[eclipse]

My quick summary of the 3 links below:
* Boron can be a metal powder or pellet. It only burns in a very high-oxygen environment, and so oxygen tanks or miniaturised concentrators would be attached to car engines.
* With oxygen, boron is 4 times as energy dense as gasoline . It “takes a quart of boron to match the energy in a gallon of gasoline.” (Dr James Hansen, below).
* Without concentrated oxygen, boron is safe and inert to store for years, and does not corrode storage tanks or leak like hydrogen does.
* Boron is an effective energy carrier, not an energy source. Nuclear power would be the energy source that drove the ‘boron economy’.
* Boron can be recycled by melting it down and stripping the rust off. (Suburbs around a really large boron recycling plant might notice very fresh air as all the oxygen is stripped off the boron molecules!)
* Nuclear power could provide all the primary energy to recycle boron so it can be burned again and again. Your first ‘tank’ of boron would cost around a few hundred dollars, but after recycling it for a few months it will pay for itself.
* Unlike hydrogen, boron will not leak out into the atmosphere or explode.
* Boron solves the chicken and egg problem of a hydrogen economy. All it takes is one boron recycling centre in the country, and then people can mail used boron to it for recycling. It is so safe and cheap to mail that even with the cost of mail and recycling, it would still be cheaper than oil.
* Initially you would buy 2 or 3 tanks worth of boron, and then just recycle those forever.
* Eventually as the boron economy grew you would swap old for new at your local garage or shops.
* Boron is inert and only burns in a high oxygen environment. This means it is safe to store for years.
* Your car could operate as a backup power station during blackouts. This is not that big a deal here in Australia but in North America could be the difference between life and death in a snowstorm. * Nuclear power and boron would solve energy security, climate change, air pollution and associated health costs, and deliver clean driving in clean cities with a far safer fuel.


Boron to replace oil is discussed in Prescription for the Planet, a book Dr James Hansen recommends. See Chapter 5 “The fifth element” on page 155.
http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/prescr ... lanet.html

James Hansen has summarised it here. (Page
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/ ... Report.pdf

More technical specifications by Graham Cowan, who calls them ‘ash ingots’ or pellets
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/235_248.pdf

[ROCKMAN]

FYI - As a resource naturally occurring minerals containing boron is essentially similar to fossil fuel: there is a finite amount in the earth that was created millions of years ago. But as seen below we can mnmnake boron...just like we can make synthetic oil...if you can afford either of them:

"Boron is a chemical element with symbol B and atomic number 5. Produced entirely by cosmic ray spallation and supernovae and it is a low-abundance element in the Solar system and in the Earth's crust. Boron is concentrated on Earth by the water-solubility of its more common naturally occurring compounds, the borate minerals. These are mined industrially as evaporites, such as borax and kernite. The largest known boron deposits are in Turkey, the largest producer of boron minerals.

Elemental boron is a metalloid that is found in small amounts in meteoroids but chemically uncombined boron is not otherwise found naturally on Earth. Industrially, very pure boron is produced with difficulty because of refractory contamination by carbon or other elements. Several allotropes of boron exist: amorphous boron is a brown powder; crystalline boron is silvery to black, extremely hard. The primary use of elemental boron is as boron filaments with applications similar to carbon fibers in some high-strength materials."

And what does it cost to make elemental boron? From one source (http://www.rareearth.org/boron_properties.htm):

Crystalline boron (99%) costs about $5/g. Amorphous boron costs about $2/g.

I'll let someone else calculater the miles per gram.

[eclipse]

But once it's been obtained, it's in the recycle loop indefinitely.

[KaiserJeep]

I think boron is a promising energy storage medium for vehicles. It needs further R&D to complete the design of all the facets of the fuel, including expanded boron mining with boron-powered machinery, boron refining, boron engine designs, and boron recycling. Only then will we know how competitive boron fuels are with other alternatives.

