BELOW: ABSTRACTS

Preliminary Program for the New Energy World Symposium

Please note that this program is subject to change without notice.

Monday, June 18:

8.00 Registration, morning coffee & snacks

9.00 Introduction
Mats Lewan

9.30 LENR : potentially the dominant energy source of the 21st century, and beyond…
Joris van der Schot

10.15 Coffee break

11.00 New Fire implications for the world’s poor
Bob Greenyer

11.45 Commercializing Disruptive Energy Technologies
Jim Dunn

12.30 Lunch and networking

14.00 The Hydrogen Mine—a disruptive method for producing hydrogen while resolving aluminium recycling
Alan Smith

14.45 The African Energy Landscape and LENR: Opportunities and Challenges.
David Gwynne-Evans

15.30 Coffee break

16.15 The urgent need to communicate new technology and the terrible cost of failing to do so effectively
John Joss

16.35 Cocktails and refreshments

Tuesday, June 19:

8.00 Morning coffee & snacks

9.00 Introduction day 2
Mats Lewan

9.15 Keynote day 2: Investing, Working, Living, and Thriving in a Decentralized World
David Orban

10.00 Coffee break

10.45 Potentially Disruptive Impacts of Cold Fusion (LENR) As a New Energy Source – and How to Deal with Them
Thomas Grimshaw

11.30 E-Cat technology boosting financial decentralization
John Michell

12.15 Lunch and networking

13.45 LENR—the financial and economic implications
Steve Bannister

14.30 Engineering low-cost LENR systems (demo and Q&A)
Alan Smith

15.30 Coffee break

16.00 Panel discussion on energy disruption

16.30 LENR, space travel and Fermi’s paradox
David H Bailey

17.00 Cocktails and refreshments

Abstracts

LENR : potentially the dominant energy source of the 21st century, and beyond…
Joris van der Schot

We currently live on a Niagara of Oil; hydrocarbons are by and large the dominant energy source of our time, providing more than 90% of the world’s power. In the face of pressing environmental issues like climate change, society is directing significant efforts at replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy technologies such as solar and wind, which will effectively bring us back to being energy hunter-gatherers due to the extensive nature of the underlying resource. As a result, an energy transition based only on currently available technologies will require mobilizing vast resources and may end up being too slow to keep the world below the 1.5°C-2.0°C global warming threshold defined in the Paris Agreement.

But what if a fundamentally new energy source could be found that is not only cleaner than oil, but also more concentrated than oil and cheaper than oil?

Within the range of alternative energies, hydrogen fusion and related technologies take up a unique position in terms of both impact and likelihood. Cold fusion (LENR) in particular holds the potential to bring the fusion cost curve down and forward sufficiently to become not just a new energy source, but the dominant energy source of the 21st century. Its rapid development may be our best chance at maintaining a livable climate on Planet Earth. But in a world of abundant clean energy, entropy may become our next grand challenge…

New Fire implications for the world’s poor
Bob Greenyer

Abstract will be provided shortly.

Commercializing Disruptive Energy Technologies
Jim Dunn

The Commercialization of emerging ‘Disruptive’ energy technologies presents many challenges and issues. There are several obvious options, including outright sale, licensing, OEM partnering, manufacturing of ‘Core’ LENR Engines and subsystems, sale of Heat/Power, and various hybrid approaches. This presentation will cover the benefits and drawbacks of several leading approaches, and estimates of market size and ‘Time to market’, and key elements of success. Also includes potential concerns about competition, reliability, support/service, compliance requirements, and patent issues, etc.

The Hydrogen Mine—a disruptive method for producing hydrogen while resolving aluminium recycling
Alan Smith

The many benefits of the ‘hydrogen economy’, both hypothetical and real, have been touted for decades, but there is little sign of it actually becoming real. Hydrogen vehicles appear now and then to much fanfare, and then quietly vanish, back into the factories that spawned them. Hydrogen fuel cells are talked about too, and sometimes deployed in the real world, but the lack of access to a low-cost hydrogen supply has tended to limit their use to too few subsidized and often short-lived projects.

This is because there is a chicken-and-egg problem, too few users mean no availability of cheap hydrogen, and expensive hydrogen means there is no incentive to grow a market for technologies that use it.

In this presentation we turn the problem on its head, and use the half-truths and outright deception practiced by some actors in the recycling business to show how they have created a scenario in which an immediately profitable and unexpectedly eco-friendly technology can, from day 1 create a new possibility. We describe how it will create new recycling incentives, reduce greenhouse emissions in several sectors and supply valuable industrial raw materials as well as providing 24/7 zero-emissions power for the grid and for all forms of transport.

The African Energy Landscape and LENR: Opportunities and Challenges
David Gwynne-Evans

Africa has high levels of insolation and regions with excellent wind potential and thus should be rapidly pursuing clean energy. Seemingly counter-intuitively, Africa has invested in and continues to pursue large polluting or environmentally destructive power plants. Recent examples include the building of large hydroelectric dams in Mozambique and South Africa; a suite of the largest coal-powered plants in the world, and continued investment into nuclear fission. The South African government’s quest for energy independence reveals a reckless and shortsighted approach to the energy mix with reliance upon nuclear fission and fracking. Whereas investment in nuclear fission threatens to financially cripple the country, fracking will lead to rank environmental destruction and the release of climate-changing hydrocarbons. As Africa is projected to be the continent most seriously affected by climate change and its peoples least able to mitigate against it and adapt to its effects, there is a desperate need for abundant clean energy. With its small size, portability, simplicity, use of relatively abundant materials and low price, Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) holds the potential to radically change the energy landscape within Africa.

