good car modification

TNR Gold has announced that its exploration team is already on the grounds of its Lithium and REE properties in Canada. Junior is up to 0.25CAD on the news and volume is over 1 million shares. More funds are taken positions, financing was oversubscribed and Canada Zinc Metals CZX.v came into the picture with its Chinese partners Tongling. Media is full of electric cars and electric bikes stories: some reports suggested that in China in 2008 22 million electric bikes were sold alone. Chinese interest is understandable: TNR Gold still below last year level of 0.35CAD financing without any Lithium and REE properties. Los Azules is shaping into huge Copper deposit with NPV over 1 billion with Copper price above 2.1 USD/lb. Who knows better then Chinese where the commodity prices are going? We like to see that the company is not just sitting and playing on all these developments alone, but advancing its new Lithium and REE start up International Lithium Corp and preparing Alaska properties for Gold surpassing 1000 USD/oz. Will we have another spin out from TNR Gold this time of Alaska Gold and Copper next year?

Our Canada Gold M&A play Roxmark Mines RMK.v is making new headlines and stock is finally breaking out to the upside. In plus to solid continued results from J/V with Premier Gold PG.to company is moving forward its old producing mine with new high grade discoveries. Some estimations suggest the value of 0.18CAD attributed to only J/V part of the game based on Premier Gold PG.to valuation report. Our Target is North of 0.30CAD with 43-101 released by PG.to and gold above 1000 mark.

"From an investor’s perspective, the goal is to own what China needs and China needs metals. And strategically, it could be easier for China’s state-owned corporations to fly under the radar and buy or take positions in smaller foreign corporations rather than their larger cousins. We return to our long-term thesis: own quality junior exploration and mining companies with superior projects. Canaccord Adams"

China has became number one auto market in the world and shows impressive growth. Chinese companies are on a shopping spree in the resource world. Asia has its own ambitions to play Next Industrial revolution, starting from commodity side:

"1. Market place for Lithium and REE products: Huge potential - auto market is growing...China has become largest market in the world. Electric cars could be the only way to bring mobility to hundred of millions without destroying environment in China and India."

"Billions are coming into our Next Big Thing: Green Mobility revolution - new factories for lithium batteries are under contraction and new Electric Cars models are rolled out. In Lithium Supply chain, which will benefit from newly born Bull, place is not very crowded, but success will depend on people involved, their energy and ability to develop the projects."

Automakers are taking Green Mobility Revolution seriously and getting up to speed with production. Lithium technology is a choice for batteries according to industry insiders:

"Lets check first on "Zero to 1 Billion" matrix:
1. Market place for Lithium and REE products: Huge potential - auto market is growing...China has become largest market in the world. Electric cars could be the only way to bring mobility to hundred of millions without destroying environment in China and India.
2. Transition potential: groundbreaking - Fleet conversion to Electric mobility plus Electric cars economics. Money are going directly into the pockets of most in need. Basis for the next industrial revolution and manufacturing base in the West including US Corp. with High Tech jobs."

Next Big Thing means tough competition on pricing in the end product - Electric cars, the most lucrative business for a while will be batteries. Now auto makers are securing their say in battery makers and they in turn will move to secure Lithium Supply.

"Normal investment cycle will include money flowing into new play - this time Lithium, into companies like SQM, ROC and FMC first and then they will move down the food chain. What will be the M&A targets of new Bull?"

China is moving ahead in Lithium and REE space as usual:

"It is a ground breaking milestone for both Juniors involved: value network in action. TNR Gold has attracted interest from Canada Zinc Metals and its shareholders including Chinese Tongling and Lundin mining with opportunities opened in Lithium and REE market."

