Argentinian-Spanish
entrepreneur Martín Varsavsky says Cole Porter was right;
Q. So you like living here, you feel at home?
A. I have a lot of great friends here, and I love
the style of life when I am not working. I find myself representing
Spain often because there are very few Spaniards who go to the places I
go to, I don’t know why, well I do actually: they don’t speak English.
Amancio Ortega is an incredible guy, but he doesn’t speak English;
neither does Zapatero or Rajoy, or Aznar, although he learned a little.
But it is shameful. Spain’s problem isn’t Catalan, Basque, or Galician,
the problem is English. Let’s stop fighting over nonsense!
He also predicts
un nuevo mundo bravo;
We can program human beings. There are two approaches: programming
things so that they behave like humans; and programming humans so that
they perform better than computers. What has been achieved in the last
five years is to reduce the size of a computer so that it fits into a
ring, connecting it to a smartphone, which is connected to the cloud… I
have been to conferences recently that make me think the future is going
to be incredible: things that seemed like science fiction are going to
be science reality. I have been in a driverless car, and it’s
incredible. You just get in and say, “take me to this street” and then
you get on with your work, and the car doesn’t run anybody down. We are
going to see a transport revolution, in health, in energy. A lot of
poverty on this planet is to do with energy: it’s what makes things
expensive. Food is expensive because you need energy to cook. If we had
free energy, we’d have free food. Our dependence on hydrocarbons has
affected our societies and created enormous injustices. If we can reduce
the cost of energy that would be a real revolution.
Well then,
how about investing in these guys;
The ability to make liquid fuels from natural gas isn't new, dating
back to the 1920s. But the most common way of doing it, a process known
as Fischer-Tropsch, is neither cheap nor easy, requiring high heat and
pressure to work. Royal Dutch Shell last year shelved plans for a $20
billion "gas-to-liquids" plant in Louisiana, in part due to the cost.
Siluria's
process doesn't require intense pressure and heat. It uses a chemical
catalyst to take methane molecules from natural gas and combine them
into ethylene, a hydrocarbon widely used in the chemical industry. The
ethylene can be sold as its own product, or it can be processed with
other catalysts to produce liquid fuels. The catalysts stitch together
carbon atoms from the ethylene to create gasoline or diesel or jet fuel.
"With
a refinery, you're essentially boiling oil and separating it out," Iyer
said.
"We're building new molecules that weren't there before."
The
controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has
flooded the United States with inexpensive natural gas, pried from shale
formations beneath Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. Siluria's
technology represents one way to take advantage of that surge.
Siluria claims to be able to produce a gallon of gas for those driverless cars for $1.
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