Abstract
Energy is one of the world' s largest markets, but the demand is forecast to
far exceed the available supply from current resources. In addition, the use
of energy from non-renewable sources is the major contribution to the emission
of greenhouse gases leading to increasing concern over climate change.
Therefore, both the industry and governments are eagerly searching for new
energy solutions, which will both address this growing supply gap and from
industry' s point of view, turn a profit. Renewable energy resources are needed
to maintain the world' s energy supply to slow the depletion of fossil reserves
and reduce global carbon emissions.
Sustainable energy has long been a dream and nanotechnologies have long been
seen as a technology with the potential to reduce greenhouse emissions, but to
date this has not been quantified. Many of the initial ideas were based around
replacing current manufacturing techniques with bottom up technologies,
whether assembling items atom by atom as proposed by Eric Drexler, or by
attempting to understand how nature assembles useful devices from the bottom
up and mimic or control these techniques.
While bottom up engineering remains a topic of much research, many of these
applications of nanotechnologies are still at an early stage, and there is
general agreement that breakthroughs are still ten to fifteen years in the
future. These breakthroughs will not only help improve current energy
technologies but also open up many possibilities for new energy technologies
to power the future world.
This report examines how nanotechnologies are contributing to sustainable
energy, and quantifies the near term impact in terms of carbon dioxide
emissions.
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