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| Preparing For The Pandemic |
| 02.16.06 (8:28 am) |
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(PRWEB) February 15, 2006 -- Avian Flu Talk recently launched a very popular H5N1
bird flu discussion forum that has generated a lot of excitement among the general
public. People are joining this new forum in waves from all around the world as it
has now surpassed 500 members in just over 90 days since its inception.
Because of the growing threat of a Superflu pandemic, Avian Flu Talk has recently
added several new discussion forums on their site that are aimed specifically at
providing worldwide communications in the event of an H5N1 pandemic.
“These new forums allow a way for countries all around the world to collectively
work together in preparing for the immanent pandemic” said Ryan Evans, founder of
the website. “The forum will provide an invaluable communication structure for the
entire world in the event of a crisis, said Evans. “It will help people to
coordinate plans and share information among other people that reside within their
own country, which is very unique”.
In additional to launching the recent international communication forums, the site
also created a pre-designated forum for the members located within the United
States.
“This new forum allows intrastate communication among each individual state”, said
Evans. People are already posting informative helpful resources in their
respective state forums to coordinate pandemic preparedness efforts. These new
forums are very useful for connecting people locally”.
This website’s motto of people-helping-people has added a comforting appeal to the
new site, which is attracting people from all over the world.
“We believe in providing a caring type of atmosphere on the forum, said Evans. We
understand that new visitors to the site may be a little nervous of the current
situation so we make every effort possible to comfort them. If the new visitors
take their time and review the information on this site, they will have no problem
adequately preparing”.
The website is also a great source for receiving the latest bird flu news and
developments as members from all around the world post news releases in a designated
news forum.
For all those that are interested in immediate preparation for the ensuing H5N1 bird
flu pandemic, we would encourage you to visit this site located at:
www.AvianFluTalk.com.
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1 Comments
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| The Climate Change News |
| 02.12.06 (4:34 pm) |
The Climate Change News
We have a problem with Greenhouse Gasses building up in the atmosphere. There isn't really much arguement to that statement. Carbon Dioxide is at a 30% creater concentration today than it was at the start of the industrial age and so it is the main one that concerns us and I thought I would take a look at a little known option for dealing with it that just might be the best one. If you look at the natural scheme of things animal life on this planet takes in oxygen and releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Plant life does the opposite, taking in the carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. As long as these two halves of the whole are relatively in balance the ecosystem is maintained in a way which is beneficial to both types of life.
As you see in the simple illustration above plants take in both Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere and Water from the ground and then combine these two elements to create sugars and then release the excess oxygen which is formed as a byproduct of this process. Since the burning of fossil fuels creates carbon dioxide and water vapor as it's two main products then we can say that plants are reversing this process in a way by taking these pollutants and turning them once again into a form of hydrocarbon (sugar is composed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen).
The energy to carry out this process comes from the sun. Can we get more energy out of the alcohol or biodiesel we can make from these plant hydrocarbons? No, of course not. The idea though is to turn the energy of the sun into srtored chemical energy which we can use to power our transportation infrastructure.
The main problem is that the biosphere we live within cannot take in all of the carbon dioxide that we produce and so we can not have a renewable fuel supply based on plants alone. On the other hand it is because plants canot take in all of the carbon dioxide that we produce that we have Climate Change. Unless we somehow drastically reduce the amount of fuel that we use we are just going to keep putting more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and then we will have to live with the consequences.
What if we could take the carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere as fast as we put in in and convert that carbon dioxide back into hydrocarbon fuels just like nature does? Then it wouldn't matter if vehicles polluted or not as it would all be recycled back into fuel while maintaining the proper balance of gasses in our atmosphere. Is this even remotely possible though? The answer is yes, there are scientists working on this very process today.
