Gas 2.0

The City of Copenhagen has announced the establishment of its first hydrogen fueling station, alongside a mini-fleet of fuel cell vehicles, and hopes that the move will help it towards the ambitious goal of becoming the first carbon-neutral capital city in the world by 2025.

Following the recent news of a growing hydrogen fueling system in Germany, the new facility also opens up the intriguing proposition of a cross-border European hydrogen infrastructure.

According to grandly titled Technology and Environment Mayor Klaus Bondam, “Today we are putting Copenhagen on the map as a champion of clean transport. Together with [fuel cell vehicle integrator] H2 Logic, Copenhagen is setting in motion the development of hydrogen transport in Denmark and in northern Europe, because the hydrogen filling station in Copenhagen will help provide future hydrogen-powered vehicles from Scandinavia and Germany with hydrogen.”

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According to two unnamed sources as reported in the Guardian—one current International Energy Agency (IEA) employee and one former—the IEA has been purposely painting an overly rosy picture of the remaining available world oil supplies to avoid panicking the public. Apparently this obfuscation has been a result of heavy pressure from the United States.

As one whistleblower put it, “Many inside the [IEA] believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources.”

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In many ways plastics are simply synthetic compounds that mimic and try to improve upon substances we find widespread in nature—polymers such as you might find in wood, leaves, seeds and fur. Bio-based plastics (those derived from biological sources other than fossil fuels) have been around for more than 100 years. In fact, celluloid, the first synthetic plastic ever made was invented in the mid 1800s, and—you guessed it—was bio-based.

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As far as I am concerned, the two biggest problems facing humanity are kicking our addiction to oil, and figuring out a way to get rid of all our garbage without stuffing it into big, endless holes in the ground.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could kill two birds with one stone? One day, we might be able to, but for now at least one company is working on a way to fix their fuel woes within the confines of their own business.

Waste Management, one of the biggest garbage companies in the country, says it will be able to produce 13,000 gallons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) daily from just one landfill in Northern California.

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In 1877 Russian scientist Dimitri Mendeelev suggested that the large deposits of oil and gas we find under the surface of the Earth could be made without the decay of long-dead organisms in a process called abiotic synthesis of methane.

Since then the theory has been relegated to the back shelf due to a lack of evidence and the prevailing conventional wisdom that all deep oil and gas deposits arise from decaying prehistoric animal and plant material.

While it’s no doubt that the decay of dead animals and plants is one pathway to the creation of Earth’s oil and natural gas deposits (potentially the largest), new research done with high-tech equipment simulating the conditions of deep earth suggests that Mendeelev’s theory is correct.

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Conventional drag racing is pretty much the furthest thing from a green sport, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying the hell out of it. Yet even this tire-melting, gas-wasting sport is diving into the realm of alternative fuels for a variety of reasons.

Roush, a leading builder of aftermarket Mustangs, is developing two Mustangs for the drag strip powered not by gasoline, but clean-burning propane.

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The U.S. military has been pushing for the development of alternative fuels for a while now, and nobody paid much attention until the Pentagon finally put a price tag on the oil habit. As reported by Roxana Tiron in thehill.com, last week Pentagon officials disclosed that getting conventional petroleum fuel to remote combat locations in Afghanistan costs a whopping $400 per gallon.

There couldn’t be a more clear illustration of why the “drill baby drill” mentality is a non-sequitur when it comes to energy security.  Regardless of whether petroleum fuels are domestic or imported, they need to be transported to their point of use.  That’s not much of a problem when you’ve got modern seaports, highways and fuel depots, but to paraphrase one infamous former Secretary of Defense, you have to fight the war you have, not the war that’s got the ideal infrastructure to support your fuel of choice.

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In an unexpected U-turn, the U.S. Senate has agreed to continue to back research for the next generation of hydrogen cars - funding that the Obama administration had earlier proposed to cut.

The move came last Thursday as Senate members voted to commit $187 million to hydrogen research, almost as much as was promised before the indecision.

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Cow poop is a leading contributor of nitrous oxide and ammonia into the atmosphere, adding heartily to global warming. Cars, as we all know, provide their own fair share of noxious fumes to the environment. But a British team of engineers and racers is working on a way to kill two birds with one stone (metaphorically of course) by developing a race car that can run on cow poop.

Realizing that most technology found in our daily drivers was often first developed for the race track, Oaktec has announced plans to develop a manure-powered rally car, giving all new meaning to the phrase “This car runs like crap!” [ed. note: cow farts and burps contribute far more GHGs than poop, but hey, you gotta start somewhere]

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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.

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Germany has launched an exciting new plan to establish a national hydrogen fuel network, which could be fully operational as early as 2015.

On behalf of the German government, the transport minister Wolfgang Tiefensee has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with eight industrial partners to set up the H2 mobility scheme. High profile participants include Daimler, EnBW, Linde, OMV, Shell, Total, Vattenfall and the NOW GmbH National Organisation Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology.

Speaking about the groundbreaking plan, the first of its kind anywhere in the world, Tiefensee said, “Our aim is to continue consistent and systematic promotion of electromobility based on batteries and fuel cells. Today we can see that Germany is setting the pace when it comes to hydrogen and fuel cell technology. We are aiming at establishing the nationwide supply with hydrogen in Germany at around 2015 in order to support the serial-production of fuel cell vehicles.”
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Here’s one for the “surprising” list: a consortium of researchers and business partners at the University of East Anglia in Britain has found that they can convert diesel buses to run on either diesel or methane for a “small fraction of the cost” of purchasing a natural gas-only bus. The implications for Britain’s (and the world’s) fleets of already-existing diesel buses are huge.

The buses will run on biomethane — which is methane captured from landfill decomposition or other sources of surface biological decomposition and not derived from buried fossil sources. Methane is a large part of what makes up natural gas. According to the consortium, the converted bus will reduce emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases by about half when compared to a standard diesel-only bus.

The converted vehicle was originally part of the local bus fleet run by the Anglian Bus & Coach company. After conversion of the standard Mercedes diesel engine, the bus now runs from 60-80% of the time on biomethane and the rest on diesel. Having the option to switch back and forth provides flexibility to the bus operator in the case of a shortage of either fuel. Read the rest of this entry »

New findings from the Cassini mission to Titan — Saturn’s largest moon — show that its atmosphere contains about 29 billion gallons of propane.

Given that the average new car fuel economy in the US is currently about 20 miles per gallon, and that propane-converted cars get about the same mileage as regular gas cars, there’s enough propane on Titan to take one average car more than 23 million times around the Earth’s equator.

Wow! So what you say? Even though that may sound staggering, you still aren’t convinced that it really means anything to you? What if I told you this: that’s only enough propane to satisfy the propane needs of the US for 18 months.

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Mercedes has dipped its toes into the world of hydrogen power (video below) with the launch of its first-ever production fuel-cell vehicle, the B-class F-cell.

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But from an another point of view, are wild oil price fluctuations really all that bad?

In my experience, it doesn’t take a higher degree and advanced knowledge of oil economics to see that rampant speculation is behind the crazy swings in oil prices we’ve seen in recent years. Even so, it’s a topic that economists and pundits have debated ad nauseum.

In what may be one of the most exhaustive analyses of the issues surrounding the murky field to date, Rice University researchers from the Baker Institute for Public Policy have released a new policy paper — “Who is in the Oil Futures Market and How Has It Changed?” — aimed at setting the record as straight as can be.

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