Energy is a concern for planet Earth in many ways. We live in an an increasingly energy hungry world, with increased development in many parts of the world. There are huge concerns surrounding the amount of pollution that is currently emitted by fossil fuel sources, and the dangers of nuclear power plants. Many countries are moving to transition to renewable sources of fuel because of these concerns. However it is hard abandon fossil fuels significantly when the main alternatives, solar and wind, struggle to keep up with energy demand, especially without sufficiently developed energy storage technology.
So is there a better way? Could a more promising solution be on the horizon that could help meet our energy needs in the near future? Well perhaps.
For people interested in an energy source that is clean, energy dense, efficient, and can be created in vast quantities from tiny amounts of inexpensive raw materials, then it might be worthwhile taking a look at the E-Cat QX, an invention of Italian inventor Andrea Rossi, which is to be introduced to the world in a public demonstration on November 24, 2017.
The E-Cat is based on the principle of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) which is a field that has been the realm of a relatively few dedicated researchers since the days that Pons and Fleischmann first came out and claimed to have achieved what was then termed “cold fusion”. At the time their claim was very controversial and they were ultimately shunned by the scientific community when some scientists trying to replicate their work were unsuccessful (others were successful), concluding that cold fusion was “junk science.”
Following the Pons and Fleischmann announcement, Andrea Rossi began working on developing a LENR device in the early 1990s, and in a January 2011 press conference in Bologna, Italy he, along with retired University of Bologna physicist Dr. Sergio Focardo, introduced an early prototype of a device they called the “Energy Catalyzer” or E-Cat.
Perhaps the most important thing about the E-Cat, if claims made about it over the years are valid, is its ability to generate more energy than it consumes. The ratio of input energy to output energy is known as Coeficcient of Performance (COP)
Patent disclosures indicate that the fuel for the E-Cat is hydrogen, nickel, lithium and aluminum. Rossi has claimed that these are consumed in minute quantities, so that one charge of an e-cat unit, consisting of just grams of fuel can last for around a year of continuous operation in the killowatt range of power output. Andrea Rossi carried out a year-long test of a heat producing plant rated at 1 megawatt from 2015-2016 which was certified in a report to produce around 80 times more energy than it consumed.
There have been a lot of different iterations of the E-Cat since this first demonstration, as Rossi and his colleagues have gone through the R&D process, and he seems to have now settled on a version he calls the E-Cat QX as one that will be reliable enough to be commercially viable. The E-Cat QX is a small E-Cat, rated at around 20 W, designed to be grouped with other reactors in order to produce power at the desired output.
It is the QX device that Rossi will be demonstrating in a public presentation to take place on November 24, 2017. The event will be video streamed to the world and will be available for viewing at the website or Rossi’s Leonardo Corporation, ecat.com starting around 12 noon US Eastern time.
The goal of this demonstration is apparently to show an E-Cat QX reactor (or reactors) in action, which will involve showing how much energy it can produce, and how much it consumes in the process. If the E-Cat really does put out more energy than it consumes this really would be a big deal, as this is not possible in any known chemical reaction (such as combustion of fuel).
At this point we don’t know quite what to expect from this presentation. We don’t know what protocols will be used, nor what the results will be. There will be much scrutiny of the demonstration by observers trying to determine whether the reported results are real, or if some kind of trickery is being employed. If the measurement systems are transparent, and the results show that the E-Cat is able to successfully produce significantly more energy than it consumes, it will help confirm that the E-Cat really is a very big deal.
