The Oil Drum

Apologies for the delay, but dinner with Stuart Staniford (great guy!) took up most of Thursday evening and there's little power and even less connectivity in Yosemite.  (Great waterfalls and cool geology and other stuff, though.)  Now that I'm landed in Kansas with a bit of connectivity for a couple days, I can give you more of what I saw!

8:30:  Lawrence DuBois

The first session I caught was with Lawrence DuBois of SRI International.  SRI is a contract R&D organization which has its fingers in many pies.  This gives them a great deal of expertise in many areas, some of which are applicable to energy.

DuBois noted that alternative energy systems use massive amounts of materials compared to at least some conventional systems (gravity dams excepted, I suppose).  He cited some numbers I didn't write down fast enough.  He then went on to other developments.

The first one he mentioned was... a Direct Carbon Fuel Cell (DCFC)!  I was rather surprised to hear SRI claiming credit for this, but this matter was clarified later.  The attraction of the DCFC is that the coal market has very different dynamics from oil and gas, and coal is still a great deal cheaper per BTU than the others.  Coal is still a major energy source (as little as some of us like it) and forms a $150 billion/year market (I believe this is world-wide).