"By Chang-Ran Kim and Kiyoshi Takenaka - Analysis
TOKYO (Reuters) - Rechargeable batteries could become the core technology for the auto industry if pure electric cars enter the mainstream -- a prospect that has carmakers racing to team up with battery makers.
Auto executives say that with fewer moving parts, easy-to-assemble electric cars may also lower the bar for entry into the cut-throat autos industry and make battery manufacturers the unlikely competitors for car giants.
"I've said for years that Toyota's rival will be Hitachi," said Kenichiro Senoo, a professor at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo.
"Or that in 2016, you'd be able to buy a car assembly kit in Akihabara," he said, referring to Tokyo's famous electronics shopping district.
Already, China's battery maker-cum-automaker BYD Co has entered the scene, bad news for automakers whose expertise lies in the complex task of fitting together thousands of components into a safe and reliable vehicle.
Some see the shift to electric cars turning the auto industry into something resembling the PC sector, where Intel Corp and Microsoft Corp, which supply key devices across PC brands, take the lion's share of the industry profit.
Firms such as Panasonic Corp and Hitachi Ltd, which have the core technology to make batteries, could be the Intels and Microsofts of the auto industry of the future.
Japanese electronics conglomerate NEC Corp plans to raise around $2 billion and use some of that money in growth areas such as lithium-ion batteries, a source and the Yomiuri newspaper said on Friday.
LINKING UP
Lithium-ion batteries are seen as the most practical option available now for electric vehicles as they have the higher energy density required to feed the electric motors that power the car instead of an engine.
To avoid being sidelined, top automakers are looking to tie up with battery giants to have a say in developing batteries that still face cost and safety hurdles for commercial viability.
Most hybrid cars use nickel-metal hydride batteries, which store less energy.
Early movers such as Toyota Motor Corp, Nissan Motor Co and Mitsubishi Motors Corp have set up joint ventures to produce batteries with Panasonic, NEC and GS Yuasa Corp, respectively.
"When we were doing the research for electric vehicles (EVs), we believed we needed to have the core battery technology in-house," said Andy Palmer, senior vice president and head of product planning at Nissan, which wants to be the world's first automaker to mass-market zero-emission electric vehicles in 2012.
"That was a strategic decision we chose to make. If Nissan is right ... and zero-emissions is the future, then we've ensured that future by having that technology."
The Nissan-NEC venture is looking to sell its lithium-ion batteries widely in a move some say resembles an open structure that Intel succeeded with.
Not to be left behind, Volkswagen AG has sealed non-equity battery partnerships with Japan's Sanyo Electric Co and Toshiba Corp.
Europe's top automaker said in May it would explore options for a third partnership, with China's BYD, which already has the endorsement of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.
Daimler AG now has a 6 percent stake in Tesla Motors Inc, a California start-up that has used its battery technology to create high-performance sports cars under its own brand.
In danger of falling through the cracks is Honda Motor Co, which formed a late venture this year with Mitsubishi Motors partner GS Yuasa limited to batteries for hybrid cars.
Honda has dismissed electric cars as a short-range compromise, betting instead on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as the zero-emission option to ultimately replace today's cars.
Absent from the growing list of tie-ups are U.S. automakers General Motors, Ford Motor Co and Chrysler, which have little cash to spare.
Toyota is going even further by researching, without the involvement of partner Panasonic, an advanced battery that it hopes would beat lithium-ion batteries in performance and cost.
Panasonic, for its part, is in the process of acquiring Sanyo, while SB LiMotive, a battery venture between South Korea's Samsung SDI and Germany's Robert Bosch, is buying U.S. battery maker Cobasys.
BUMPS AHEAD
While batteries could take center stage in the world of electric cars, it's not all doom for automakers. The rigorous testing involved in ensuring safety is an area where battery makers trail automakers.
"I think electronics makers can probably make cars if they buckle down to it," said Mitsuru Homma, executive vice president of Sanyo, the world's largest rechargeable battery maker.
"But electronics companies are miles behind automakers when it comes to awareness of safety and product liability concerning vehicles, and the technological know-how on the whole process of auto-making. Some things are best left to the experts," he said.
Succeeding in the auto industry also requires brand power, competitive sales channels and services, and expertise in parts integration, analysts said.
That probably means few battery giants, which also include South Korea's LG Chem Ltd, Hitachi and A123 of the United States, are likely to go down the same road as BYD.
"If consumers are happy with that level of crudeness, then maybe BYD has a chance," a top executive at a Japanese automaker said.
"But there's something to be said for building a sophisticated, fun-to-drive car, and that takes experience."
(Additional reporting by Nobuhiro Kubo; Editing by Valerie Lee)"

Our Electric Cars will help us to grow solar and wind power to charge them.