Dr. Hans Ziock, of Los Alamos National Laboratory reportedly told American Energy Independence that carbon dioxide really could be captured out of the air. He said;
"The idea is far more than science fiction, although certainly a fair distance from actual implementation. The removal of CO2 from air is fairly easy, as flowing air through a calcium hydroxide, or other basic solution will show. That is simple chemistry. Although the needed scale is large, the land area required is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than that required for wind energy, solar energy, and more than three orders of magnitude smaller than the area required for biomass. The reason for this is that there is a lot of energy in a small amount of carbon, where as solar and wind energy are very diffuse, and biomass has a huge inefficiency in converting the diffuse sunlight energy into fixed carbon."
"One should be careful to note that removal of CO2 from the atmosphere does NOT generate any energy, and in fact consumes energy. However, its removal allows one to generate energy from carbon fuels elsewhere which more than compensates for the energy consumed in the process. Our back of the envelope calculations show that we could remove the CO2 generated from a gallon of gasoline for less than 25 cents."
"The process would be aimed at the transportation sector and other small diffuse emitters of CO2. It would be foolish to do this for a power plant where one already has a fairly concentrated stream of CO2."
"The concept would be a solution for the CO2 emissions from the transportation sector, which, if implemented, would eliminate the need for the huge expense of completely replacing the existing fuel infrastructure for the transportation sector, and side step the entire issue of finding a cost and energy efficient means of producing, transporting, and storing hydrogen both to/at the distribution centers and then in the vehicles. It of course also makes the CO2 collection completely independent of how or where the CO2 is emitted, as all that is needed is that the net balance of CO2 is zero.
A more aggressive implementation of this technology would allow civilization to begin drawing down atmospheric CO2 levels back to where they were before the industrial revolution, not simply stop the increase."
In a paper entitled The Case for Carbon Dioxide Extraction from Air three scientist/collaborators make the case for such a process being very effective in eliminating greenhouse gasses from our atmosphere and the threat of Climae Change with them. They would use "synthetic trees" such as the one pictured below to capture Co2.
But is it possible to convert CO2 into hydrocarbon fuels like gasoline or alcohol? It seems that it is indeed. In a story in Chemical and Engineering News Professor George A. Olah said:
"From plant life over the ages, new fossil fuels can be formed. The process is so slow, however, that within our human life span we do not have time for nature to replenish what we are rapidly using up. A challenging new approach that we are pursuing is to reverse the process and produce hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide and water via methanol, thus chemically recycling carbon dioxide. In the laboratory, we already know how to do this, and progress is being made toward bringing about the feasibility of such an approach. The limiting factor is the energy needed for generating hydrogen from water. Using alternative energy sources–but first of all atomic energy, albeit improved and made safer–will eventually give us needed energy."
"Much is said these days about a hydrogen economy, emphasizing hydrogen as the clean, inexhaustible fuel of the future. However, the safe handling and dispensing of volatile hydrogen–for which no infrastructure exists–is difficult and costly."
"I believe a much preferable way of storing hydrogen is in the form of methyl alcohol (methanol economy). Methanol is a convenient liquid that can be produced by reduction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It can be catalytically converted into ethylene and propylene and through them to higher hydrocarbons. This can provide an inexhaustible source of hydrocarbon products and fuels, which are now obtained from oil and gas. Furthermore, in recent years, with colleagues at California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, we have also developed a new, direct methanol fuel cell that produces electric power without the need of hydrogen. Thus, methanol is both a fuel and a source of hydrocarbons. By recycling excess CO2 into methanol instead of just storing or sequestering it, we can also mitigate global warming. It is to this effect that a major research effort, with my colleagues associated with the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute at the University of Southern California, is directed."
In an unrelated development Nakamichi Yamasaki of the Tokushima Industrial Technology Center in Japan says he has developed a way to turn carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons. He says the process makes propane and butane at relatively low temperatures and pressures. He uses an iron catalyst to enable this reaction to occur.
So then it seems that, while the technology may not be fully developed and deployed yet, science will be able to provide us with ways to both balance the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and provide an endlessly renewable source of fuel in the process. A fuel which will be compatable with our existing storage and distribution infrastructure and which will work in existing vehicles as well.
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