Lifeboat Foundation

Imagine waking up tomorrow in a world that doesn’t depend on oil.

That might seem far-fetched, but as engineers and scientists come up with new ways to harness renewable energy, those new sources of energy may soon shape the way our societies function and how we live our daily lives.

“We’re going to stop depending on oil long before we run out of it, so we really need to exercise our imaginations about what other futures are possible,” explains University of Alberta associate professor Sheena Wilson, who heads the Future Energy Systems energy humanities theme.

Researchers have developed a straightforward way to make a type of conducting polymers with high surface area—called “nanoflowers”—potentially useful for energy transfer and storage.

If you could brush your cheek against a nanoflower’s microscopic petals, you’d find them cool, hard, and… rusty. Common rust forms the inner skeleton of these lovely and intricate nanostructures, while their outer layer is a kind of plastic.

“Rust will always pose a challenge in Earth’s humid and oxygenated atmosphere,” says Julio M. D’Arcy, assistant professor of chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis and a member of the Institute of Materials Science and Engineering. “Corrosion makes structures fragile and decreases the ability of components to function properly. But in our lab, we’ve learned how to control the growth of rust so that it can serve an important purpose.”

This special report will look at the energy transition from the perspective of America, the EU and China as well as petrostates such as Russia and Saudi Arabia. It will pinpoint winners and losers. It will argue that America is at risk of squandering an early lead, obtained by using natural gas and renewables to slash emissions, promoting clean technology and helping pioneer the Paris agreement. China is catching up fast. Saudi Arabia and Russia are in most obvious peril.

TO ENTER TAFT, two hours north of Los Angeles, you drive along the “Petroleum Highway”, past miles of billboards advertising Jesus. God’s country is also oil country. Spread over the sagebrush hills surrounding the town are thousands of steel pumpjacks (pictured), contraptions that suck oil out of the ground. They look like a herd of dinosaurs. Some Californians would describe the oil industry in the same way.

The oil produced at Taft is not produced by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as much of it is in Texas and North Dakota. It is so heavy it needs to be steamed out of the ground, in a process known locally as “huff and puff”. Yet Kern County, with Taft on its western edge, produces 144m barrels of oil a year, the second highest output of any county in America. Fred Holmes, a third-generation oilman and patron of the West Kern Oil Museum, says he is proud of the heritage, however much it irks local drivers of electric Tesla cars that the Golden State has such a carbon-heavy underbelly. “Oil is renewable energy. It just takes longer to renew,” he quips. He has built a giant wooden derrick at the museum to celebrate it.

Continue reading “Clean power is shaking up the global geopolitics of energy” »

You may have heard of Numerai — the unorthodox hedge fund that crowdsources predictive stock market models from data scientists around the world. It is now seeking more brain power and announced today that it is giving away $1 million worth of cryptocurrency to Kaggle users who sign up. The San Francisco-based hedge fund incentivizes its community members by giving them digital tokens they can stake during tournaments to express confidence in their predictions. The best trading algorithms are then selected based on how they perform on the live market, and their creators are rewarded with more tokens.

Looking at most Wall Street hedge funds’ models, it’s fair to say open, collaborative efforts aren’t at their core. Movies like Wall Street, which portrays a greedy Gordon Gekko, and The Wolf of Wall Street, which highlights the derailing decadence of power and money, paint a rather unflattering picture of egocentric traders and financiers. Numerai founder and CEO Richard Craib is looking to change that.

The 30-year-old South African wants to create a more open and decentralized ecosystem for hedge funds. Rather than restricting access to trading data, Craib encrypts it before sharing it with his global network of data scientists, which effectively prevents them stealing and replicating the trades on their own. They can, however, use the shared information to build predictive models for the hedge fund.

Continue reading “Numerai will give $1 million in crypto tokens to Kaggle users who sign up to its crowdsourced hedge fund” »

Wind power in the UK set a new record today by generating 14 gigawatts for the first time – nearly 37 per cent of the country’s electricity.

The National Grid control room confirmed that 13.9 gigawatts was the highest ever metered wind output.

It was responding to a tweet by “wind-loving Walthamstow mum” Sarah Merrick, who said: “Think this might be a new wind record”.

Continue reading “UK sets new wind power record as turbines deliver 14 gigawatts for first time – 37 per cent of nation’s electricity” »

Look out for—falling space debris?

A large Chinese satellite that’s free-falling to Earth could crash into southern Michigan sometime between now and early April, researchers say.

According to a new report from the Aerospace Corporation, southern portions of lower Michigan fall into the regions listed as having a high probability of debris landing from the 8.5-ton space station. The report also identifies northern China, central Italy and northern Spain as regions with higher chances of impact.

Continue reading “Chinese satellite filled with corrosive fuel could hit lower Michigan” »

I’d suggest France partner with Algeria to start trying to build a massive solar array in the Algerian desert, there is nothing out there. Although it is a rough neighborhood.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) — France will commit 700 million euros to the International Solar Alliance (ISA), President Emmanuel Macron said on Sunday at the founding conference of the organization, reiterating the European country’s commitment to the alliance and clean energy.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi ® shakes hands with French President Emmanuel Macron as he arrives to attend the International Solar Alliance Founding Conference in New Delhi, India, March 11, 2018. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi.

Continue reading “France to commit 700 million euros to International Solar Alliance” »

For weeks, digital clocks in Europe have been lagging behind. The unexpected source of the problem: Kosovo and Serbia, whose power grid operators can’t find common ground.

Clock radios and timers on microwaves and stoves have gotten out of sync in Europe in recent weeks. The reason: Coordination problems between the power grid operators of Kosovo and Serbia.

Since mid January power companies in Kosovo and Serbia have failed to mutually balance their electricity grids in the case of irregularities. According to the grid codes of the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E), they are obliged to maintain a mean frequency of 50 hertz (oscillations per second) and help each other out if necessary.

Continue reading “Clocks in Europe are running late because of the Kosovo conflict” »

Sending a spacecraft to the far reaches of our solar system to mine asteroids might seem like an improbable ambition best left to science fiction. But it’s inching closer to reality. A NASA mission is underway to test the feasibility on a nearby asteroid, and a niche group of companies is ramping up to claim a piece of the pie.

Industry barons see a future in finding and harnessing water on asteroids for rocket fuel, which will allow astronauts and spacecrafts to stay in orbit for longer periods. Investors, including Richard Branson, China’s Tencent Holdings and the nation of Luxembourg, see a longer-term solution to replenishing materials such as iron and nickel as Earth’s natural resources are depleted.

Millions of asteroids roam our solar system. Most are thought unsuitable for mining, either because they’re too small, too inaccessible to Earth or because the materials that make up the asteroid have little value. But we know of almost 1,000 asteroids that show potential. Timing is everything, though. The varied orbits of these asteroids mean that many are nearby only once every several years.