Tag: pacific

Virgin Atlantic turned industrial waste into greener jet fuel

Illinois-based LanzaTech and Virgin Atlantic have been working on an alternative fuel source for Sir Richard Branson’s flagship airline since 2011. This week, the two companies announced a breakthrough that could drastically reduce the airline industry’s carbon emissions. LanzaTech has produced 1, 500 US gallons of jet fuel derived from the industrial gases given off by steel mills. The LanzaTech fuel was created by capturing these gases, which would have otherwise been dispersed into the atmosphere, and converting them to a low-carbon ethanol called “Lanzanol” through a fermentation process. As the New Zealand Herald reports , the Lanzanol was produced in China at the Roundtable of Sustainable Biomaterials-certified demonstration center in Shougang and then converted to jet fuel using a process developed alongside the Pacific Northwest National Lab and the US Department of Energy. While initial tests show the Lanzanol fuel could result is as much as 65 percent less carbon emission than conventional jet fuel, it will need to pass a few more tests before it can be used in an commercial setting. Still, Branson believes Virgin Atlantic could make a Lanzanol-powered “proving flight” as early as 2017. According to LanzaTech, the company could implement their technology at 65 percent of the world’s steel mills, allowing the company to produce 30 billion gallons of Lanzanol annually. That’s enough to create 15 billion gallons of cleaner-burning jet fuel and replace about one-fifth of all the aviation fuel used yearly worldwide. Source: Virgin , New Zealand Herald

View post:
Virgin Atlantic turned industrial waste into greener jet fuel

Russia’s Rogue Spacecraft Disintegrated Safely 

On April 27th, a Russian resupply ship to the ISS started spinning out of control shortly after reaching space. For more than a week, Progress 59 has been hurtling around the Earth in an increasingly unstable orbit, but tonight, it re-entered safely (and violently) over the Pacific Ocean. Read more…

Continued here:
Russia’s Rogue Spacecraft Disintegrated Safely 

U.S. Congressman Wants to Build a Bridge Out of Aircraft Carriers

Shortly after the invention of the airplane in the early 1900s, some military-minded maniac tried to launch one off of a ship. The experiment worked, and soon the American, British and Japanese navies began building aircraft carriers. Like all military craft, carriers have a shelf life. The supercarrier USS Kitty Hawk , for instance, was built in 1956 and decommissioned in 2009; the only reason she’s still floating is that the U.S. Navy is saving her as a backup until the USS Gerald Ford , another supercarrier, comes on-line in 2016. But a Washington-state Congressman, Rep. Jesse Young, has other plans for the Kitty Hawk , or any other carrier he can appropriate: He wants to turn them into a bridge. Congressman Young’s plan sounds completely crazy, but his idea is to connect the Washington municipalities of Bremerton and Port Orchard with a bridge made out of aircraft carriers. “I know that people from around the world would come to drive across the deck of an aircraft carrier bridge, number one, ” Young told the Pacific Northwest’s NW News Network . “Number two, it’s the right thing to do from my standpoint because this is giving a testimony and a legacy memorial to our greatest generation.” Although the rendering shows three carriers, Young believes the span across the Sinclair Inlet could be handled by two connected by a conventional span. He’s reportedly got his eye on the two carriers awaiting the scrap pile at Bremetron’s naval shipyard, the aforementioned Kitty Hawk and the USS Independence . While it’s presumably possible from an engineering standpoint—if a ship can launch an F-16, it can probably handle your average commuter’s Ford Taurus—it would of course require naval cooperation, and the U.S. Navy doesn’t seem interested. The Independence is scheduled to be scrapped later this year, they say, and the Kitty Hawk isn’t going anywhere until the Gerald Ford is ready to sail. Still, Congressman Young is undeterred, and is currently trying to push a $90, 000 feasibility study through the legislature. “That is the beautiful thing about opportunities, ” he told the NSNN . “No one ever says they’ll be easy, just that the greater the difficulty the greater the accomplishment.”

Read this article:
U.S. Congressman Wants to Build a Bridge Out of Aircraft Carriers