"British company which has developed pioneering electric car motors that do not rely on expensive rare magnets is preparing to raise £250m as it seeks to expand.
Spun out of Newcastle University in 2017, Advanced Electric Machines (AEM) is seeking £30m over the next few months to boost UK production capacity. It will then try to secure another £220m within a year to fund further growth as the market booms ahead of a UK ban on new petrol and diesel cars in 2030."
As it says, the big “plus” is that unlike most electric motors these do not use magnets - and at a time when the rare metals needed for this are becoming increasingly expensive and sought-after this is potentially a huge step forward.
"Peter Fleet, a former vice president at Ford, has been brought in as chairman to oversee AEM’s fundraising and scaling up, with the initial round hoped to support expansion from a production capacity of 10,000 motors a year now to at least 100,000.
Mr Fleet said: “This is a unique technology that’s not just green because it doesn’t need rare magnets, it’s also lighter and more powerful than traditional motors, and wrapped up in patents that solve the challenges around it.” "
It’s all potentially coming together nicely in a way that could see the UK become a major auto manufacturer again.
Lithium produced in Cornwall & Scotland.
Batteries from this lithium in a few places arranged already with hopefully more to follow.
Now cheaper & lighter electric motors.
Yes it’s from the Telegraph which is subscription-only but it does have a free trial period, otherwise the above excerpts give the general idea.
I watched a bloke in a documentary the other night and he had converted a standard engine to run on Methane. It was 90% less polluting than petrol or diesel, and the best part was, there was enough methane produced at the sewage works where he was a scientist, to light a small town or run thousands of vehicles instead of it being released into the atmosphere. It would save scrapping hundreds of thousands of engines and the exhaust is not toxic gasses but water…
The first heavy vehicles to be powered by hydrogen in Australia will be rolled out in Port Kembla after the New South Wales government approved funding for a landmark project.
The largest producer of hydrogen in the country, Coregas, is behind the plan to acquire two hydrogen-powered prime movers and build a hydrogen refuelling facility at its Port Kembla plant.
The project was green-lit after it received half-a-million dollars in backing from the state government in the latest round of the Port Kembla Community Investment Fund.
The executive general manager of Coregas, Alan Watkins, said the funding could help get the pioneering project off the ground before the end of the year.
The project is likely to have broad implications for decarbonising the road freight industry in Australia.
Coregas will be making data from the project available and expects converting trucks from diesel to hydrogen will halve its vehicle emissions.
The company is currently using fossil fuels to produce hydrogen but believes the increased availability of renewables means cleaner energy options are becoming more viable.
I remember seeing something similar some time ago and I remember the bio-bug too which IIRC was British.
The trouble is I think that it would take more methane than there is to convert all ICE’s into using methane.
According to those upselling EV’s, presumably.
Dung Beetle VW
Affectionately known as the “Dung Beetle”, this 1966 VW might look like a rusted, old, junk yard carcass but hidden underneath the hood is a heavily modified, turbocharged 2.3L motor that is more than capable of taking on any competition. Dung Beetle’s motor is a 2332cc turbocharged, air cooled flat four.
"An electric van and bus start-up that has yet to build its first production vehicle has secured the highest valuation ever for a British company on its stock market debut.
Arrival, which was founded in 2015 and is based in London, has yet to turn a profit but was valued at $13.6 billion, or almost £10 billion, when its shares began trading in New York yesterday."
“Arrival has 1,800 staff worldwide. It has a factory in Bicester, Oxfordshire, and research and development facilities in Reading and Banbury. Its backers include Kia and Hyundai, the South Korean carmakers, and BlackRock, the American asset manager.”
The report goes on to say that production of buses will start this year and vans later on next year with a big deal to sell twenty thousand vans to UPS alone.
They reckon that the company will show a profit as early as 2023.
Hooray for UK innovation However, as soon as a patent is awarded, it opens up the field for competitors to start developing their own versions so, don’t get too upset if you start to see other players in this field. One can only hope that none of the vehicle majors buys out the patents and then sits on them effectively squashing this invention.
As for methane power: when you burn methane the resulting exhaust gases are water vapour, carbon dioxide and, possibly, carbon monoxide plus plenty of other molecular variations of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
That was the car I saw in the documentary Besoeker. I reckon running on Methane is a better bet than electric vehicles. Have you seen the mess they make while sourcing lithium.
And with hydrogen you have to source the ingredients and use energy to to make the stuff. Whereas Methane is a naturally occurring gas, and is provided from decomposing matter processed in a anaerobic digester.
The components used in a digester are produced anyway, and have been wasted in the past. And by using the Methane in converted engines will save an awful lot of scrap. And producing enough electricity to power all those electric vehicles, not to mention the extra installations required for the increase in electricity use is just counter productive. Isn’t that a good thing…
I was unaware of the extents of usefulness of biogas and the possibility of it being produced here, in this country, by our own people and our own waste!
We have always been reliant on foreign supplies for our energy: gas, electricity, oil, etc.
If this can be invested in and made to work efficiently, it could be the holy grail of our future energy needs.
It almost sounds too good to be true…
oh, hang on! Could there be objections from the Green lobby for some reason? :surprised:
I think it’s a brilliant idea JB, and there are lots of scientists working on it even as we speak. If we are serious about saving the planets resources and not just making some rich blokes even richer, it needs to be considered.
And wasn’t there a bus somewhere converted to run from methane collected from the town sewage works? Comically, it ran on the Number 2 route - someone at the local council must have had a sense of humour.
Without doubt the biggest concern for motorists is the charging and the amount of miles they can travel on a single charge (not a problem for the over seventies who will be restricted to driving to the local doctors and back).
I assume that would convert the engine and carburettor, etc., but what about the storage tank? I assume that would have to be quite different to store gas under pressure.
