Arteplas, the largest producer of PET chords in Latin America, offers a 100 percent recycled chord which is generated from plastic bottles. The manufacturing process utilises 70% less energy than traditional means, and is said to be both cheaper and of higher quality than typical rope from fibres. Applicable industries include agriculture, construction, fishing & transportation.

PNC, a US based financial services corporation, has installed a green wall on its headquarters in Pittsburg (Pennsylvania). The green wall is a horizontal area of vegetation that covers approximately two tennis courts. Benefits of such an initiative include natural insulation and removal of air pollutants, a drop in temperature within the building (roughly 25%), as well as the capacity to display a positive public image. The wall was installed by Green Living Technologies LLC, which provides products and services that facilitate and simplify the integration of environmental technologies.

ecoATM, a company that provides automated systems for recycling electronics, has rolled out a plan to place their ATM machines in mobile carrier stores. The concept is very simple: When a user decides to purchase a new electronic gadget (e.g. a mobile phone), instead of throwing the old device away, the user can “sell” it to an ecoATM. The user inserts the device into the ATM machine, it then values the device and offers a form of payment (or coupons) in exchange for the device. If the user accepts, the device is immediately binned and stored for pickup by a recycling agent.. Click Here to view what the ATM machines look like.

The Hyperion Power Module (HPM) is designed to create a deliverable nuclear station significant enough to power 20,000 households. The technology was licensed from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

WiTricity aims to develop wireless electricity solutions for consumer use. The video shows their technology in action, and the CEO estimates their product will be on the market by 2011.

The DESERTEC Concept describes the perspective of a sustainable supply of electricity for Europe (EU), the Middle East (ME) and North Africa (NA) up to the year 2050. It shows that a transition to competitive, secure and compatible supply is possible using renewable energy sources and efficiency gains, and fossil fuels as backup for balancing power.

]]> http://www.techabia.com/2009/11/desertec-sustainable-electricity-up-to-2050/feed/ 0 http://www.techabia.com/2009/07/oasys-low-cost-water-treatment/ http://www.techabia.com/2009/07/oasys-low-cost-water-treatment/#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:19:18 +0000 admin http://www.techabia.com/?p=1119

Oasys, who’s technology was developed by the environmental engineering program at Yale University, aspires to provide low cost seawater desalination and water treatment. The patented technology, Engineered Osmosis (EO), aims to produce drinking water at less than half the cost of current desalination methods. This is done by reducing the amount of high-pressures needed (which current methods rely on), reducing electricity and fuel demands by more than 90%. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that 2.4 billion of the world’s 6.8 billion people live in highly water-stressed levels, and it is innovations such as EO that must be funded by government initiatives to help the developing world.

Rive Technology, a clean energy company backed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has completed the development of a catalyst that could make the refining of crude oil more efficient, increasing the amount of petroleum delivered by up to 9% . The process uses a zeolite catalyst (which is already heavily used in the petrochemical industry) to break up the hydrocarbons in crude oil. What makes Rive’s technology unique is that the zeolites are enhanced (their pores are altered to become larger), allowing for a larger reaction which in turn gives the refiner more gasoline. See below for more information.

The Situation

Petroleum refining is a huge industry – every day the world consumes more than 84 million barrels of refined products with a value in excess of $8 billion. Despite the size of the industry, refiners today confront a difficult environment: they need to increase capacity to meet growing worldwide demand for transportation fuels; they are forced to process heavier crude oil with greater sulfur content because of dwindling supplies of high-quality crudes; and, at the same time they are under pressure to maintain profit margins in a highly competitive commodity industry.

To increase capacity, refiners are expanding their existing refineries and building new refineries. The cost and lead time for capital projects like these has almost doubled over the past five years and it has become nearly impossible to get permits to build new refineries in the U.S. To address the shortage of high-quality crudes, refiners are forced to pay a premium for feedstocks or revamp their refineries to process low quality crudes, which can be difficult to do profitably.

These market conditions are straining the ability of refiners to maintain the profit margins required to support new investments in refining infrastructure. As a commodity business with no control over the cost of crude oil or the prices of its refined products – these are set on the open market – the only levers the refiner controls are the value of the products it produces and the efficiency with which it converts crude to products.

All these factors have created an extraordinary need for new refining technology that enables refiners to increase production of transportation fuel, to process less desirable and less expensive crudes, and to maximize the value of its products, all without making major capital investments.

Technology

Rive’s proprietary catalyst technology unleashes the potential of zeolites to transform crude oil molecules into valuable transportation fuels. Zeolites are relatively inexpensive, active catalysts and are used extensively in petroleum refining and petrochemical production. Their high acidity, active alumina sites, and crystalline structure, formed by a network of small pores, effectively “crack” the bonds of crude oil molecules, producing valuable refined products.

However, zeolite pores are very small, less than one nanometer in diameter, which prevents the larger molecules in a feedstock from accessing the interior of a zeolite and undergoing the desired reactions. This is especially critical in diffusion controlled environments, such as the short contact time reactors prevalent in modern fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) units.

Rive’s technology involves a proprietary method of modifying the pore structure of a zeolite, making the zeolite more accessible to larger molecules in a feedstock. By selectively introducing mesopores (pores nearly four nanometers in diameter) into a zeolite, Rive allows larger molecules to access the zeolite and get “cracked” into valuable products. Further, the cracked products, such as gasoline-range molecules, are able to exit the zeolite before they overcrack to lighter, less valuable gases. As a result, petroleum refiners obtain a higher yield of desirable products such as gasoline, diesel fuel, and propylene, and less of undesirable products like heavy cycle oil and coke.

Rive’s catalyst – called RiveCat – is nano-engineered through the surfactant-assisted transformation of a zeolite. The resulting mesoporous structure maintains all of the characteristic properties of the zeolite, namely crystallinity, high acidity and stability. Rive is able to control the size and concentration of mesopores to create a zeolite structure that yields the best catalytic performance.

Rive co-founder Javier Garcia Martinez invented the technology while at MIT, and the company has an exclusive license from MIT to commercialize the technology.

From Rive Technology website.