mardi, août 12, 2014

The wonders of chemistry ^_^

Nature published the Chemist's choices of 2014, within this review a lot of amazing stuff that makes you realize that Mother Nature can do it all, but not necessarily needs to! Here is a selection of my preferred ones:
A new plastic material imitates veins to heal itself:

A robo-chemist for organic synthesis

Heating up any organic material to make biofuel

Turning photons into fuel

Bath-salt chemical promises safer solar cells

Chemical treatment could cut cost of biofuel

CCS infografics for UK policies

I love infografics, it take a couple of seconds to read and you feel more intelligent afterward! Well it is not entirely true but at least if you want to get deeper in a subject it is a doorsteps. So the UK government issued lately a document showing the possibility of a phase 2 development in CCS. And they did put a couple of infografics that I will paste here, for you guys to appreciate their vision. The document is retrievable here and the infografics are below.
In this first infografics they show the 3 phases of development for an ideal CCS implementation plan. Phase 1 (in blue) is not entirely implemented but the idea is to build main pumping units (phase 1) and satellites (phase 2 and 3) to inject CO2 and also being able to retrieve extra oil reserves. It is the most realistic way to implement further CCS, through the integration with Extended Oil Recovery (EOR) techniques of aging oilfields.

This second infografic show their first power generation project integrating CCS as a plan to reduce Carbon emission (White Rose CCS project), and how it will still be able to fulfill it's goal of powerhouse, in a greener manner than it's predecessors.

This last infografics is their second large power generation project integrating CCS (Peterhead CCS project). 
Both projects plan offshore storage which most probably will be integrated as EOR feedstock. The document claims they should provide 40% of UK's energy by 2050!
Now that is a blue sky plan :-)