Published on November 4th, 2009
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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Published on October 28th, 2009
Without pavement and parking lots we would still be traveling cross-country in Conestoga wagons on 6-inch deep ruts and be breathing lungfulls of dust every time a vehicle drove by at the Kwik-E-Mart. Needless to say, pavement is one of the many things that makes modern life possible.
But, like everything else in our modern life, the more advanced we get in our ability to collect and analyze data, the more we realize that the good stuff always seems to have its awful consequences too. It’s the same story with pavement.
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Published on October 6th, 2009
Researchers have found a way to create a battery out of Nickel and Lithium that can store more than 3.5 times the energy of lithium-ion batteries and are much safer to boot.
Lithium-ion batteries are great and all—having heralded in a new age of portable electronics and allowed for the possibility of mass-market electric cars—but they have a few major drawbacks. For instance, they have a propensity to catch fire and explode and, although they have a much better energy storage capacity than say lead-acid or nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries, they still weigh too much to pack more than a couple hundred miles of range into a passenger car.
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Published on October 2nd, 2009
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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Published on September 29th, 2009
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.
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Published on September 29th, 2009
This is one of those topics I’m just not sure what to think of…
When the average person hears the term fuel cell, typically what comes to mind is something that mysteriously makes electricity from hydrogen. In reality the process isn’t all that mysterious—basically the hydrogen is split into its component parts (electrons and protons) and the protons are allowed to flow through the cell, but the electrons are forced to travel another path, which creates the current (and charges the battery or runs the motors or turns on the lights).
Although the hydrogen fuel cell is the most common type of cell, you can make fuel cells that use many different things, including hydrocarbons and sugars. They all work on the same basic principal, but hydrogen fuel cells are considered superior because their only emission is water vapor and they produce lots of energy.
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Published on September 11th, 2009
A group of researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden have discovered that a particular type of algae — with a bad reputation for causing damaging algal blooms in oceans throughout the world — produces a substance that can be used to make inexpensive, non-toxic, simple-to-build, flexible, thin and durable batteries that, after optimization, are expected to perform on par with today’s most advanced lithium-ion batteries.
The key to the discovery lies in the way in which the algae, Cladophora, produce a unique type of cellulose with a very large surface area (approximately 80 square meters of surface area per gram of material).
By coating this algal cellulose material with a thin layer of a well-known, conductive polymer, called polypyrrole (PPy), the team has “succeeded in producing a battery that weighs almost nothing and that has set new charge-time and capacity records for polymer-cellulose-based [non-metallic] batteries,” according to Gustav Nyström, a doctoral student in nanotechnology and one of the main researchers.
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Published on September 1st, 2009
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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Published on July 23rd, 2009
Oregon State University Researcher Kaichang Li is already well-known in the research world for developing a non-toxic, soy-based adhesive to make greener plywood for cabinets, so it’s almost no surprise that his next research discovery is along the same lines.
Turning his attention to the materials commonly used as reinforcing fillers in tires — carbon black and silica — Li has figured out a way to use plant products to substitute for these toxic and energy intensive conventional materials.
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Published on June 19th, 2009
Suggestions are floated in the current issue of Industrial Engineering & Chemical Research on the best way to farm living diatoms to turn their oil into a new oil field containing “massive amounts of gasoline.”
As previously fossilized fuel supplies dwindle, pinhead-sized diatoms - at the bottom of the food chain - have become the focus of the attention of the rapacious creatures at the top of the food chain. As we humans run out of oil, we have begun to cast about desperately for our new oil supplies.
Where better to look than at the tiny creatures who died to make us oil millions of years ago?
Lets not wait another million years for currently living diatoms to leave us new oil supplies. Lets extract their oil while they are still alive!
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Published on April 1st, 2009
A Flemish company has announced plans to sell what it claims to be the world’s only true zero emissions vehicle, the HPV (pictured above).
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Published on March 9th, 2009
A well-known biofuels researcher at Harvard has developed a synthetic ribosome — one of the fundamental building blocks for creating artificial life — which, initially, could have major implications for the creation of designer enzymes to make cheaper and more energy efficient cellulosic ethanol.
Dr. George Church, co-founder of the next generation biofuels company LS9, made the stunning announcement in a telephone call with reporters.
“If you are going to make synthetic life that is anything like current life … you have got to have this … biological machine,” Dr. Church said in comments to Reuters.
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Tags:
Artificial Life,
Biofuels,
Cellusosic Ethanol,
Dr. George Church,
Harvard,
LS9,
Mike Jewett,
Protein,
Protein Synthesis,
Ribosome,
RNA
Published on February 14th, 2009
MIT undergraduates have created a regenerative shock absorber that can increase vehicle fuel efficiency by 10 percent. Not only does this conserve energy that would otherwise be wasted as heat, it also reportedly results in a smoother ride than conventional shocks.
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Published on February 13th, 2009
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have come up with a straightforward two-step process to convert cellulose — the ubiquitous energy-rich molecules found in all plant material — into a furfural biofuel.
To make this simple process reality, Ron Raines and his graduate student, Joseph Binder, developed a special mix of solvents and additives with an extraordinary capacity to dissolve cellulose.
“This solvent system can dissolve cotton balls, which are pure cellulose,” says Raines. “And it’s a simple system—not corrosive, dangerous, expensive or stinky.”
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Published on December 9th, 2008
Researchers reported Monday that they have re-engineered a common bacteria to produce complex and energy-dense alcohols similar to the hydrocarbon compounds found in fuels such as gasoline. This is the first time these types of alcohols have been synthesized by bacteria (man-made or otherwise) in the lab.
E. coli is normally found in the guts of most warm-blooded animals (yes, even yours) and if you’ve had an encounter with it that you remember, chances are you spent the weekend on the toilet wishing you were dead. Yet, while it’s true that some strains of e. coli can cause food poisoning in humans, most are actually quite harmless.
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