By Caroline
Valetkevitch
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Global stock indexes eased and
the dollar rose on Friday amid continued concerns over the timing of more U.S.
economic stimulus.
The S&P
500 and Nasdaq ended lower, while the Dow closed up slightly. All three indexes
registered declines for the week.
Rising coronavirus
deaths are causing fresh business restrictions in many U.S. states and
increasing layoffs, making investors anxious to hear whether more fiscal relief
is coming.
House of
Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday raised the possibility of
stimulus negotiations dragging on through Christmas.
“Investors
are wondering what is it that Congress needs to hear before they decide to act
... their focus is more on politics than it is on the American economy,” said
CFRA Chief Investment Strategist Sam Stovall.
The U.S.
Food and Drug Administration is expected to issue an emergency use
authorization for Pfizer Inc’s COVID-19 vaccine later in the day, the New York
Times reported.
The Dow
Jones Industrial Average rose 47.11 points, or 0.16%, to 30,046.37, the S&P
500 lost 4.64 points, or 0.13%, to 3,663.46 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped
27.94 points, or 0.23%, to 12,377.87.
The
pan-European STOXX 600 index closed down 0.8% and MSCI’s gauge of stocks across
the globe shed 0.19%. The MSCI index also was down for the week.
Still,
recent U.S. initial public offerings suggested investors were generally upbeat
on equities, even as jobs data pointed to U.S. economic weakness.
More
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-global-markets/stocks-slip-dollar-gains-as-concerns-remain-over-stimulus-talks-idUKKBN28K3FK
Next,
more follow up to last week’s energy update. Below, the rush towards “green”
hydrogen. Read last weeks Special Update for why this is probably a gigantic generational
mistake.
Big energy partners join
Shell's giant NortH2 wind-to-hydrogen project December 8, 2020
Oil giant Shell is planning the biggest wind-to-hydrogen
project in Europe, a colossal 10-gigawatt offshore wind farm in the North Sea
feeding a massive electrolysis plant on dry land that'll pump out a million
tonnes of clean H2 a year by 2040.
The NortH2 project will be located on the North coast of
the Netherlands, and by the time it reaches that kind of output, it'll be
reducing emissions by the same amount as shutting down every combustion vehicle
in Norway.
Started in conjunction with Dutch natural gas company
Gasunie and Groningen Seaports, it will eventually dwarf the 3.6-gigawatt Dogger Bank offshore wind generation project
Gasunie's existing natural gas pipeline infrastructure will
come in very handy. It'll allow large-scale transport and storage of the
hydrogen produced, which will primarily feed industrial clusters in the
Netherlands and Germany, with smaller amounts going to transport, mobility and
domestic uses.
The NortH2 project aims to place a
huge 10-GW offshore wind facility in the North Sea, feeding an electrolysis
plant that will send clean hydrogen out through the Netherlands and Germany
NortH2
Norwegian
oil and gas company Equinor, as well as German-headquartered multinational
energy company RWE, have now joined the project, a huge decarbonization push
that aims to displace dirty coal- and gas-based hydrogen production and make a
big contribution to the European Union's climate targets for 2030 and beyond.
More
https://newatlas.com/energy/north2-project-wind-hydrogen-europe/
Driving the Hydrogen Industry
Forward with Safer and Cleaner Storage Solutions By Kerry Taylor-Smith, B.Sc. (Hons)
Hydrogen was the first element created after the
Big Bang and remains the most abundant in the Universe, accounting for around
88.6% of its composition by weight. The gas is the richest energy source for
stars like the Sun and holds great promise as a fuel here on Earth. However, it
isn’t readily available in pure form, preferring to form compounds with
non-metallic elements.
Consequently, hydrogen must be extracted from water or organic
compounds and stored. However, there are issues concerning both hydrogen’s
production and storage, which have prevented it from becoming the mainstream
fuel it has the potential to be.
Production, Storage and Safety Steam reforming from natural gas is by far the most common
method of producing hydrogen, but electrolysis is perhaps the most widely-known
despite only accounting for around 5% of all global hydrogen production. The
process requires energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen; this often
comes from fossil fuels, which are dirty and polluting. The use of biomass,
non-food crops and renewable energies, however, is ever-increasing, cleaning up
the process.
Once produced, hydrogen gas needs to be stored. The most
important tried-and-tested methods include physical storage approaches based on
compression or cooling, or a hybrid of the two. However, compression of
hydrogen into high-pressure storage is an energy-intensive process and
increases the cost.
And like any other fuel, hydrogen is a hazardous substance
with a wide range of flammable concentrations in air and a low ignition energy.
