Sunday, October 20th, 2024

Time	Event
3:34a	What Happens When a California Oil Refinery Shuts Down? A California oil refinery that produces 8% of the state's gasoline is shutting down late next year — a decision the Los Angeles Times says is "driven by climate change, the transition to electric vehicles and demands for cleaner air." "There's no question we are going to lose refineries over time, because demand is going to go down as we transition to electric vehicles, but I did not expect to see any of them exiting this quickly," said Severin Borenstein, faculty director of the Energy Institute at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. California "over the medium term" will have to rely more on imports, he said. "I think part of the response the state's going to need to consider is how to make sure that we can import sufficient gasoline to meet our needs...." David Hackett, chairman of Stillwater Associates, an Irvine oil consultancy, said he was contacted by Phillips just before the announcement, and was told the closure was a business decision. He said that although the timing was somewhat surprising, the closure wasn't, given the age of the refineries, their relatively small size and the inefficient layout that connects them by a pipeline. "That plant has been for sale for years. It hasn't found any buyers and I think that this has been an economic decision on their part. They looked at the profitability of the place and compared it with the other businesses that they have, and it didn't make the cut," he said. "The closure is likely to increase California's already high prices at the gas pump, given that much of the replacement gasoline will be shipped in by ocean vessel, analysts say..." according to another article from the Los Angeles Times. "Environmentalists and community activists cheered the news, however, saying it will mean cleaner air for the thousands who live in the area and that the state must continue the transition away from its dependence on fossil fuels." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
11:34a	Electric Motors Are About to Get a Major Upgrade - Thanks to Benjamin Franklin "A technology pioneered by Benjamin Franklin is being revived to build more efficient electric motors," reports the Wall Street Journal, "an effort in its nascent stage that has the potential to be massive." A handful of scientists and engineers — armed with materials and techniques unimaginable in the 1700s — are creating modern versions of Franklin's "electrostatic motor," that are on the cusp of commercialization... Franklin's "electrostatic motor" uses alternating positive and negative charges — the same kind that make your socks stick together after they come out of the dryer — to spin an axle, and doesn't rely on a flow of current like conventional electric motors. Every few years, an eager Ph.D. student or engineer rediscovers this historical curiosity. But other than applications in tiny pumps and actuators etched on microchips, where this technology has been in use for decades, their work hasn't made it out of the lab. Electrostatic motors have several potentially huge advantages over regular motors. They are up to 80% more efficient than conventional motors after all the dependencies of regular electric motors are added in. They could also allow new kinds of control and precision in robots, where they could function more like our muscles. And they don't use rare-earth elements because they don't have permanent magnets, and require as little as 5% as much copper as a conventional motor. Both materials have become increasingly scarce and expensive over the past decade, and supply chains for them are dominated by China. "It's reminiscent of the early 1990s, when Sony began to produce and sell the first rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, a breakthrough that's now ubiquitous..." according to the article. "These motors could lead to more efficient air-conditioning systems, factories, logistics hubs and data centers, and — since they can double as generators — better ways of generating renewable energy. They might even show up in tiny surveillance drones." And the article points out that C-Motive Technologies, a 16-person startup in Wisconsin, is already "reaching out to companies, hoping to get their motors out into the real world." ("So far, FedEx and Rockwell Automation, the century-old supplier of automation to factories, are among those testing their motors.") C-Motive's founders discovered that a number of technologies had matured enough that, when combined, could yield electrostatic motors competitive with conventional ones. These enabling technologies include super fast-switching power electronics — like those in modern electric vehicles — that can toggle elements of the motor between states of positive and negative charge very quickly... Dogged exploration of combinations of various readily available industrial organic fluids led to a proprietary mix that can both multiply the strength of the electric field and insulate the motor's spinning parts from each other — all without adding too much friction — says C-Motive Chief Executive Matt Maroon. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
4:34p	Could Geothermal Power Revolutionize US Energy Consumption? That massive geothermal energy project in Utah gets a closer look from the Washington Post, which calls it "a significant advance for a climate-friendly technology that is gaining momentum in the United States." Once fully operational, the project could generate up to 2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power more than 2 million homes. In addition, the BLM proposed Thursday to speed up the permitting process for geothermal projects on public lands across the country. Earlier this month, the agency also hosted the biggest lease sale for geothermal developers in more than 15 years... White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi said in an interview Thursday, "Enhanced geothermal technology has the opportunity to deliver something in the range of 65 million homes' worth of clean power — power that can be generated without putting any pollution in the sky. So we see it as a really meaningful contributor to our technology tool kit...." The developments Thursday come as tech companies race to find new sources of zero-emission power for data centers that can use as much energy as entire cities. With major backing from Google parent Alphabet, Fervo recently got its first project up and running in the northern Nevada desert... The advanced geothermal technology that Fervo is trying to scale up is an attractive option for tech firms. Enhanced geothermal plants do not pose all the safety concerns that come with nuclear power, but they have the potential to provide the round-the-clock energy that data centers need. The challenge Fervo faces is whether it can bring this technology online quickly enough. Fervo (a seven-year-old start-up) was co-founded by Tim Latimer, who previously worked as a drilling engineer, according to the article. But "Early in my career I got passionate about climate change. I started looking at where could a drilling engineer from the oil and gas industry make a difference," Latimer said during a Washington Post Live event in September. "And I realized that geothermal had been so overlooked ... even though the primary technical challenge to making geothermal work is dropping drilling costs." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)

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