MIT Energy Conference!

This is the week of the MIT Energy Conference, the largest student run energy conference in the world! It is scheduled for this Friday and Saturday, the 6th and 7th of March. And what an exciting week this has been! I am so looking forward to the weekend for the guests and panelists present a mouthwatering prospect. For people who want to learn more about this AWESOME conference, here is the link:

http://www.mitenergyconference.com/index.htm

As this is my blog, and I am allowed some shameless publicity here, I put together a completely new idea for the conference, the idea of a workshop. So, the day of Friday is a day of workshops, and my workshop is one of those. Details of the same can be found at:

http://www.mitenergyconference.com/workshop.htm

And if you scroll down to the last on this page, you shall see the workshop that I am organizing tomorrow. So much for my contribution to the MIT Energy Conference.

I shall take this opportunity to describe something about my research area, here at MIT, and the topic of the workshop tomorrow. This area, or technology, is called Air Capture, which quite logically stands for capture of CO2 directly from the air. This is one of the most exciting next generation CCS technologies out there and a topic of intensive research. Its USP lies in the fact that its a cheap way to mitigate the emissions of the distributed sources, like cars, planes and human beings. One can understand point sources, the thermal power plants etc., being tackled by the conventional CCS technology but we cannot install this in all the cars on the road. This is where Air Capture provides a very viable option of mitigation.

There are several drawbacks of this process too, and I shall not go into the specifics of it lest this blog starts resembling the research paper I am writing:) Suffice to say that there are promoters and critics of this technology in equal measure out there.

This is all for today, I am sure I will be posting something shortly after the conference for I will be brimming with knowledge and itching to share them with you. Hence, I shall save you the 'pain and suffering' of reading my blog twice weekly:) Enjoy the weekend!

Plagiarized by The New York Times!

This is an untimely post but was necessitated by an untoward incident. The New York Times, in retaliation to me stealing their editorial title few days back, has plain lifted the ideas I presented in my last post in their front page article today!!:) Here's the complete article and you can judge for yourself:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/science/earth/01treaty.html?_r=1&hp

I would also post another green, or yellow, energy article that I read this week. Quite an interesting read it was. A caveat though, its only for the avowed supporters of green:)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/opinion/27george.html?scp=1&sq=yellow%20is%20the%20new%20green&st=cse

Happy Reading!