However, it is non-toxic and dissipates quickly when released, allowing for
rapid dispersal of fuel and less chance of fire than conventional fuels.
New Storage Options for
Transport Hydrogen boasts the highest energy content of any common
fuel by weight; it’s a highly efficient and low polluting fuel that could find
use in transport, heating and power generation. However, current methods of
storing hydrogen are costly and space-consuming.
Academics from the School of Built Environment and
Architecture at London South Bank University (LSBU) are developing a new way to
store hydrogen for use as fuel on buses, shrinking the large high-pressure
cylinders currently used.
“Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles produce very
low carbon emissions and no air pollution, which makes them vital to cleaning
our air and tackling climate change,” said
Professor Yunting Ge, LSBU Professor of Building Services Engineering. “But important concerns have been raised about the size, cost
and safety of hydrogen storage in buses.”
“Our LSBU project aims to develop a safer
and cheaper way of storing hydrogen, which takes up less space than the large
high-pressure hydrogen tanks that are used in buses today.”
The ground-breaking project will investigate using a
hydride to absorb, release and store hydrogen and aims to improve safety by
storing hydrogen at lower pressure in smaller cylinders.
Of the three types of hydride (ionic, covalent and interstitial),
the researchers are focussing on a metal hydride in which the hydrogen atoms
form interstitial compounds with the metal. Molecular hydrogen is first
adsorbed on the metal surface before being incorporated in its elemental form
into the metallic lattice. Mechanical or thermal processing causes the hydrogen
to be released by degassing.
More
https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1160
Coalition Aims for 25GW of
Green Hydrogen by 2026 Seven firms join forces for
fiftyfold scale-up of global hydrogen production capacity. Jason Deign December 08, 2020
The soaring hype surrounding green hydrogen
ACWA Power, CWP Renewables, Envision, Iberdrola, Ørsted,
Snam and Yara launched a coalition called the Green Hydrogen Catapult
The coalition, which is linked to the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Race to Zero campaign, is also hoping
to halve the cost of green hydrogen production, cutting it to less than $2 per
kilogram.
A January 2020 report press release
These sectors could include steel and fertilizer
production, power generation and long-range shipping, the coalition said. Green
hydrogen could supply up to 25 percent of global energy needs by 2050, it
added.
The coalition also cited Goldman Sachs research
More
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/coalition-aims-for-25-gw-of-green-hydrogen-by-2026
5 New Battery Technologies
That Could CHANGE EVERYTHING https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOBBwx3Cbbk
Supercapacitors explained -
the future of energy storage? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7T-6XdiRTw
If times have been so
good, why do we feel so bad
Paper Money, “Adam Smith” aka George Goodman.
Covid-19 Corner This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
U.S. FDA authorizes Pfizer
COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use December 12, 2020 2:34 AM
(Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it
authorized the use of Pfizer Inc’s COVID-19 vaccine on Friday, with the first
inoculations expected within days, marking a turning point in the United States
where the pandemic has killed more than 295,000 people.
The FDA granted
an emergency use authorization for the vaccine, developed with German partner
BioNTech, which was shown to be 95% effective in preventing the disease in a
late-stage trial. It said the vaccine can be given to people aged 16 and older.
Healthcare
workers and elderly people in long-term care facilities are expected to be the
main recipients of a first round of 2.9 million doses.
Cases are
surging in the United States, with thousands of death per day, while hospital
intensive care units across the country are nearing capacity, threatening to
overwhelm healthcare systems.
The timing
gives the authorization “huge importance”, BioNTech Chief Executive Ugur Sahin
said in an interview.
U.S. health
authorities, shipping services and hospitals stood ready to begin a nationwide
inoculation campaign. State public health systems have been planning to begin
shots as early as Monday.
More
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-vaccines-pfizer/u-s-fda-authorizes-pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-for-emergency-use-idUKKBN28M03H?il=0
‘95% Effective’ May Not Mean
What You Think It Means Posted on December 10, 2020
by Yves
Smith
Yves here. It’s good to see Tom Neuburger discussing a
possible misperception by some of what the “95% effective” Covid mRNA vaccine
results touted by Pfizer and Moderna mean, when they are on the verge of
receiving an FDA Emergency Use Authorization to allow their release.
While we have your attention, we’ll point out another
misperception, which the press is amplifying, that having been vaccinated would
prevent the recipient from transmitting Covid. For instance, some business
owners are saying they will require employees to be vaccinated, not because
they are concerned about worker safety, but because they intend to market their
venue as safe for customers by virtue of having vaccinated staff.
