Bill Gates fund supports methanol as Green Fuel

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What's on today:

• Bill gates' fund supports methanol as green fuel

• Meme: The big fan

• A city in the Netherlands is banning meat ads to fight climate change

• Stat of the week

• Quick bites

Bill Gates' fund supports methanol as Green Fuel

Blue World Technologies has raised $36.9million US dollars from investors, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures which is backed by Bill Gates, to help it scale up production of a new system that could power large ships using methanol.

Usually, when trying to use methanol as fuel, you pass it through a device known as a reformer to extract the hydrogen, which is then consumed via the fuel cell. However, Blue World Technologies has created a high-temperature fuel cell that is able to take a mixture of gases directly from the reformer — including small amounts of carbon monoxide that would not be possible in a regular commercial cell.

The only waste products from doing it this way would be water and carbon dioxide and these can be compressed, stored, and later combined with hydrogen again to make more methanol.

Overall, this is a much cleaner and more efficient way to use methanol in fuel.

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Meme of the week

A city in the Netherlands is banning meat ads to fight climate change

Haarlem is a Dutch city on the outskirts of the Netherlands' capital city of Amsterdam, and the local council has banned advertisements of meat to its population of 160,000. However, Haarlem is still discussing whether they will ban advertisements only for meat that comes from industrial farming or include sustainably sourced meat as well.

Advertisements will not be allowed in public places controlled by the government such as train stations and bus stops.

It is believed to be the first such move by a city. The council has announced they will start to enforce the ban in 2024.

news source

Stat of the week

Can you believe that so far this year, over 1.4 Billion tons of waste have been dumped globally?

Quick bites

• Chinese investments are helping Zimbabwe play a bigger role in the renewable energy sector, because of these investments Zimbabwe is now opening up a Lithium mine, set to start exporting next year.

• GE Renewable Energy has secured a contract from Green Power Investment (GPI) to supply wind turbines for its Fukaura wind farm in Aomori, Japan.

• Conrad Energy, one of the UK’s power producers, has secured consent for a 50MW two-hour battery energy storage system in Somerset, England. This will be Conrad Energy's largest battery storage project to date.

• Suzlon Group, an Indian renewable energy solutions provider, has secured a new order for 86 turbines from Sembcorp's renewables subsidiary Green Infra Wind Energy Limited.