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Factclipper Abstracts
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Factclipper -- Abstracts -- All
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Energy efficiency can cut the growth in energy demand by 50 percent in developing countries
Most developing nations are in a relatively early stage of economic growth, and will build more than half of their capital stock between 2008 and 2020.
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ConoccoPhillips's breakup may spell the end of Big Oil's joint exploration and refining operations
ConocoPhillips plans to break up into two separately traded companies, one for oil exploration and drilling and a second for petroleum refining and marketing. The move has taken "Wall Street by surprise," reports Fortune magazine, since until now the widespread perception has been that the bigger the oil company, the stronger the oil company.
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New oil and gas fields and a renaissance in drilling turnaround the world's energy outlook
Heady prediction: “Oil and gas will continue to be pillars for global energy supply for decades to come,” says James Burkhard, a managing director of IHS CERA (Cambridge, Massachusetts), an energy consulting firm. “The competitiveness of oil and gas and the scale at which they are produced mean that there are no readily available substitutes in either one year or 20 years.”
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China will be the main driver in future energy supply and use, including renewables, reports IEA
In its annual global energy report, the International Energy Agency (IEA; Paris) made many predictions about demand and supply of various fuels around the world, but it singled out China’s rapid industrial growth as the single biggest factor in spurring higher oil prices and carbon dioxide emissions over the next quarter-century. The Agency notes that:
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Carbon nanotubes produce powerful thermopower waves that can be harnessed for energy
An engineering team from MIT and Korea's Sungkyunkwan University has discovered a previously unknown phenomenon that creates self-propagating "thermopower waves" — a moving pulse of heat traveling along a microscopic wire and driving electrons to creat an electrical current.
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Transonic's ultra-efficient fuel-injection system gets 64 miles per gallon in gasoline engines
Startup company Transonic Combustion (Camarillo, California) claims that it has invented a better internal combustion engine that boosts gas mileage by more than 50 percent: a test vehicle is getting 64 miles per gallon (27 km/l) on the highway.
The key is a new fuel-injection system that heats and pressurizes gasoline into a "supercritical" state before injecting it into the combustion chamber. The fuel is also treated with a catalyst that partially oxidizes it to improve combustion.
Once the fuel is injected into the piston, heat and pressure combust the fuel cleanly and quickly without a spark. The fuel is ignited just when the piston reaches its optimal point, further improving fuel efficiency. The engine also cuts throttling losses: At steady cruising speeds of 50 miles per hour, the engine runs on lean fuel-air mixtures, and can get 98 mpg.
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Consumers in developed nations import goods that account for 23 percent of global CO2 emissions
Scientists at The Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford (California) report that 23 percent of the global emissions of carbon dioxide — some 6.2 gigatonnes — went in making products that were exported from China and other emerging-market countries to consumers in rich countries.
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World Bank's $3.7-billion loan to South Africa for a coal power plant is under fire from US, UK
The US and UK, the World Bank's two largest members, have threatened not to support the Bank's funding of Eskom's 4,800-megawatt Medupi coal-fired plant in the northern Limpopo, a power plant that is critical to easing the chronic power shortages that choked South Africa's economy in 2008. The move highlights the global debate over who should pay for clean energy, and reveals the deep divisions between the world's industrial powers and developing countries over tackling climate change.
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Fear carbon dioxide, not methane, says scientist aiming to defuse Arctic's methane time bomb
"Is now the time to get frightened?" asks David Archer, a computational ocean chemist at the University of Chicago, in response to the flurry of recent studies reporting1
- 1. Factclipper: Global methane levels are rising once again since 2007, raising fear
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Get the raw climate data behind changes in Arctic sea ice, and model the data yourself
The UK's Met Office Hadley Centre has reviewed1 more than 100 scientific studies that monitor changes in the Earth's climate system, and concludes that it is an "increasingly remote possibilit
- 1. The Guardian: Met Office analysis reveals 'clear fingerprints' of man-made climate change
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