"A single idle, electric-powered car could generate as much as 10 kilowatts of power, enough to meet the average demand of 10 houses, according to Willett Kempton, director of the Center for Carbon-free Power Integration at the University of Delaware. With vehicle-to-grid technology, controlled by an array of smart meters, car owners plugged in at home or work could allow the grid to draw off unused chunks of power at times when short-term demand is high. Conversely, cars could be recharged when demand is low."

Welcome to Energy business: Charge it Low, Sell it High!

It is a new way to look at our Green Mobility Revolution based on Electric Cars as a structural shift in all energy business. With enough penetration Electric Cars will implement an ideal Mobile Distributed Energy Storage Network, addressing concerns about terror or natural disasters and providing important link to solar and wind power utilisation. Lithium as a base for this applications will be realised in its status of a New Oil - powering the new sustainable economy.

"Lithium: Life begins with LI

3. Geopolitical implications: the only way, in our opinion, for US corp to survive and maybe one day prosper again. Options are not whether to chose or not, but how to be able to join Electric mobility revolution. You can not compete with China as a producer with electric mobility on the cost side against your oil addiction. With oil above 100USD/barrel wealth transfer is 1 trillion dollars per year. US Corp is bankrupt without this kind of hazard, but here we are talking about cash flow and mere market existence..."

On another front money are flowing in Lithium based batteries:

TOKYO, July 13 (Reuters) - Japanese battery maker GS Yuasa Corp (6674.T) said on Monday that it plans to sell 40 million shares in a public offering and up to an additional 6 million shares, depending on demand.
GS Yuasa plans to make lithium-ion batteries for hybrid cars from 2010 with Honda Motor Co (7267.T). (Reporting by Mayumi Negishi)"

"Billions are coming into our Next Big Thing: Green Mobility revolution - new factories for lithium batteries are under contraction and new Electric Cars models are rolled out. In Lithium Supply chain, which will benefit from newly born Bull, place is not very crowded, but success will depend on people involved, their energy and ability to develop the projects."

"The challenge for green energy: how to store excess electricity

The challenge for green energy: how to store excess electricity
For years, the stumbling block for renewable energy has been how to store electricity for days when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. But new technologies suggest this goal may be within reach, writes Jon R Luoma from Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian From Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 15 July 2009 15.41 BST

