Fuel cells use the chemical energy of fuel to generate electricity without combustion.
Sasol also turns out polypropylene, ammonias, PVC--over 200 fuel and chemical products in all.
Professor North says recycling CO2 may be more vital for the chemical industries than for fuel production.
In September 2011, fuel and chemical Group Ultra, holding that controls gas stations in Brazil, launched the energy drink Mood, which is commercialized in about 1000 stores near gas stations around the country.
If only some way can be found to transport and store hydrogen, the fuel cell has two powerful things going for it: It doesn't pollute and it converts 55% of the chemical energy in the fuel into useful work.
So not only are we facing a fuel crisis but the entire chemical industry is likely to cease to exist.
Only last week, Ukrainian customs officials seized a Russian cargo ship bound for Libya and carrying a multilaterally-controlled chemical used in the production of rocket fuel.
The gas is then fed into a stack of solid oxide fuel cells, where a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen occurs, producing electricity, water vapor and a tiny amount of carbon dioxide.
Every fuel cell, which generates electricity by a chemical reaction (as opposed to combustion), has an electrolyte.
Thus far the star of this new science has been ethanol, a car fuel made from corn, but around the world chemical, grain and biotech companies are working to produce auto paint, cosmetics, even apparel fiber from renewable resources.
The most promising breakthrough in portable chargers is the use of fuel cells, a technology that creates a current from a chemical reaction.
The question is when storing of electricity in batteries or a fuel cell feedstock will become more eonomicial than burning a form of chemical energy to gain mechanical power.
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Last year, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs decided that the link between air-borne dioxin (an ingredient in Agent Orange, and also a common air-borne pollutant emitted by waste incineration, some chemical manufacturing processes, cars and trucks, and other industrial sources that burn fuel) and diabetes was so strong, it compensated 270, 000 veterans for diabetes linked to dioxin exposure.
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Illinois-based company Renew Power has said it has already come up with a fuel cell compatible with mobile phones, by using formic acid, the chemical sprayed by black ants on the attack.
The Anthropocene's equivalent of iridium is nitrogen - although there will be other candidates (such as heavy metals, and carbon isotope ratios characteristic of fossil fuel emissions) for geochemists of the far future to identify as the chemical signature of the new epoch's dawn.
Chemical and fertilizer manufacturers like Dow and Potash, for example, use gas as a fuel and a feedstock.
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