At this point, the effect of any of the Covid vaccines on
disease transmission is a known unknown. From Wired in late November :
The problem is, a Covid-19 vaccine that only prevents
illness—which is to say, symptoms—might not prevent infection with the virus or
transmission of it to other people. Worst case, a vaccinated person could still
be an asymptomatic carrier. That could be bad.
The article further points out that so far, only the
Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has evidence that it reduces transmission, as
opposed to protecting recipients of the disease.
A more technical explanation from The Lancet , in September:
Multiple COVID-19 vaccines are currently in phase 3 trials
with efficacy assessed as prevention of virologically confirmed disease. WHO
recommends that successful vaccines should show disease risk reduction of at
least 50%, with 95% CI that true vaccine efficacy exceeds 30%. However, the
impact of these COVID-19 vaccines on infection and thus transmission is not
being assessed. Even if vaccines were able to confer protection from disease,
they might not reduce transmission similarly.
Challenge studies in vaccinated primates showed reductions
in pathology, symptoms, and viral load in the lower respiratory tract, but
failed to elicit sterilising immunity in the upper airways. Sterilising
immunity in the upper airways has been claimed for one vaccine, but
peer-reviewed publication of these data are awaited.
More
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/12/95-effective-may-not-mean-what-you-think-it-means.html
Covid Vaccine Setbacks Temper
Optimism After Upbeat News By Tim
Loh Suzi
Ring
December 11, 2020, 6:16 AM GMT Updated on December 11,
2020, 11:16 AM GMT
·
·
Vaccine makers, including two of the biggest in the world,
suffered setbacks in the push to get more Covid-19 shots across the line,
tempering a run of positive news.
Sanofi GlaxoSmithKline
Plc
Sanofi and its U.K. partner will begin a new second-phase
study with a more concentrated antigen in February after they said
The delay underscores the difficulties and uncertainties
companies face in developing shots against a disease that’s already claimed
more than 1.5 million lives. It’s also a blow for governments that were
counting on supplies from the two vaccine giants amid expectations the world
will need multiple inoculations to stop the spread of the pathogen.
Australia meanwhile canceled
Pfizer, Moderna The announcements temper some of the optimism following
positive trial results from Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc. Another inoculation
from AstraZeneca Plc and the University of Oxford looks promising, too, despite
questions about its effectiveness in older adults. The U.K. and Canada have
already approved a shot from Pfizer and partner BioNTech SE that employs
messenger RNA technology, and the U.S. and Europe may do so soon. China and
Russia have already begun administering their own vaccinations.
Sanofi fell as much as 3.3% Friday in Paris, while Glaxo
was little changed in London.
The delay to the Sanofi-GSK vaccine means it may not reach
the market until the fourth quarter of 2021 rather than the middle of the year.
A study using an improved antigen mix, exposing monkeys to the virus, showed a
rapid clearance of the pathogen from the nose and lungs.
The companies are planning a new trial that could include a
head-to-head comparison with an approved Covid-19 vaccine to speed research.
The companies haven’t disclosed how many people will be included.
Advanced-stage tests could start in the second quarter of next year.
Click here for Bloomberg’s global vaccine
tracker
This particular candidate relies on recombinant DNA
technology Sanofi uses to make influenza shots, along with Glaxo’s adjuvants,
which enhance the body’s immune response. The companies previously said they
expected to produce as many as 1 billion doses in 2021. Sanofi has another mRNA
shot for Covid in development and GSK is involved in a handful of other
collaborations for Covid.
The recombinant DNA approach received approval in the U.S.
for combating the flu in
2013.
What Bloomberg Intelligence
Says “This development may increase the odds of an approval for
AstraZeneca’s vaccine despite unanswered questions over its trial and data.”
-- Sam
Fazeli
The delay highlights the challenges a number of second
generation Covid-19 vaccines
The biggest orders for the vaccine include the European
Union, which has agreed to buy 300 million doses, and the U.S., which is
purchasing 100 million with an option for more. Sanofi and GSK have intended to
provide 200 million doses of their vaccine to the Covax program, which is aimed
at distributing shots equitably all over the world.
Glaxo is also developing vaccines with Sichuan
Clover Biopharmaceuticals Inc. reported
last week Medicago Inc.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-11/sanofi-gsk-delay-covid-vaccine-after-elderly-get-little-boost?srnd=premium-europe
Why the Most Promising
Covid-19 Vaccines Require Super-Cold Storage Both Moderna and Pfizer’s
vaccines contain mRNA, which must be stored in frigid conditions By Theresa
Machemer smithsonianmag.com
November 18, 2020
----Everything happens more slowly as you lower the
temperature," says Margaret Liu, a vaccine researcher and the chair of the
board of the International Society for Vaccines, to NPR
Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines use a short snippet of mRNA
with the same code as RNA from SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes
Covid-19. This mRNA is sort of like a blueprint: human cells can use the code
to create a small piece of the virus, almost like a viral Lego brick. The
"brick" isn't enough to cause harm like a whole virus would, but it
is enough for the immune system to learn how to recognize that brick and mount
an immune response to fight off future infections.
