables…
Technology originally developed for harvesting oil from algae has now been applied to sanitize water and remove ammonia from commercial aquaculture ponds. Electro Water Separation (EWS) technology, developed by OriginOil Technologies (Los Angeles, Calif.; www.originoil.com), applies pulses of tuned electromagnetic…
NEDO and Hitachi Ltd. (Tokyo, www.hitachi.com) have developed a new combustion technology that could reduce the emissions of oxides of nitrogen (NOx) to below 10 ppm without the addition of diluents. As part of the CCS-IGCC project (carbon capture and…
ODC for Cl2 production Last month, ThyssenKrupp Uhde GmbH (Dortmund; www.uhde.eu) and Bayer MaterialScience AG (BMS; Leverkusen, both Germany; www.bayermaterialscience.com) commercially launched — worldwide — the oxygen depolarized cathode (ODC) technology, which BMS and ThyssenKrupp Uhde/UhdeNora developed to improve…
In April development tests, Cobalt Technologies (Cobalt; Mountain View, Calif; www.cobalttech.com) produced n -butanol at the fermentation scale of 100 m3 per run, demonstrating lower production cost than butanol produced from petroleum. This represents production that is a factor of…
To comply with increasingly stringent regulations for NOx emissions, operators of industrial plants often turn to low-NOx burners to avoid much more costly post-combustion treatment approaches like selective catalytic reduction (SCR). But low-NOx burners are plagued by significant losses in…
A process that uses magnetic nanoparticles, coated with a reactive material, to clean up contaminated water for human use is being developed at Stanford University (Stanford, Calif.; www.stanford.edu). The nanoscavengers, as they are called, are distributed in the water to…
GE Power & Water (Trevose, Pa.; www.ge.com) has introduced a novel, dual-pronged approach to corrosion inhibition for boiler and steam-condensate systems in petroleum refineries. The technology is designed to prevent attack by acidic species on steam-system surfaces, providing reliability to…
New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO; Kawasaki City; www.nedo.go.jp) and Panasonic Corp. (Osaka, both Japan; panasonic.net) have begun testing a new type of power-generation system that uses anisotropic solid-state composites that produce an electrical current when a temperature…
Ammonia is a promising candidate for scrubbing carbon dioxide from fluegas, since each ammonia molecule can absorb one molecule of CO2, whereas amine absorbers require two molecules to do the same job. However, because ammonia is volatile, the fluegas must…