"Why are we ignoring things we know? We know that the sun doesn't always shine and that the wind doesn't always blow." So wrote former U.S. Energy Secretary James Schlesinger and Robert L. Hirsch last spring in the Washington Post, suggesting that because these key renewables produce power only intermittently, "solar and wind will probably only provide a modest percentage of future U.S. power."
Never mind that Schlesinger failed to disclose that he sits on the board of directors of Peabody Energy, the world's largest private-sector coal company — a business with much to lose if a solar- and wind-powered future arrives. But at least he and his co-author got it partly right. The benefits from wind and solar are mostly intermittent — so far. But the pair somehow missed the fact that a furious search for practical, affordable electricity storage to beat that intermittence problem is well underway.
For decades, "grid parity" has been the Holy Grail for alternative energy. The rap from critics was that technologies like wind and solar could not compete, dollar-for-dollar, with conventional electricity sources, such as coal and nuclear, without large government tax breaks or direct subsidies. But suddenly, with rapid technological advances and growing economies of manufacturing scale, wind power is now nearly at grid parity — meaning it costs roughly the same to generate electricity from wind as it does from coal. And the days when solar power attains grid parity may be only a half-decade away.
So with grid parity now looming, finding ways to store millions of watts of excess electricity for times when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine is the new Holy Grail. And there are signs that this goal — the day when large-scale energy storage becomes practical and cost-effective — might be within reach, as well. Some technologies that can store sizeable amounts of intermittent power are already deployed. Others, including at least a few with great promise, lie somewhere over the technological horizon.
New storage approaches include improvements to existing lithium ionbatteries and schemes to store energy as huge volumes of compressed air in vast geologic vaults. Another idea is to create a network of small, energy-dense batteries in tens of millions of homes. Under such a "distributed storage" scheme, utility computers could coordinate electricity flows over a "smart grid" that continually communicates with — and adjusts the flow of power to and from — local batteries. This would even include batteries in future plug-in hybrid or all-electric vehicles.
And one 2008 breakthrough could even fulfill chemists' long-held dreams of producing a squeaky-clean and storable fuel by using excess electricity generated from renewable sources to cheaply produce hydrogen, which could then be used in fuel cells to power homes and cars.
In a world run mainly on fossil fuels, finding ways to store electricity was not a pressing concern: Power plants across a regional electrical grid could simply burn more fuel when demand was high. But large-scale electricity storage promises be an energy game-changer, unshackling alternative energy from the constraints of intermittence. It would mean that if a wind or solar farm were the cheapest and cleanest way to generate power, it wouldn't matter when the sun shone or the wind blew.One storage approach seems obvious: to improve battery technologies. Picture efficient, enormous batteries that can store tens of millions ofwatt-hours of juice. Today, the vast majority of new rooftop solar photovoltaic panels are connected to the grid, using it as a giant battery, pushing excess power onto the grid when solar panels provide excess power. The building then draws power from the grid when the sun doesn't shine, with its meter spinning backward and forward with the ebb and flow of power. With relatively few solar roofs yet in play, utilities manage any ebb and flow by drawing down and ramping up generation at conventional power plants designed to balance fluctuating supply and demand.A more robust world of solar and wind power might be better served by some sort of giant battery — or, more likely, many of them, widely distributed. The basic concept has been proven. Since 2003, the world's largest battery backup has been storing energy for an entire city: Fairbanks, Alaska. Isolated as it is, and not part of any regional electricity grid, the metropolitan area of about 100,000 residents needs an electricity backstop more than most: In its sub-zero winters, pipes can freeze solid in as little as two hours. Six years ago, the city installed a huge nickel-cadmium battery, the same technology used for years in laptop computers and other portable devices.
Housed in a giant warehouse, the 1,300-metric ton battery is larger than a football field, and can crank out 40 million watts of power. Still, the Fairbanks battery provides only enough electricity for about 12,000 residents for seven minutes. That was enough to prevent 81 blackouts in the city in the battery's first two years of operation.
Yet effective storage of electricity from solar or wind arrays that generate power equivalent to one large coal plant implies batteries on a breathtaking scale — hundreds of units the size of the Fairbanks array.
One possible answer? In Japan, so-called "flow" batteries have been used for years to store backup power at industrial plants. Conventional batteries store energy in chemical form.With flow batteries, charged chemicals are pumped into storage tanks, allowing still more chemical to be charged and pumped away, then pumped back into the active portion of the battery and drawn down as needed. One big advantage: Battery "size" can be expanded by simply adding more chemicals and more storage tanks. In 2003, the local utility on small King Island, off the coast of Australia, installed a large flow battery to sop up and later release excess power from a wind farm.As with the alternative generation technologies, cost will be key for determining which battery or other storage technologies might prevail. Aside from such typical economic concerns as raw material and maintenance costs and durability, storage technologies all face some losses in "round-trip efficiency." Inevitably, some energy is lost as it goes into storage, and more is lost as it comes out.
