We start this month’s Future Energy eNews with an announcement of an award given to “The 11^th Green” movie www.ChristopherMunch.com , which the New Yorker has listed as One of the Best of 2020. Our IRI Members will recall that we screened this movie at COFE11 in Albuquerque NM in 2019, before its official launch. Now it is a classic, based on actual real life events, that traces the US government’s secret programs from Eisenhower to Obama, with two look-alikes for each of those Presidents. Even a believable alien is portrayed in the film, which sticks with you after it is over. I was also just interviewed by the movie’s writer-director Chris Munch for a follow-up documentary he is working on at this time. Watch the trailer  and rent the movie today!

Our Story #1 has an energy discovery from MIT that is hard to qualify and quantify, since it is in a new category of energy generation that borders on free energy. As Professor Dubbs states, “this way of generating energy is completely new” to draw electrons out of carbon nanotubes by just flowing a solvent over them. It is electrochemistry but with no wires! Half of the nanotubes are coated with a polymer and half is not, so that the electrons will flow from one section to the other freely. With arbitrary nanotube particles made to be 250 microns, a 0.7 volt potential is generated in EACH particle, which can be assebled into arrays to compound the voltage and current. Applications are just beginning to emerge but micro and nanorobots now seem possible with their own built in power generation. The conservation of energy transfer or equivalently, scavenging energy from the environment is explained in their published article in Nature Communications, which is open access. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23038-7 The title is rather humorous for its inventiveness skirting the free energy issue: “…an electrically asymmetric carbon Janus particle”.

Our Stories #2 and #5 are also quite a hopeful sign for future energy emerging. Our friend and colleague Ryan Wood, who also was a presenter at COFE7 in 2015, has an announcement in Story #2 about his Electric Fusion Systems’ successful demonstration with a novel fusion technology that also works in a small, portable setting. Similar to focus fusion that IRI has presented in the past at COFE2, this type of nuclear fusion does not require high pressure as in the tokamak reactors. A related story is that General Fusion in the UK also has some progress to report just this week and expects to commercialize their operation in three years, which would be amazing Story #5 also shows that the Chinese are further along, even with the old-fashioned tokamak, that keeps making incremental improvements. Now achieving 101 seconds of sustained nuclear fusion, the Chinese tokamak circulating a hot million-degree plasma with a super-cooled powerful magnetic field in a donut-shaped containment, is not to be ignored.

Story #4 is an important and wide-reaching discovery about ammonia. Chemical & Engineering News have announced that ammonia could replace lithium with its 9 times energy density, that is also 1.8 times the energy density of H2 by itself, since it also contains hydrogen (NH3) as a byproduct which they call “a perfect commodity for a future hydrogen economy.” The company AmmPower (CSE:AMMP; OTC:AMMPF) offers the best hope for industrial ammonia producing units, which can be called “Green Ammonia” that will also help the fertilizer industry to become carbon-free. Ammpower is also a rapidly growing company that is expected to reach an $80 billion evaluation in 2025. We are expecting to see the first ammonia-fueled supertankers by 2024 and the first vessel by Viking Energy propelled by ammonia fuel cells. All newly built ships may start using ammonia power by 2044 according to this article, all of which is pretty exciting.

A new material made from carbon nanotubes can generate electricity by scavenging energy from its environment. MIT engineers have discovered a new way of generating electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create a current simply by interacting with liquid surrounding them. The liquid, an organic solvent, draws electrons out of the particles, generating a current that could be used to drive chemical reactions or to power micro- or nanoscale robots, the researchers say.

“This mechanism is new, and this way of generating energy is completely new,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. “This technology is intriguing because all you have to do is flow a solvent through a bed of these particles. This allows you to do electrochemistry, but with no wires.”

-- Electric Fusion Systems (EFS) announced today that it has successfully demonstrated fusion reactions in a laboratory setting. EFS is pioneering revolutionary energy technology, using novel fusion physics that does not emit dangerous radiation.

DAVID NIELD 8 MAY 2021

The worldwide shift toward cleaner, greener energy sources once again appears to be picking up speed.

One of those alternative energy sources – which appears to have the potential to provide a tremendous amount of industrial power – may be something you had never considered: ammonia.

The experts at Chemical & Engineering News have called ammonia a fuel of the future that may be “a perfect commodity for a future hydrogen economy.” And one company could emerge as a leader in the rapidly-growing Green Ammonia space…

China’s “artificial sun” tokamak has sustained a plasma reaction for a whopping 101 seconds at 120 million degrees Celsius, setting new records in the field of nuclear fusion. The breakthrough could pave the way for a carbon-neutral energy future.

EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak), or HT-7U, is a custom-built fusion reactor that has operated in different phases since 2006. Like many of the world’s tokamak experiments, EAST has reached fusion before. As a refresher, inside the donut-shaped (or, sometimes, more spherical) containment of a tokamak, sun-hot plasma swirls in a circle that’s held in place by supercooled electromagnets. This magnetic field is the only thing floating between 360-million-degree plasma and a bunch of human-made materials that obviously can’t sustain that temperature. The plasma results from smashing different nuclei together, fusing them rather than splitting them.

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