Gas 2.0

US Department of Energy secretary Steven Chu and US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack have announced that the two agencies will be providing $6.3 million dollars for 7 projects at research institutions throughout the US to improve the use of plant feedstocks in biofuel production.

Although biofuels have fallen out of favor in the public eye recently, the federal government — led by Secretary Chu — is still forging ahead with providing money to research next generation biofuels.

“Part of the solution to the energy problem will be home-grown energy crops,” said secretary Chu in a statement. “These projects will help us unlock the true potential of advanced biofuels, decrease our dependence on foreign oil, and create new jobs and a thriving biofuels industry in America.”

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As electric vehicles gain traction, a concern is how to produce renewable energy to charge them up. Well, look no further than your refrigerator. One company is using onions to produce electricity and the owner, Steve Gill along with brother David Gill of Gills Onions, are crying all the way to the bank. In the new energy paradigm, many experts predict that we will no longer transport our energy around the world but will create it within our own communities. Using the waste juice from onions fits right into this scenario.

Gills Onions is the largest fresh onion processing plant in the world. The company has more than 15,000 acres of farmland and 300,000 square feet of processing and warehousing facility. Gill was looking for ways to reduce his costs in his farming operation when he began to experiment using the juice from his onion crop in Oxnard, California to create the energy to run his lighting and refrigerators. The result was the creation of an Advanced Energy Recovery System (AERS). Read the rest of this entry »

In a macabre When Life Deals You Lemons - Make Lemonade kind of news item: Researchers are considering that perhaps we could safely reuse radioactive land: to grow crops for biofuel.

Growing food is still too dangerous in southeastern Belarus because the region is still so contaminated by fallout from Chernobyl that crops grown there cannot safely be eaten by humans for hundreds of years, until the radioactive isotopes decay.

Yet 1.5 million mostly older people have not left, and some are in fact growing some grain on the contaminated land anyway. The radioactive material concentrates in roots and stalks, which they just plough back into the ground after harvesting. As a result; the soil is still almost as contaminated now as it was after the accident.

Things could not be much worse there than they are now and the Belarus government is open to new ideas. So when an Irish company had the idea of remediating the soil by planting a biofuel crop, Belarus was more open to the idea than you might imagine:
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OK. I admit it. I am writing this article from a Summit about cow poop. No, this isn’t a joke to get 8-year olds rolling on the floor with laughter. This is serious.

I am reporting from the inaugural National Biomethane Summit, in Sacramento, California, where over 300 attendees including elected officials, government agencies, farmers, ranchers, landfill owners, facility owners and operators, technology leaders, researchers, regional planners, and carbon trading experts.

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If there’s one thing Oregon’s good at, it’s home-grown solutions. From blackberries, to grass seed, to Christmas trees, to hazelnuts, Oregon controls the American market on some major niche agricultural products (PDF). And with Oregon’s new push into the future of alternative energy and transportation, it only makes sense that Oregon agriculture will follow suit.

Enter Barefoot Motors and its all-electric heavy duty ATV targeted at farmers. Based in southern Oregon’s picturesque community of Ashland (which has recently garnered attention as the least immunized city in the nation), Barefoot Motors seeks to take advantage of the winds of change by providing farmers with the ability go green and still get their work done with a minimum of hassle — all with an eye towards saving money.

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A team of researchers at Baylor University, Texas, have figured out a way to make car parts from coconuts, opening the door to the replacement of environmentally damaging plastic with an abundant, renewable resource.

The team have also created biodiesel from coconut oil, and are confident the new fuel could be an economically viable substitute for gasoline, as well as a vital source of income for more than ten million coconut farmers worldwide struggling on tiny annual incomes, typically as little as $500.

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Jatropha is a nondescript and rather ugly desert shrub, but its appearance belies a huge potential as a major source of oil for biodiesel production on land that doesn’t compete with food crops — and the whole world is taking notice.

Jatropha has the potential to produce 4 times the amount of biodiesel as soybeans and 1.5 times the amount of even a dedicated oil crop such as canola. This alone has been enough to make people sit up and take notice, but jatropha’s true beauty lies in the fact that it can be grown on literal wasteland — land that has been left for dead with little rainfall, poor soils, and a harsh climate.

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In a country where Corn is King, you would assume that rural ranchers and farmers in our countries corn belt would vote for a president who is Pro Ethanol.  After all, most ethanol is made from corn and the U.S. Government is paying farmers to grow it. But a growing number of cattle and pig ranchers are seeing the increased price of corn, drive them out of business.

Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, opposes the Renewable Fuel Standard and Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, supports it. Two farmers from Ohio, offered their perspective on how the presidential candidates’ stances will influence their votes in the Nov. 4 election.

Tim Blair, who has spent 33 years raising hogs, will be voting for Sen. McCain. Tim predicts he’ll be out of business by year’s end, and said “I’ve basically spent my life savings the past 14 months hoping it would get better.”

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Editor’s Note: this is a guest post by Adam Shake

Osage BioEnergy announced that it will break ground next month on its Appomattox Bio Energy plant, a 65 Mgy (Million Gallons per Year) barley ethanol plant that will be the largest in the US, using barley as a feedstock.

Barley is a winter crop that can be double cropped with soybeans, and produces a high quality meal in addition to fuel ethanol.

The Appomattox Bio Energy (ABE) facility is projected to use regionally grown barley as the primary raw material.  Why Barley? Barley is a moderate to high yield winter crop and can be grown in double crop systems with other food crops such as soybeans.

In an attempt to possibly allay “food for fuel” critics, Osage BioEnergy plans on using a 3-in-one approach:

• Cash crops for farmers
• Animal Feedstock and
• fuel for cars

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In concert with the opening of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, the American Corn Growers Association (ACGA) has announced their endorsement of Barack Obama for President of the United States.

This marks the first endorsement by a major biofuels trade association in the 2008 US presidential campaign, and only the second time in the ACGA’s twenty-one year history that they have ever endorsed any presidential candidate.

The American Corn Growers Association represents 14,000 members in 35 states. Keith Bolin ACGA president and a corn and hog farmer in Obama’s home state of Illinois issued a simultaneously glowing endorsement of Obama and blistering critique of McCain.

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Part 2: Green Building Materials

Earlier this week, I wrote about my experience at Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. Specifically, I discussed the Ford Escape Hybrid. While I was in Dearborn, I also had the chance to check out some of the “green” materials that Ford is currently using/plans to use in their vehicles.

One of these materials is soy-based foam, which is present in the 2008 Mustang, the F-150, the Expedition, the Navigator, and the Focus. The foam is made by crushing soybeans to get oil, which is then turned into soy polyol. According to Ford, the foam reduces CO2 emissions by 5 million pounds annually. Soy proteins are also eventually going to be used in rubber parts.
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Imagine a grass crop, grown on marginal, non-food bearing land without pesticides or much fertilizer, that, when harvested, produces an oil that needs almost no processing to be substituted for diesel fuel.

Much attention has been given to producing ethanol from non-food crops like grasses, but the ability to produce something indistinguishable to diesel from grass could be a game-changer. It would require almost no infrastructure change and could fuel all of the existing long-haul trucks on the road without modification.

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In the June 2008 issue of the journal Nature Reviews Genetics, internationally renowned biofuels researcher Mariam Sticklen proposes that future production of cellulosic biofuels will be made infinitely more efficient and affordable through genetic modification of cellulosic feedstocks such as cereal grains and perennial grasses. Citing the impossibility of fueling the world on starch-based ethanol, such as that from corn, Sticklen argues that cellulosic biofuels are the only viable option for future commercial production.

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Farmers in Northern Queensland, Australia, are investigating another approach to producing renewable fuel: growing diesel trees. As weird as that sounds, it’s real, and it isn’t a scientific breakthrough. We’ve actually known about the trees for over 300 years.

As Treehugger reported earlier this week, farmers in the more tropical region Queensland purchased about 20,000 Brazilian diesel trees, or Copaifera langsdorfii, with the intention of having a living oil-mine in 15 years. According to Purdue University, a 100 acre plot of trees could produce about 25 barrels of oil per year.

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Is it going to come down to a choice between eating or driving? Is that what are future holds? If it does, it looks like the driving contingent may win (or in other words many others will lose…or starve). That’s a distorted overview of last night’s EcoNow presentation that highlighted the current and future state of biofuel. Actually I like the term that one of the speakers Eric Holt-Giménez used - “agrofuels” rather than “biofuels” because “bio” means “life” which certainly doesn’t represent these alt fuels.

The event held in Berkeley (where else?) gave Tad Patzek, Professor of Geoengineering at UC Berkeley, Miguel Altieri, Professor of Agroecology at UC Berkeley, Eric Holt-Giménez, Executive Director of Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy, and Judith Mayer, Project Coordinator of the Borneo Project a chance to educate or frighten the audience into what’s happening with agrofuels, whether it’s ethanol, B20, or something else that makes our cars go.

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