Thursday, January 20, 2005

New Engine Promises More Efficient Gas Liquefaction

Maybe not quite so new, but I picked this one up in the peakoil.com forums: a Lawrence Livermore Labs webpage describing a more efficient acoustic Stirling cycle engine that can make liquefaction of natural gas economical. A more complete description can be found in this PDF document; a 2002 Praxair press release announcing a Department of Commerce grant (why are they getting Federal money if this is such a great idea?) can be found here. If they're on schedule, a working system should be coming online this year.

According to the PDF above, this technology could be used to generate electricity in residential cogeneration. Hmm...