Gas 2.0

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by filmmaker Joe Berlinger, director of Crude. For more information visit the Crude film website.

During the summer of 2005, a charismatic American environmental lawyer named Steven Donziger knocked on my Manhattan office door. He was running a $27 billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorean inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest and was looking for a filmmaker to tell his clients’ story.

Since I am not known as an environmental filmmaker — my last film, “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” was a warts-and-all portrait of a heavy metal band in crisis — I was a little surprised that Donziger had sought me out to me to make his pitch.

The story the lawyer told me was indeed shocking: From the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, Texaco (now Chevron) dumped 18 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste into the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador, creating a 1,700-square-mile “cancer death zone” the size of Rhode Island. The plaintiffs he represented alleged that birth defects, leukemia, miscarriages and other ailments were plaguing the people of the region, and the Amazon itself — one of the few places on Earth to survive the last ice age — was gasping for breath under the strain of oil exploitation.

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Earlier this week we covered the announcement that OriginOil had created a Live Extraction process for converting algae to oil coined, ‘milking’. This is just one of several big breakthroughs the company has had during the past year so I decided to catch up with CEO Riggs Eckelberry to get his take on algae to fuel.

Q: Due to this breakthrough technology (Live Extraction) and some of the others you’ve recently announced, how soon do you think you’ll be able to use this technology to produce algal fuels at a commercial scale?

A: Due to the lag in actually building large scale projects, the ability will come long before the fact. Also, we won’t build or produce ourselves, but instead we will provide technology and devices, and help design, build and maintain these sites. The next step is a pilot plant which could occur as early as next year.

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More Media:

• David Letterman Slams Chevy Volt, Tesla CEO Agrees
• Realizing the Dream of a Luxury Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle with Henrik Fisker (interview)
• Better Place: Shai Agassi on Gavin Newsom’s Radio Show

GreenTalk Radio host Sean Daily speaks to Henrik Fisker, CEO and lead designer of Fisker Automotive. Henrik Fisker is not your average green car designer. Considered something of a legend in the luxury automobile industry, the 45-year old master designer is famous for an array of well-known luxury class automobiles including the BMW Z8, Aston Martin DB9 and the Aston Martin V8 Vantage. Read the rest of this entry »

Professor Daniel Sperling Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California Davis visited The Daily Show last week to discuss hybrids, advanced batteries, alternative fuels, transportation policy and more. Sperling’s book Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability was published by Oxford University Press in January 2009.

Carbon Motors Corporation announcing the unveiling of it’s Carbon ‘E7’, the world’s first purpose-built law enforcement vehicle. The car will be rolled out during the “2008 Pure Justice Tour” of nine U.S. cities for the 115th Annual International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Conference and Exposition.

The vehicle, with a high powered clean-diesel engine capable of running on biodiesel, will display a robust collection of world-class technological and design enhancements, including an ergonomically correct cockpit inspired by jet fighters.

The Carbon ‘E7’ – the temporary program code used until the law enforcement community selects a vehicle name – represents the next generation of law enforcement technology as the first vehicle in history designed and engineered from the ground up and bumper-to-bumper specifically for law enforcement operations.

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This post was originally published on Eco-Libris blog on September 28.

Bill Roth is the author of the new and important book “On Empty (Out of Time)“, which readers have described as “America’s final “wake-up call”" and “A must read if you want freedom from high pump prices!”.

We reviewed the book at the beginning of the month and I felt afterwards that this issue is way too important and requires an interview with the author to learn more about his views and thoughts on the energy issues we’re facing.

Firstly here’s a little background of the author (see also photo below): Bill Roth has a solid experience in the energy sector, with a career that included posts such as senior VP of marketing and sales with PG&E Energy Services and COO of Texaco Ovonics Hydrogen Solutions. Currently he is the President of NCCT, a San Francisco-based consulting firm helping businesses define and integrate Sustainability into their strategies, performance metrics, branding/marketing and business processes.. He is also Entrepreneur.com’s Green Business Coach.

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Click the image above to hear Richard Branson, head of Virgin Atlantic Airways, talk about his commitment to develop “clean fuels” for aviation. Back in 2006 Branson said he’d put 100% of Virgin’s future profits, or $3 billion over the next 10 years, into fighting global warming. That includes $1 billion earmarked for alternative fuels, including a proprietary “Virgin fuel” developed for cars, trucks, trains, and of course, aircraft.

Learn more from the Washington Post interview above…

Electric and hybrid electric car manufacturer Aptera has been turning heads since the first announced their space-age looking Typ1 prototype. The sub $30,000 electric version of the Typ1 has a range of 120 miles and is expected to be ready for limited release later this year.

Take a look at the latest video from Aptera, a guided tour of their factory:

You can also see pictures of the facility here.

Related Post: Aptera’s $26,000 Electric Car and 300 MPG Hybrid Coming Soon

Cool replica of the Lotus 7 with plenty of horsepower and legendary performance.

Source:

I happened across this video on algae biofuel today: a company I’ve never heard of, Valcent Products, claims they can grow algae to produce oil yields of 100,000 gallons per acre. That’s the upper range of estimates I’ve seen for algae production—an absolutely phenomenal amount of oil—which Valcent attributes to their ‘high density vertical bioreactor’ system. Check it out (more video after the jump):

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Put six-gallons of water in your fuel tank and drive anywhere you wish. The only thing you’ll need to replace, is a bit more water.

Last May, I wrote about Jim Hunt, a student at Carl Sandburg College in Galesburg, Illinois concerning his plasmatic induction system that turns water into hydrogen gas to fuel your vehicle.

Today, the system works, and Jim is looking for a company to manufacture and market his invention. His patent is secure, the system is proven and now ready to produce. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the first time a plane powered by a hydrogen cell has left the ground with a pilot at the controls. Boeing said there’s still a lot to do before hydrogen fuel cells will power commercial airliners. As the technology progresses, Boeing says traditional jet fuel will be phased out as renewable sources take its place.

Source

Not everyone is waiting until 2010 to get their first plug-in hybrid. As I reported previously, Hybrids Plus out of Boulder, CO, is offering conversions for the Toyota Prius and Ford Escape hybrids, turning them into 100 MPG+ superstars.

I’ve collected a little more background on Prius hybrid hacks, and a few more resources. Check out this video, which should give you a good feeling for what getting 100 MPG would be like: Read the rest of this entry »