In what could be a major breakthrough, Joule Biotechnologies announced that it has directly produced fuel from the plentiful carbon dioxide in the air around us using highly engineered photosynthetic microbes.
While Chrysler’s alt-fuel plans for the future—and its integrity—seem uncertain at best, its cross-town rival General Motors is trying to make good on its fuel efficient pledges in a different way. This includes (finally) offering a Hummer with E85 flex-fuel capabilities, as promised in 2007.
Oh, and for those who are wishing for a Volt sub-brand, keep wishing. GM has no plans of spinning off the Volt as a brand of its own (as Toyota might do with the Prius). That won’t stop the General from spreading its hybrid drivetrain across other models, however.
As it stands right now, there are comparatively few places to purchase alternative fuels. As of 2005, there were approximately 168,987 gas stations in the United States; of those, just 2,200 sell E85 ethanol fuel.
No major oil outlets have fully embraced biofuels, although British Petroleum has just announced that it may begin commercial production of ethanol starting in 2010.
BP has partnered with Verenium to bring a commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol facility online next year to start bringing alternative fuels to a gas pump near you.
BP has big plans for biofuels and seems to be marching towards an alternative fuel future faster than many of its competitors. Verenium already has a demonstration plant in Louisiana capable of producing over a million gallons of cellulosic ethanol annually, and BP hopes to ramp production up. The Verenium process uses proprietary enzymes to break down grass feedstock and convert it to ethanol more efficiently.
On the heels of the opening of Coskata’s first flex ethanol facility capable of making ethanol from virtually any organic material, GM and Coskata have released a video (below) detailing the Coskata process. Unlike most promotional/informational videos that get dumped on the public, this one is actually rather informative.
Pennsylvania is beautiful this time of year, but I missed most of it since I made the 400+ mile drive mostly in the dark. It took eight hours of dodging speeding semi-trucks and going through many miles of tunnels, but I finally made it to the Westinghouse Plasma Center in Madison, PA. In case you’re asking, yes, the same Westinghouse that makes flat screen televisions (among other nifty tech stuff).
The Coskata semi-commercial flexible ethanol plant, dubbed “Lighthouse”, is located here. This facility is essentially a working scale model of a full size ethanol plant, and the processes and technology here can one day soon be scaled up to produce as much as a 100 million gallons of flex ethanol annually. The important word here is flexible, because unlike other ethanol products, the Coskata process can use just about any carbon matter to produce ethanol. This means the very garbage filling our dumps may one day instead fill our cars.
After the new Executive Order last week requiring every Federal Agency to accurately account for their greenhouse gas emissions—and then sharply reduce them 30% by 2020 [previous story]—the Navy has doubled down in their response.
Already the Navy uses 17% renewable energy (about like Iowa and even better than California), but they plan on achieving a faster reduction and a much tougher goal that that decreed by the president: fifty percent—some of which will be achieved by 2015. Or as US Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus put it: “Our Navy and Marine Corps has never backed away from a challenge.” [ed. note: THAT makes me so damn patriotic I have no words. Anybody who says greenies aren't patriotic can go suck it.]
A group of University of Kansas students have rigged up a 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle to run on a mix of biodiesel and battery power.
The team, calling themselves the Ecohawks, claim the quirky hybrid is capable of getting 50 MPG from a series of 10 lead-acid batteries and a biodiesel generator.
Performance-wise, although quite cool looking in a retro kind of way, the car isn’t exactly what you’d call a speedster, topping out as it does at a leisurely 30 mph.
That doesn’t seem to bother team-leader Prof. Chris Depcik though, who told reporters, “We have driven it around and reached approximately 30 mph, but this was more of a proof-of-concept drive without pushing the boundaries. We are currently getting the vehicle into road-ready shape to be driven safely in order to determine these values.” (More pics after the jump).
Today, Coskata Inc. unveiled their semi-commercial flex ethanol factory in Madison, PA. This factory will serve as the first commercially viable flex ethanol factory, which produces ethanol from a variety of feedstocks other than just grain—which is an important step to satisfy food vs. fuel issues and start moving past ethanol from corn.