In this presentation, a number of key questions will be dealt with: What is the current and projected energy mix of South Africa? What is the potential for LENR and associated emerging technologies within Africa? What is the political climate that inhibits research into and the large-scale rollout of technology like LENR and alternative energy? Why are massive energy deals with attendant environmental destruction so actively sought? Also proposed will be the environmental risks associated with a plentiful, clean energy source. Although Africa will be looked at as a whole, this talk will focus on the author’s own experience as a clean energy advocate within the South African context.

The urgent need to communicate new technology and the terrible cost of failing to do so effectively
John Joss

The thesis is based on three appalling failures: The Hiroshima bomb, Sony’s Betamax, and Swedish Flex-Link and its brilliant, hyper-clean conveyor belt technology. Joss follows up with an explanation of all the communications channels that must be energized to succeed, no matter what the product, service or market—technology, retail, talent . . . it makes no difference unless you communicate the power and value of the ‘new’ thing.

Investing, Working, Living, and Thriving in a Decentralized World
David Orban

The way we organize society, the very moral ambitions underlying what we think possible, has been fundamentally defined by the availability and the nature of energy. Muscle energy implied slavery, oil and carbon generated our industrial society. What are going to be the possibilities for humanity with a decentralized energy source at an order of magnitude higher base than today? Are we going to be able to step up to the challenge? Can we draw a path from here to there that minimizes suffering and violence? It is not too late to broaden the conversation about the necessity of a radical change in our mindset, of a redefinition of the social contract. Going from scarcity to abundance, we have to reassess the meaning of investing, working, living in a decentralized world, in order to be able to thrive in it!

Potentially Disruptive Impacts of Cold Fusion (LENR) As a New Energy Source – and How to Deal with Them
Thomas Grimshaw

The potential benefits of LENR as a new energy source have been known since it’s 1989 announcement, when both Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons made note of its energy possibilities. The disruptive impacts of game-changing new technologies like LENR are well described by Clayton Christiansen in “The Inventors Dilemma”. Adverse secondary impacts of LENR may be expected to be both direct (on the energy production, transport, and storage sectors) and indirect (particularly on the elements of society that are closely tied to the energy industry). Methods for identifying and proactively dealing with secondary impacts and unintended consequences of LENR are both readily available and well established. A step-by-step process has been developed to address the direct and indirect impacts of LENR specifically and could be implemented on short notice.

LENR technology boosting financial decentralization
John Michell

The introduction of LENR technology will provide a massive boost to the decentralization of energy. Similarly crypto-currencies, notably Bitcoin, lead the way towards a decentralized global financial system.

There can be a symbiotic relationship between the two, as crypto-Currencies need energy to secure their block-chains, and a wide roll-out of LENR based energy devices can be combined with crypto mining systems and internet connections to ensure a truly global, decentralized means of securing this new peer-to-peer global financial system.

Crowd-funding initiatives based on crypto-currencies already provide a rapid way of raising large sums of money to fund such initiatives, thus enabling a rapid roll-out of LENR based systems to decentralize and secure these currencies.

The synergistic effect of these two ground-breaking technologies both moving towards a decentralized and distributed world will be very far reaching as these technologies support each other in engendering massive social consequences which include a fairer distribution of wealth and providing diverse work opportunities.

LENR—the financial and economic implications
Steve Bannister

LENR promises to cause profound changes to our economic systems, and thus our financial systems. In order to begin to explore and understand these implications, the talk extends an existing global energy framework from the International Energy Agency (IEA) (the World Energy Outlook 2015) with the new technology of LENR and new scenarios of how it will affect existing output and investment by sector of the energy economy. Assumptions are made as explicit as possible to encourage discussion and debate. The time horizon for the analysis is through 2040.

Included in the talk will be an estimate of the effect of a radically reduced energy price on the output of the global economy, an effect that has historical precedents including the English Industrial Revolution.

Engineering low-cost LENR systems (demo and Q&A)
Alan Smith

Although LENR effects have been produced and reproduced multiple times over the last decades by researchers all over the world, it’s notoriously difficult to make them work, involving delicate challenges in preparing the fuel, starting the reaction and eventually keeping it stable. For anyone who likes to give it a try, Lookingforheat.com provides both materials, equipment and assistance. In this session, Alan Smith, director of Lookingforheat.com, will make a short demo of a simple LENR system, and also describe the evolution of Lookingforheat’s reactor system. The session will also include a Q&A, offering attendees a valuable opportunity to gain insight of basic LENR experiments.

LENR, space travel and Fermi’s paradox
David H Bailey

In 1950, while having lunch with colleagues, Nobel physicist Enrico Fermi reportedly blurted out: Where is everybody? He reasoned as follows:

Most likely there are numerous (maybe millions) of other technological civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy alone;
If a society is less advanced than us by even a few decades, they would not be technological, so any other technological civilization is, almost certainly, many thousands or millions of years more advanced;
Within a million years or so (an eye-blink in cosmic time) after becoming technological, a society could have explored or colonized most of the Milky Way;
So why don’t we see evidence of the existence of even a single extraterrestrial civilization?

The advent of LENR directly applies to at least two of the proposed explanations of Fermi’s paradox:

– They exist, but are too far away. The practical development of LENR dramatically lowers the cost for exploring the cosmos.

– Civilizations like us invariably self-destruct. LENR dramatically lowers the risk of runaway global warming. Also, the advent of LENR means that we can explore the cosmos very soon, not decades or centuries from now that might expose human society to a catastrophic end in the meantime.

Note: All meals and coffee are included in the conference fee.

Photo: Henrik Trygg/mediabank.visitstockholm.com