Fuel

Hydrazine rocket fuel is highly toxic, carcinogenic and unstable, making it incredibly dangerous to work with. Scientists at McGill believe their new alternative, based on metal-organic frameworks, will lead to cleaner, safer, more controllable rockets.

​​Millions of metric tons of plastic are produced each year and in reality, very little of it is recycled. But what if there were more ways of turning this waste into something valuable, be it new plastics, hydrocarbons or different types of fuel?

Israeli-Australian company Electriq Global's new technology stabilizes hydrogen in a recyclable liquid that can be pumped and transported just like gasoline. That's huge, because it enables long-range electric driving with fast refueling – and it plugs right into the existing fuel logistics model.

​​Porsche has announced that it is turning its back on diesel-powered vehicles, instead choosing to shift its focus toward a cleaner energy future. The news comes three years after parent company Volkswagen admitting to using a defeat device to cheat emissions testing.

Direct air capture (DAC) systems have been discussed as a possibility for removing CO2 from the air, but until recently seemed too expensive. After running a pilot plant for three years, Carbon Engineering (CE) has broken down the costs of a DAC system and found how it can work.

Several experiments have shown that the EMDrive can generate thrust from basically nothing – in apparent violation of Newton’s Laws of Motion. Unfortunately, a German team has now built and tested their own EMDrive, and found that environmental factors may have been responsible for false positives.

Researchers at MIT have developed a new membrane-based system that can convert carbon dioxide emissions into useful alternate fuels. The process has been effectively demonstrated on a small-scale and the researchers hope to ultimately adapt the system to conventional fossil fuel-based power plants.

Finding a way to produce hydrogen simply and cleanly would go a long way toward eventual use of the gas as a fuel source. And that's exactly what researchers at the University of Cambridge (UC) have done, adding to a host of other green possibilities that have been proposed for creating the gas.

The humble leaf, which collects sunlight and uses that energy to turn carbon dioxide into fuel for the plant, has inspired scientists. Researchers have developed a molecule that uses sunlight to convert the problematic carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, which can then be stored as a fuel source.

A transportable chemical reactor​ developed at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and spinoff company Ineratec that uses solar power to convert CO2 from the air and regenerative hydrogen from electrolysis into liquid fuels will be tested in a pilot plant.

Using genetic engineering, researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) have modified algae to boost its hydrogen production by 400 percent. This could lead to algae being used to mass-produce hydrogen on an industrial scale.

Part of what you buy with a Bentley is a sense of exclusivity, but that can quickly evaporate with having to queue for gas like everyone else. The British marque is now trialing a new "concierge fuel service" where drivers can choose exactly where and when their vehicle is refueled.