EES Blog

Welcome to the first issue of Energy & Environmental Science in 2011.

Please take a look at our New Year Editorial in this issue, which evaluates the progress the journal has made since launch, and looks forward to new developments over the year ahead.

We hope you enjoy reading all of the excellent articles in this issue, some highlights include:

Analysis article
Ionic liquids in the biorefinery: a critical assessment of their potential
Annegret Stark
Energy Environ. Sci., 2011, 4, 19

Perspective
Catalytic routes for the conversion of biomass into liquid hydrocarbon transportation fuels
Juan Carlos Serrano-Ruiz and James A. Dumesic
Energy Environ. Sci., 2011, 4, 83

Research paper
Increasing the efficiency of zinc-phthalocyanine based solar cells through modification of the anchoring ligand
Miguel García-Iglesias, Juan-José Cid, Jun-Ho Yum, Amparo Forneli, Purificación Vázquez, Mohammad K. Nazeeruddin, Emilio Palomares, Michael Grätzel and Tomás Torres
Energy Environ. Sci., 2011, 4, 189

And much, much more!!

We invite you to submit some of your best work for publication in Energy & Environmental Science in the coming year.

Energy & Environmental Science issue 12 covers:

Outside front cover

Commercially viable porphyrinoid dyes for solar cells
Ivana Radivojevic, Alessandro Varotto, Christopher Farley and Charles Michael Drain
Energy Environ. Sci., 2010, 3, 1897-1909

The commercialization of solar cells using organic dyes will depend on self-organization, new modes of binding to surfaces, and dye systems that can be synthesized economically on a large scale.

Inside front cover

Separator-free fuel cell stacks operating in a mixture of hydrogen and air
Masahiro Nagao, Motohiro Takahashi and Takashi Hibino
Energy Environ. Sci., 2010, 3, 1934-1940

The separator-free fuel cell stack shows high potential for a significant reduction of the cost of fuel cell systems.

Polymer coated nanoparticles could be used to detect unrecovered oil in mature oil fields, say US scientists.

With estimates that only ~60% of oil has been recovered from established oil fields, it seems that there’s an untapped source waiting to be discovered. With this in mind, James Tour and his colleagues from Rice University, Texas, and Nankai University, China, have designed nanoparticles to detect crude oil hydrocarbons in rocks in the fields.

The nanoparticles consist of oxidised carbon cores surrounded by polyvinyl alcohol shells that can transport hydrophobic, or water repellent, compounds called nanoreporters through the rocks. ‘It was truly exciting to see that we could build nanoreporters that will migrate through oil-field stone,’ says Tour. The nanoparticles release their cargo when they come into contact with rocks containing oil, which can be seen when they are recovered.

‘We know that there’s a large volume of residual oil down there, but we don’t know exactly where it is,’ says Bob McNeil, fossil fuels specialist from the oil operator sector. ‘If we had that information, we could start to design smart enhanced oil recovery procedures targeting that oil.’

Emma Shiells

Read the full Chemistry World article…

Link to journal article
Engineered nanoparticles for hydrocarbon detection in oil-field rocks
Jacob M. Berlin, Jie Yu, Wei Lu, Erin E. Walsh, Lunliang Zhang, Ping Zhang, Wei Chen, Amy T. Kan, Michael S. Wong, Mason B. Tomson and James M. Tour, Energy Environ. Sci., 2011
DOI: 10.1039/c0ee00237b