These tasks are already complete for hydrogen fuels, an obvious boron competitor. If handling, storing, burning, and recycling boron is safer and cheaper than manufacturing, handling, and burning hydrogen in fuel cells, we should find that out.

The critical factor with either is how cheaply and quickly either tech could scale to replace tens of millions of barrels of gasoline and diesel, consumed every day. The infrastructure and the vehicle fleets are both involved in this comparison.

[Tanada]

Boron is also a fusion fuel material, bombard Boron-11 with Hydrogen-1 or Boron-10 with Hydrogen-2(Deuterium) and the result is energy plus three Helium-4 nuclei.

[KaiserJeep]

Boron is also a fusion fuel material, bombard Boron-11 with Hydrogen-1 or Boron-10 with Hydrogen-2(Deuterium) and the result is energy plus three Helium-4 nuclei.

True - except nobody has figured out how to get any useful energy out of a fusion reaction except for stars and H-bombs.

I would not assume fission power plants for reducing boron to metallic form either - I'd think a massive desert installation like the Tesla Gigafactory would be more likely. Although I'm a fan of nuclear power, even with fuel recycling we are talking about decades, not centuries of power.

[ROCKMAN]

e - "once it's been obtained, it's in the recycle loop indefinitely." First, you haven't put a price tag on that acquisition nor the cost of converting the US fleet or the boron fuel distribution system. Second, as far as recycling the CO2 from ICE's (as well as all other sources) can also be cycled...just takes some H and an insanely large sh*tload of capital. LOL.

So again it will be interesting to see what the cost per mile calculates out to be. Until we see those numbers it will remain just one more "interesting idea"...just like the hundreds of others we've seen that have to be implemented in scale.

[Cog]

What about the energy required to produce a tank of pure oxygen to burn the boron in?

I'm sensing another perpetual energy machine being discussed here.

[eclipse]

Not at all. Read the book Dr James Hansen recommends and you'd see that boron and the oxygen are both just energy carriers. The source is high EROEI nuclear, and eventually and especially super-high EROEI breeder reactors that feed of nuclear waste.

Read the book. It's free.
http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/prescr ... lanet.html

[sparky]

.
If one want to use metal oxidation as energy carrier , there is plenty to choose from ,
Aluminium , Iron , copper ... pretty much all Metals are suitable

there are whole libraries of safety regulation on handling finely powdered metals and dust ,no pure oxygen is required
for that matter ,the same explosive risks apply to grain elevator

........why not grain dust as a fuel ,

[eclipse]

I'm no chemist or physicist, but my understanding from the book is that the other metals have been tested and are simply not as energy dense.

[KaiserJeep]

Burning the fuel (oxidation) is just half the story when you are recycling the fuel. The other half the story is when one melts the metallic oxides and "reduces" them to metal form again, using electric currents or chemical catalysts.

Boron is a lightweight metal that melts at 3769 degrees F. That means that LOTS of energy can be recovered when you oxidize it. Compare it to aluminum, also fairly lightweight, but which has a lower melting point of 1221 degrees F. Burning aluminum releases a third the energy released by burning boron, from a metal that weighs more to begin with.

The differences have to do mainly with the strength of the valent bonds when the element is in solid form. At least, we think that is the reason, what I am discussing is the Valence Bond Theory of chemical bonding. The "other" theory of chemical bonding is called the Molecular Orbital Theory. Both theories are incomplete and/or imperfect, and are the result of attempting to apply Quantum Mechanics to chemical bonding. The "real" or complete theory to explain everything observed with chemical bonding has yet to be created.

Heck, it's Friday and I just flashed back to undergraduate Chemistry. That calls for a drink, I much prefer to think about Physics, as Chemistry has an unfortunate association with a lot of bad smells.

[sparky]

.
You ungrateful churl ,
physic is all about the first universal law , gravity ,
it is unnatural to stand , our natural state require us to lie flat
ethanol the darling child of chemistry help us to achieve this