Early results from Phase III trials show that both Pfizer/BioNTech Moderna
More
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-do-mrna-vaccines-need-cold-storage-180976330/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20201211-daily-responsive&spMailingID=44087207&spUserID=NjUwNDIzNTUzNDE0S0&spJobID=1901034091&spReportId=MTkwMTAzNDA5MQS2
Next, some very useful vaccine
links kindly sent along from a LIR reader in Canada. The links come from a most
informative update from Stanford Hospital in California.
World Health Organization -
Landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines . https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines
NY Times Coronavirus Vaccine
Tracker . https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html
Stanford Website . https://racetoacure.stanford.edu/clinical-trials/132
FDA information . https://www.fda.gov/media/139638/download
Regulatory Focus COVID-19
vaccine tracker . https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker
Some more useful Covid links.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus
resource centre
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Rt Covid-19
https://rt.live/
Covid19info.live
https://wuflu.live/
The Spectator
https://data.spectator.co.uk/city/national
Winter
Watch.
The Arctic winter sea-ice expansion and
northern hemisphere snow cover. From around mid-October, the northern
hemisphere snow cover usually rapidly expands, while the Arctic ice gradually
expands back towards its winter maximum.
Update: we seem to have started new sunspot cycle 25 this month,
though it’s unlikely to affect 2020-2021s coming winter.
Northern Eur-Asia turned snowy fast in
mid-October. The Arctic sea ice
expansion was slow, and from a very low level at the end of September, but with
the vastly expanded snow cover, sea ice formation sped up.
The Laptev Sea ice was back to normal
at the end of November. But the failure
of the Kara Sea ice to return to normal, leads me to bet on a warmer western
European winter ahead.
US National Ice
Center.
https://www.natice.noaa.gov
https://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims/ims_gif/DATA/cursnow_asiaeurope.gif
Technology Update.
With events happening fast in the development of solar power and
graphene, I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported. Is converting
sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC energy mankind’s future from the 21st
century onwards.
New method quickly converts natural
gas into solid form for storage Engineers at the National University of Singapore (NUS)
have developed a new way to convert natural gas into a solid form, allowing it
to be stored and transported more safely and easily. The process can be done in
just 15 minutes using a low-toxicity mixture.
It may be a fossil fuel, but natural gas remains a key
energy source for now, and some argue it might help us bridge the gap towards
more renewable energy. It still has its problems though – the stuff can be
hazardous to store or transport, and it is often converted into liquid form to
make it easier to work with. However, that requires extremely cold temperatures
of around -162 °C (-260 °F).
An emerging method is to instead convert the gas into a
solid for easier transport and storage. In fact, nature already does this under
certain conditions, as molecules of natural gas can become trapped in “cages”
of water molecules, forming what are known as gas hydrates or combustible ice.
It’s far from a quick process though, taking upwards of millions of years.
Researchers have been trying to speed that up, and now the
NUS team claims the fastest conversion time on record. The key ingredient in
the new mixture is L-tryptophan, an amino acid that speeds up the reaction rate
and traps more of the gas into solid hydrates faster. Taking just 15 minutes,
the team says the new method is more than twice as fast as the current
standard.
“Our
breakthrough can really be put into perspective when you consider that it takes
millions and millions of years for gas hydrates to form in nature, yet with our
correct addition of secret ingredients to the system in small quantities, the
same process can be effected in the laboratory in a matter of minutes,” says
Gaurav Bhattacharjee, an author of the study.
The end
product is much more convenient and safer to store and transport. As a block of
ice it’s shrunk in volume by 90 times, and is non-explosive and stable enough
to be stored in a regular freezer at -5 °C (23 °F). The new method also
apparently requires less toxic additives than usual.
While it’s
so far only been tested in the lab, the researchers next plan to try a pilot
scale experiment, with the aim of converting around 100 kg (220 lb) of gas per
day. Eventually, they hope to scale it up for industrial use.
https://newatlas.com/energy/natural-gas-solid-form-storage/
This weekend’s musical diversion. George Frideric Handel - The
Arrival of the Queen of Sheba https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TGKJ9MgCOQ&feature=fvw
This weekend’s great chess game. 
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