Six Sigma is a business strategy designed to use smarter data and methodology to reduce defects - six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit. Statistically it is 3.4 defects per million.

Could this business practice be used to help turn companies green by reducing their energy use?

According to mechanical engineer Prabhakar Kaushik of NC College of Engineering in Haryana, India, and colleagues, energy conservation should be at the forefront of company efforts. In a global economy with environmental pressures high on the agenda, organizations are under increasing pressure to control costs, maintain high levels of safety and quality, and save energy. Energy conservation, of course, offers the parallel advantages of helping to reduce costs, improving efficiency, as well as reducing the carbon footprint.

One consistent feature of human progress throughout history has been that science will come up with creative answers to current problems. When ancient people living in small tribes were running out of game to hunt, some leaders thought rationing and mitigation were the answers. They would have created a culture of despair. Domesticated livestock was the answer instead and then efficient agriculture and even terraforming.

Based on that confidence, a lot of people, me included, assume that global warming can be solved by some 'future technology' as yet undeveloped. Killing our economy by 25% now (yes, imagine it 25% worse) to stave off a .5 degree warming problem in 50 years is positively un-scientific.

But hope is not how things get done. People point to Y2K and say 'it was all hype, nothing happened' but they forget that's because we spent billions prior to that fixing problems. Likewise, acid rain was a huge concern in the 1980s and is not now because problems were addressed squarely.

Capturing and storing carbon dioxide is a solution the anti-global warming contingent (read, political pundits and bloggers using science to attack Democrats) say can keep us in an SUV Promised Land today. Then future technology can deal with it permanently.

To those people (in this case, Republicans) I say, 'Pretend a Democrat is saying Social Security will take care of itself in the future. Would you be skeptical?' Well, that's how I feel when they insist nothing needs to change and it will all be okay.

Photosynthesis is of great interest outside biology, specifically in the energy industry. Using photosynthesis, green plants are able to harvest energy from sunlight and convert it to chemical energy at an energy transfer efficiency rate of approximately 97 percent and if scientists can create artificial versions of photosynthesis, the dream of solar power as the ultimate green and renewable source of electrical energy could be realized.

However, a potential pitfall for any sunlight-harvesting system is that if the system becomes overloaded with absorbed solar energy, it most likely will suffer some form of damage. Plants solve this problem on a daily basis with a photo-protective mechanism called energy-quenching. Excess energy, detected by changes in pH levels, is safely dissipated from one molecular system to another, where it can then be routed down relatively harmless chemical reaction pathways.

In a study of the molecular mechanisms by which plants protect themselves from oxidation damage should they absorb too much sunlight during photosynthesis, a team of researchers has discovered a molecular “dimmer switch” that helps control the flow of solar energy moving through the system of light harvesting proteins. This discovery holds important implications for the future design of artificial photosynthesis systems that could provide the world with a sustainable and secure source of energy.

Over the past decades competition for fossil fuels and the concern that they are generating large quantities of contaminating gases have given rise to a growing scientific interest in the development of alternative energies.

Most current research is focused on hydrogen cells, the biggest advantages being that they do not generate contaminant gases and have water vapor as the only waste product. However, hydrogen is very expensive, both in production and distribution. It has to be kept and stored under conditions of very high pressure (more than 800 bars).

This is why hydrogen is dangerous and even more so when stored in vehicles travelling at high speed – a small crack in the storage container could have fatal consequences.

The genome analysis of a champion biomass-degrading fungus has revealed a surprisingly minimal repertoire of genes that it employs to break down plant cell walls, highlighting opportunities for further improvements in enzymes customized for biofuels production.

The discovery of Trichoderma reesei, the target of the published analysis, dates back to World War II, when it was identified as the culprit responsible for the deterioration of fatigues and tents in the South Pacific. This progenitor strain has since yielded variants for broad industrial applications and is known today as an abundant source of enzymes, particularly cellulases and hemicellulases, currently being explored to catalyze the deconstruction of plant cell walls as a first step towards the production of biofuels from lignocellulose.

As a futurist I speak and write about trends and the future. I am often asked questions about the future of one thing or another. In most cases I speak to general trends, not specific outcomes. In some areas I can be somewhat specific as I have taken the time to analyze and then cross reference what I have learned with the trends and forces I see. One of those areas is the price of oil.