According to Coskata, their process uses less than half the water needed to make a gallon of gas, while producing seven times the energy of the fossil fuel used in the process.
An analysis done by Biofuels Digest has come to the very surprising conclusion that an electric car will produce 30% more carbon dioxide emissions over its lifetime than a car powered by E85 corn ethanol. Not only that, the study also found that the same electric car will produce 21% more carbon dioxide than even a gasoline powered car.
These claims assume that 100% of the electricity for the EV comes from coal-fired power plants and that a comparable car would get 35 mpg—both of which seem like unrealistic assumptions. So I dug around the internet today to try and come up with more realistic numbers.
Attendees at a recent alternative fuels gathering in Washington are reporting that US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu remarked, “If it were up to me, I would put every cent into electric cars,” when referring to the way stimulus dollars should be distributed. With a focus on alternative and renewable fuels, the group was obviously shocked at the concept.
If this statement is being represented accurately, it would not only put Chu directly at odds with Obama administration policy, it would mean that he doesn’t really believe in how his department is distributing their $36.7 billion dollar slice of stimulus funds. The statement would also contradict Chu’s previous stances on biofuels development. Comment from DOE was not immediately available, but I’ve got a request in to confirm or deny the statement as accurate. I’ll update as soon as I hear word.
Update 8:00 PM Pacific Time 10/13/2009: DOE’s Director of Public Affairs, Dan Leistikow, responded to my request from earlier today in an email, saying “I can’t verify the quote the blogger is using from an undisclosed source at an undisclosed meeting, which is at best wildly out of context.” He also added, “Anyone who has spent five minutes listening to Secretary Chu also knows he is one of the country’s staunchest advocates for pursuing a broad portfolio of clean energy research, and has warned against investing all our resources in a single technology to the exclusion of all others.” Read the rest of this entry »
As part of a National Science Foundation grant program to examine cutting edge ways to make nature work for us, a team of scientists at Iowa State University have been awarded $2 million to unravel how some plants and algae can make hydrocarbons and discover if the genes that govern that process might be isolated.
“These plants are capturing solar energy and creating something that’s chemically identical to petroleum,” said Jackie Shanks, Iowa State’s Manley R. Hoppe Professor of Chemical Engineering, in a statement.
Just about this time last year I reported on the very promising and innovative Mcgyan® biodiesel process. It was one of the most popular stories gas 2.0 ran that year, and rightly so: the breakthrough seemed to deliver the possibility of making biodiesel in mere seconds from start to finish, reducing costs by half the price of other biodiesel, producing no waste, using no chemical reactants, and using any animal fat or vegetable oil as a feedstock.
At the time the company in charge of the project, Ever Cat fuels, had only succeeded at making a small-scale pilot operation of 50,000 gallons per year. But, as of 2 days ago, the process has been completely commercialized.
With the attention on first generation corn ethanol fading, the next big thing on the sustainable fuel horizon is nonfood biofuel crops. Within that category, inedible weeds are taking a front-row seat due to their relatively low demands on water, pesticides, and herbicides, and their reduced need for tilling and other mechanized soil prep. Some weeds with biofuel potential can also thrive on contaminated soils, absorbing and cleaning pollutants in a process called phytoremediation.
The demise of retail giant Filene’s Basement may have a positive effect on proponents of vertical urban farming and algae biofuels alike. Since 2007, the developers of a Filene’s site in downtown Boston have been unable to find funding to move the project forward. But now Höweler + Yoon Architecture and their partner Squared have put forth a proposal to erect a temporary vertical, modular, algae bioreactor high-rise in its place.
Arizona Public Service, the state’s largest electricity provider, has secured $70.5 million in stimulus funds to expand an innovative project that turns carbon dioxide emissions from a coal power plant into biofuel using algae. While part of the funds will be used to scale up the algae processing portion, some of the funds will also be used to investigate the potential benefits of turning the coal into a gas prior to burning it for power.
The concept of creating two products — electricity and fuel — from the same process is known as cogeneration. In this case, the cogeneration also helps to reduce environmental pollution. It’s an idea that has been gathering support as a way to make coal less polluting while finding an additional revenue source to pay for the pollution control itself. In fact, a while back I reported on a similar pilot project in Oregon.
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