James Hansen Backs Boron To Replace Oil

[Eclipse Now]

Hi all,

James Hansen helped form the SCGI which is a think tank for solving our climate and energy problems. They promote the Tom Blees book, "Prescription for the Planet" which promotes GenIV waste-eating nuclear power like the Integral Fast Reactor to replace coal and gas, and boron to replace oil. It's a good read, especially the chapter on boron replacing oil. What do people think? FREE PDF download of book here. Let me know what you think.

http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/prescription-for-the-planet.html

[Murga]

Not very appreciative of the global warming (climate change) "sustainable" word speak.  Could happen, but the way they go about it is pointless.  Blees et al have swallowed it hook line and sinker.  Of his Integral Fast Reactor, maybe good, not sure.  I personally like the idea of a boron car, though wonder if it would pass EPA as it is very combustionable (or would the EPA/FDA allow gasoline to cars/peanut butter to people if they were new products?)

 

It woudl be good to hear more on the boron car and if the energy costs are put far too low. 

[CraigD]

I don’t know much about the Science Council for Global Initiatives or Tom Blees, who wrote the 2008 book Perscription for the Planet, but will read it when time permits. I couldn’t find more than a brief biography of Blees.

 

... and boron to replace oil.

The idea of using the oxidization of metal to generate energy in engine-useful heat form was one I though originated in 2005 with work by Ammon Yogev at an Israeli tech incubated company, Engineuity R&D Ltd. Though at present, the only technology their site mentions is a scheme to produce liquid hydrocarbon fuels from CO₂ + CH₄ + H₂O, in 2005, they claimed to have developed a system that produced engine-usable water steam and hydrogen gas from thin wires of aluminum and/or magnesium + O₂.

 

See this archive.org page) for the original Engineuity press release, or this 2005 page for an article including Yogev’s Dec 2012 US Patent application.

 

We had a brief discussion in 2006, here.

 

According to this 22 October 2005 New Scientist article, around the same time, ORNL’s David Beach – who Blees terms an “Oak Ridge boy” in his book - was pursuing the same basic chemistry – metal + oxygen = oxidized metal + energy – but with tiny (50 nm, 0.00000005 m) diameter iron particles rather than wires. Beach speculated that boron would be a better metal than iron, but didn’t yet know how to grind it as finely as iron.

 

This ORNL Review article has more details of Beach’s scheme.

 

A beauty of Yogev wire scheme was the simplicity of the “fuel” – simply spools of thin wire, which could be packaged into sealed cassettes, fed into a reactor vessel. The powerful burning/oxidization reaction fragmented the wire into dust, which is caught and eventually removed from the reactor, and recycled - heated, separating the metal and oxygen, the pure melted metal pulled into thin wire and reloaded onto spool cassettes.

 

I don’t think Beach’s research continued to the point of producing useful amounts of heat, or investigating the engineering details of storing and recycling the metal and metal oxide material.

 

It appears to me that despite early promise, none of these “metal fuel” schemes to have achieved practical success. Especially given the success Yogev claimed in 2005, this seems surprising and odd to me.