In early 2007, when the price of oil was $53 a barrel I was invited on a business program to predict what I thought the price of oil might be by the end of the year. At that time I said that I thought that oil would exceed $80 a barrel and could well approach $100, though I didn’t think it would cross that barrier in 2007. The reporter, who had never spoken with a futurist, calling me a ‘so-called futurist’ was trying to contain her sputtering disbelief. The opposite side was some ‘oil industry analyst’ who spoke about a price fluctuation between $50-70 for the remainder of the year.

About eight months ago, I wrote that I thought that the near term trading range for the price of oil for the next couple of years would be $80-125. At the time I stated that while there was little on the horizon to create a downward pressure below $80, there was much on the horizon that could cause an upward pressure to $125 and that the long term trend would be ever upward and that downward pressure would provide only temporary dips.

Magnetic confinement fusion could be a safe, environmentally friendly way to provide a substantial part of the world’s energy needs in the 21st century but before that can happen science needs to understand the complex behavior of hot collisionless plasmas (ion gases) in strong magnetic fields.

Such plasmas are subject to temperature and density gradient driven microturbulence which leads to particle and heat losses and tends to keep the plasma from reaching a "burning" state.

Simulations are necessary if we are to understand and control plasma microturbulence but, because fusion plasmas are virtually collisionless, a three-dimensional (i.e., in space) fluid description must, in principle, be abandoned, in favor of a six-dimensional (i.e., in phase space) kinetic one.

There are many on-going themes in the large discussion of global warming and replacing fossil fuels with renewable, clean energy. One of the dominant ones is that alternative fuels such as solar are much more expensive than fossil fuels. This argument is often put forth by those entrenched in the status quo of the fossil fuel industry. The general argument is that our entire economic world will take a hit if we use solar as it is so much more expensive that oil.

There was a recent news story here at ScientificBlogging saying that it will take another ten years for solar energy to be price-competitive with fossil fuels. That may or may not turn out to be true. What is clear is that we must support innovation on all fronts to shorten that time line. At the same time we must support all efforts to make the solar industry scalable.

Solar power today is in many ways like petroleum of the 19th century. How so? When petroleum was first extracted from the ground in 1861, it was much more expensive than the energy sources that were dominant, wood and coal. It was only when the market was scaled up that petroleum became price competitive. Sound familiar? That is exactly the situation today with solar and other alternative sources of energy.

Combustion without flames can be used to build much more efficient industrial gas turbines for power generation than are used in current models and produce almost no polluting emissions, say
Mohamed Sassi of The Petroleum Institute in Abu Dabi and colleagues Mohamed Hamdi and Hamaid Bentîcha, at the National School of Engineers of Monastir.

They explain that flameless combustion, or more precisely flameless oxidation (FLOX), has become a focus of industrial research. It has, they say, the potential to avoid one of the major noxious pollutants from gas turbines, NOx, or nitrogen oxides.

In flameless combustion, the oxidation of fuel occurs with a very limited oxygen supply at very high temperature. Spontaneous ignition occurs and progresses with no visible or audible signs of the flames usually associated with burning. The chemical reaction zone is quite diffuse, explains Sassi, and this leads to almost uniform heat release and a smooth temperature profile. All these factors could result in a much more efficient process as well as reducing emissions.

Chemists are describing development of a “revolutionary” process for converting plant sugars into hydrogen, which could be used to cheaply and efficiently power vehicles equipped with hydrogen fuel cells without producing any pollutants.

The process involves combining plant sugars, water, and a cocktail of powerful enzymes to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide under mild reaction conditions. They say it is the world’s most efficient method for producing hydrogen.

The new system helps solve the three major technical barriers to the so-called “hydrogen economy,” researchers said. Those roadblocks involve how to produce low-cost sustainable hydrogen, how to store hydrogen, and how to distribute it efficiently, the researchers say.
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“This is revolutionary work,” says lead researcher Y.-H. Percival Zhang, Ph.D., a biochemical engineer at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. “This has opened up a whole new direction in hydrogen research. With technology improvement, sugar-powered vehicles could come true eventually.”

While recognized a clean, sustainable alternative to fossil fuels, hydrogen production is expensive and inefficient. Most traditional commercial production methods rely on fossil fuels, such as natural gas, while innovations like microbial fuel cells still yield low levels of hydrogen. Researchers worldwide thus are urgently looking for better way to produce the gas from renewable resources.