Gas 2.0

The American Le Mans Series isn’t the only racing outfit getting into green fuels.

This past weekend was the season opener for the Formula One World Championship. This is the peak, the very pinnacle of automotive performance, with teams spending hundreds of millions of dollars every season trying to one up each other with a technological advantage. Drivers Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso  took Ferrari to victory at the season opener of the Bahrain Grand Prix. Ferrari’s fuel sponsor Shell incorporated ethanol into its race fuel for the first time.

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As we get close to the American Le Mans series opener at Sebring, the racing news is getting piled on. So, just one more Le Mans post today, I swear!

The American Le Mans Series bills itself as “The Global Leader of Green Racing,” and they’ve got a good bit of street cred to back that up. Some of their teams now use biodegradable motor oil, and the series already has four alternatives to pure petrol power: E-85, E-10, low-sulfur diesel, and hybrid-electric. Well now you can add isobutanol to that last, as it will be running in the Dyson-Mazda Lola prototype cars this weekend.

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If you don’t like big trucks loaded with torque, you should just stop reading now.

But if you’re like me, you love you some torque and towing capacity. The 2011 Ford Super Duty truck has best in class towing capacity and payload hauling, as well as two new engines; a 6.2 liter gas engine good for 405 horsepower and 385 ft-lbs of torque, and a new Powerstroke diesel that makes 390 horsepower and a mammoth 735 ft-lbs of torque. Even more impressive? It is the cleanest diesel Ford has ever put into a truck. How awesome is that?

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Here in the US, tea is essentially a niche product, falling way behind coffee in terms of popularity. But in places like the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, tea far surpasses coffee as a national past time. In 2008 alone, the world production of black tea was more than 3.8 million tons.

Typically, all those spent tea leaves and remaining liquid are tossed out with the trash, but now two Pakistani researchers have decided to tackle what they perceived as a waste of resources, and have figured out how to completely recycle the leftover tea and tea leaves into biodiesel, ethanol, methane, propane, fertilizer and even chemical spill absorbent.

Pretty ingenious if you ask me.

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New research out of the University of York in Britain is unraveling some mysteries of the common wood-eating gribble that could provide the key to cheaply turning abundant wood and straw fiber into biofuel.

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In the world of alternative fuels, Brazilians are lucky. They have some of the best land and climate in the world with which to grow sugarcane–which they have proven is an excellent feedstock for first generation ethanol production.

Not only is it incredibly easy to convert the cane sugar into ethanol through fermentation, they can power much of their ethanol production by burning the material leftover after harvesting and crushing the sugarcane to extract the sweet liquid.

Years ago the Brazilian government realized the potential in this system and started encouraging a major shift to a transportation sector capable of running mostly on ethanol. And now the fruits of their labor are being borne out: The 10 millionth ethanol flex-fuel capable vehicle has been delivered in Brazil.

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Corn ethanol is a tricky subject, but what if you could teach corn to produce its own fertilizer from the air around it? If you could, you would vastly reduce the amount of petroleum-based fertilizer needed to grow it and therefore make it much more environmentally sound.

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This morning I wrote a piece about how GM is lamenting the lack of E85 fueling stations in the United States. But the other interesting tidbit of information in there was a simple statement by GM’s Tony Posawat that the generator in the upcoming Chevy Volt extended range electric vehicle would not support E85 (85% ethanol/15% gasoline) initially.

This came as a shock to me, especially considering that of all the car makers, GM has invested the most time and resources to make a huge portion of their vehicles flex-fuel E85 capable. It was also quite a strange statement because as recently as last October GM was proudly touting the fact that their Flint, MI, assembly plant would be building the Volt’s “flex-fuel 1.4 liter” engine.

I couldn’t accept the announcement at face value, so I decided to contact not one, not two, but three GM representatives to hear for myself that GM would not support E85 in the Volt initially.

As it turns out, it’s true. And I’m bummed.

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At the Renewable Fuels Association conference in Florida, GM’s Vice Chairman for Global Product Development, Tom Stephens, said that GM is investing significant amounts of money into making their vehicles compatible with high blends of ethanol in the U.S. market, but that the large majority of those vehicles won’t be able to take advantage of their flex-fuel capability because the ethanol fueling infrastructure in the U.S. is drastically lagging.

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A cornfield at dusk on the Great Plains (Photo: James Jordan/flickr)

Last year the U.S. produced 11.1 billion gallons of biofuel. Obama’s new plan states that by 2022, 21 billion gallons of renewable fuels will need to come from so-called advanced biofuels.

[Ed. Note: Yesterday, Tim Hurst over at Ecopolitology asked me to break down the recently released Obama administration plan to increase the amount of renewable fuels produced in our country from the current 11.1 billion gallons per year to 36 billion gallons per year in 2022. I happily obliged. The following is an excerpt from the post on Ecopolitology with a link at the end to read the full post.]

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A group of scientists from both the public and private arenas has announced that they’ve successfully engineered a microbe that contains all the bits required to turn raw plant matter directly into diesel without any refinement or intermediary steps required.

The microbe is a modified strain of E. coli (that’s right, the same type of bugger that’s responsible for some nasty gut infections) that has been enhanced to produce tailor-made diesel molecules, alcohols and waxes directly from hemicellulose—one of the main components of plants. Not only can the microbial products be used for fuel, but the team is also setting their sights on directly producing environmentally-friendly—and industrially-necessary—surfactants, solvents and lubricants.

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Anyone who has ever had to wait in line at most DMVs can attest that the government isn’t always exactly… efficient. It is full of red tape and bureaucracy and filling out form after form after form after form. Ever wonder where all of those forms go? Probably not files, not in today’s computerized world. No, they probably end up in the circular file.

Imagine if all of that paper waste could be turned into fuel? Well two vehicles, a Chevy HHR and a Ford F-150, have been converted by a company called Novozymes to use recycled waste-paper as fuel.

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We’ve talked a lot about electric motorcycles here at Gas 2.0. But what about biodiesel? Once the darling of many eco-modders, the fuel has largely fallen out of favor. But not with everyone.

Meet the Metalback motorcycle concept. Designed by Jordan Meadows, a man with plenty of street cred when it comes to vehicular design. The Metalback concept combines alternative fuels and recycled materials in a missle-shaped machine drawn straight from some science fiction dystopian future. And it just plain old looks cool.

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In a concise letter to the heads of the US Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, and Department of Agriculture as well as to the White House, a broad and diverse coalition of major consumer and industry associations has implored the EPA to slow down as it heads towards what seems to be a quick decision on allowing E15 (85% gasoline, 15% ethanol) blends to be sold at fueling stations for use in all vehicles—even those not originally designed for use with ethanol.

The letter writing coalition* represents virtually every retail gasoline provider, virtually every automobile manufacturer and a large majority of motorcycle, marine, and non-road equipment manufacturers in the US.

The EPA already allows the use of up up to 10% ethanol blends (E10) in all gasoline-powered vehicles and many states have adopted their own rules regarding the subject. Owners of small engined machines have been generally resistant to the ethanol blends, saying that higher amounts of ethanol can harm them.

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In a nice reminder of the fact that we can never predict the unintended consequences of even small changes to a complex system, researchers at Stanford University have found that using high blends of ethanol fuel in vehicles will likely increase health problems related to ozone as well as increase the amount of certain cancer-causing chemicals in the air we breathe when compared to the use of gasoline.

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