Green Options

Hand-built, eco-modified, and wood-powered cars raced across the Bay State this weekend driving 100 miles on just a single gallon of fuel. Aptly named the One Gallon Challenge, the event was part of a four-day long festival in Boston that celebrated clean technologies. Welcome to GreenFest 2009!

Garage-Built Car Gets 105 MPG, Cost $2,500 To Build

Frustrated with the price of filling up his Toyota, Jory Squibb built the Moonbeam. It has [...]

Global warming. Climate change. The greatest threat to continued human survival. The rhetoric these days can be awfully scary regarding new energy and oil. Sometimes it feels like we’ve all been doomed already by a hyper-active media always looking for the “next big story” to terrify us with. But I don’t really take anything seriously, so I am always on the lookout for a fun twist on a real problem.

What could be fun about climate change, you ask? Well, besides the fact that my home might end up as beach front property one day if we don’t mend our sins, how about a race? One that challenges contestants to go 100 miles on a single gallon of gas? That is the goal of the One-Gallon Challenge, where six contestants and their very different vehicles have to make the journey from Greenfield, MA to Boston in three hours using as little fuel as possible.

It’s almost been a year since Virent Energy partnered up with Shell to advance their biogasoline synthesis technology, known as bioforming.

I’ve been curious about their progress, and recently listened to a lecture given at the University of Wisconsin-Madison by Virent researcher Paul Blommel on the bioforming process.

During bioforming, sugars and polymers are rearranged into alkanes (biogasoline) that can be used for fuel in combustion engines. The gasoline produced is of a higher volatility and better production efficiency than corn ethanol.

Virent is still in the developmental stages of gasoline production. Their patented aqueous phase reforming (APR) technology and BioForming process is currently producing a liter per day of pure gasoline from plant material. For now they are mainly using simple sugars found in plants, but plan to tap into the more woody lignocellulose too.

After the lecture, I had a chance to talk with Blommel in depth. Read more of that conversation after the jump.