Right now, hopes are riding high on lithium ion batteries, because they have impressive round-trip efficiencies, can pack in high densities of energy, and can charge and discharge thousands of times before becoming degraded. Because of those attributes, lithium-ion battery technology has become increasingly dominant in laptop computers and cell phones. On a far larger scale, a powerful lithium ion battery pack powers the pricey all-electric Tesla Roadster, and is slated to power the plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt next year.
On the grid, lithium ion experiments are already underway. One company, General Electric-backed A123 Systems, announced late in 2008 that it had been contracted to install a two-megawatt lithium ion storage unit at a California power plant owned by global utility giant AES.
Still, lithium ion remains a relatively expensive technology — 10 times more expensive than lead acid batteries with equivalent capacity. Technological improvements and manufacturing scale should bring lithium costs down over time, but by the time that happens, the world could be beating a path to the door of someone who's found a way to build an even better battery.
Early this year, IBM revealed that it was launching a major research program into what looks like an even more promising technology — the lithium metal-air battery. Last month, a company called PolyPlus announced that it had already succeeded in developing one.
The PolyPlus battery and the IBM technology deliver an astonishing 10 times more energy density than even today's best lithium ion technology. That means that, pound for pound, they offer about the energy density of gasoline. The key reason they can store so much energy is that they use oxygen, drawn from the air, in place of some of the chemical reactants used along with lithium in their lithium ion cousins.There's one big rub: Air isn't just oxygen. Notably, it also contains humidity, and the lithium has a bad habit of acting like ignited gasoline when exposed to moisture, creating a real risk of fire and explosion. Chandrasekhar Narayan, manager of science and technology at IBM's Almaden Research Center near San Jose, Calif., has suggested that it will take five to 10 years to develop an effective membrane that will let oxygen into the battery while keeping moisture out.
Still in pie-in-sky mode, there's "vehicle to grid" storage, or "carbitrage." This enticing notion relies on idled storage in the batteries of the millions of plug-in hybrid or all-electric automobiles that will be in use in the future. There's reason to believe this scheme could work. More than 90 percent of the time cars sit idled, and aside from days they're used for long trips, most of their full energy storage capacity goes unused.
A single idle, electric-powered car could generate as much as 10 kilowatts of power, enough to meet the average demand of 10 houses, according to Willett Kempton, director of the Center for Carbon-free Power Integration at the University of Delaware. With vehicle-to-grid technology, controlled by an array of smart meters, car owners plugged in at home or work could allow the grid to draw off unused chunks of power at times when short-term demand is high. Conversely, cars could be recharged when demand is low.
The stored power in those electric cars, or anywhere on the grid, might not come from batteries after all. In March, Texas-based EEStor announced that it had received third-party verification of its "ultracapacitor" technology. The company claims the lightweight device, which was awarded a U.S. patent last December, can bottle up huge amounts of electricity far more quickly than any battery and can do so at lower cost.
Like batteries, capacitors store and mete out electricity. Small conventional capacitors have been ubiquitous in electronic devices as far back as the early days of radio. But capacitors, so far, haven't been able to store electricity for long enough to come close to competing with batteries. They have found use as devices that level out fluctuations in voltage or that briefly store power for near-instant release.
EEStor claims that its device, which is one-quarter the weight of a similarlithium ion battery, can hold a large charge for days. Its patent describes a 281-pound device that would hold almost the same charge as a half-ton lithium ion battery pack installed on the Tesla Roadster. The company's ultracapacitors have yet to prove themselves in commercial products. But industrial giant Lockheed Martin has already signed up with EEStor to use future ultra capacitors in defense applications, and Toronto-based Zenn Motors, which has also taken an ownership stake in EEStor, says it will have electric cars on the road using the technology in 2010.If advanced batteries or ultracapacitors aren't the ultimate answer, maybe using excess electricity to make hydrogen that can be stored will do the trick. Hydrogen can be produced through simple electrolysis, but technical and cost hurdles have made electrolysis impractical. Today, industrial-scale hydrogen is produced using natural gas as a not-so-clean feedstock.
But that may have begun to change last summer when MIT announced that a team lead by chemist Daniel Nocera had made a "major discovery" that employs a new kind of catalyst using cobalt and phosphate — abundant and non-toxic materials — to kick-start electrolysis.
Outside observers say the process could be revolutionary: opening up the possibility that electricity made at any time by the sun or wind could be stored by simply splitting (and later recombining) abundant water molecules, perhaps even undrinkable sea water. The breakthrough has been hailed by scientist British scientist James Barber of Imperial College London as having "enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind." The website Xconomy reported in April that Nocera had quietly formed a startup company called Sun Catalytics. Efforts to reach Nocera for comment were unsuccessful.
And there is progress being made on an entirely different front — using excess electricity to pump compressed air into caverns, salt domes, and old natural gas wells, and then releasing the air to help state-of-the-art natural gas power plants spin turbines, lowering the amount of fuel consumed by as much as 70 percent. A consortium of utilities in Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas is already working with the U.S.'s Sandia National Laboratories to develop a giant, 268-megawatt compressed air system. Called the Iowa Stored Energy Park, it would store excess energy from the region's burgeoning wind industry.
• This article was shared by our content partner Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network"