Green Options

Hundreds of thousands of tons of watermelons are tossed every year because they aren’t good enough for market. A new study finds that the juice from these watermelons could easily be used to create the biofuel ethanol and other helpful products.

The energy giant BP and Martek Biosciences, a Maryland based company that uses micro algae to produce oil-based nutritional and dietary supplements, signed a Joint Development Agreement (JDA) earlier this month to produce microbial oils for biofuels applications.

For some reason, gearheads and greenies (that is how I refer to you, deal) don’t really seem to get along. There is this huge gap between people who like to go fast and people who are trying to reduce their carbon footprint. I admit, many vehicles with speed as a primary concern are far from eco-friendly, but more so than ever, individuals are modifying their own cars for their own purposes. Whether that is going fast, or going green, turning a wrench is still turning a wrench.

That is why I love this little luxury item (which incidentally costs more than my house). A 500 horsepower super-quad equipped with BMW’s V12 engine that runs only E-85 fuel.

Austrian scientists are putting the ‘fun’ in ‘fungus’ by forcing organisms which are usually asexual to have sex instead.

The hope is that the fungus would then be easier to breed, which would allow researchers to create organisms that are more efficient at degrading cellulose for the purpose of making biofuel.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from David Hone, Climate Change Adviser for Shell.

I have been in Sao Paulo this week at Sustentavel 2009, perhaps the premiere Sustainable Development event in Brazil, if not all of South America. At the opening I represented the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and then on the first day of presentations I participated in the main climate change panel session.

What is clear is that there is a passion in Brazil for sustainability – from the huge issues they face in the Amazon region to the road congestion in Sao Paulo. Talking with delegates at Sustentavel, it is also clear that the country faces an interesting future in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

With the fluctuating price of oil, a finite resource, and concerns over CO2 emissions, many energy companies and developers have turned to utilizing biomass as alternative fuel (biofuel). This trend is actually taking two pathways: using biomass to convert to ethanol to power automobiles (which has been around for awhile now), and, converting biomass to electricity to power electric (or hybrid) vehicles (a more recent alternative). The question of which path is most efficient, sustainable, and less carbon-intensive is an [...]

Researchers have discovered that using electrolyzed water in the pretreatment of ethanol waste products can create a clean and effective acetone-butanol-ethanol fuel mix.

Previously a similar method aimed at deriving biofuel from ethanol waste products required the use of harsh chemicals like sulfuric acid, which aside from being a pollutant also had ill-effects that made the method impractical. But because electrolyzed water is nontoxic, biofuel can be derived effectively and efficiently from byproducts previously labeled as waste.

11 billion pounds of chicken feather meal are accumulated annually by the poultry industry in the U.S., and if a process developed by scientists in Nevada moves forward, those chicken parts could be used to produce 153 million gallons of biodiesel a year, and 593 million gallons worldwide.

Uganda’s Agriculture Minister said that she regretted the fact that Ugandan citizens are still dying of hunger in a country that has enough crops to export to other parts of Africa. New national laws may be imposed that require every household to grow its own root crops such as cassava and sweet potatoes.

Earlier this month, a team of scientists at the University of North Dakota’s Energy and Environmental Research Center (EERC) successfully tested a new biofuel based on a mixture of canola and soybean oils, and claim it may be the key to zero emission aviation [video].

The new super-biofuel, known as Jet Propellant-8 (JP-8) was used to launch a rocket above the Mojave Desert, where it approached the speed of sound and reached an altitude of 20,000 feet - a major leap forward in biofuel-powered flight.

Speaking about the launch Carsten Heide, associate director for the EERC said, “We demonstrated that this fuel is a flying fuel, and is 100% renewable and burns clean. It would open up the possibility to run 100% renewable, clean planes. You can see in the picture how clean it burns.”

A far reaching report has called on the aviation industry to drastically increase the use of biofuels, to make a 60% reduction in its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

The study, called ‘Green Skies Thinking‘, was published today by right wing think-tank Policy Exchange, and advocates the phase-in of an EU Sustainable Bio-Jet Fuel Blending Mandate by 2020, which would force aviation companies to commit to a rising proportion of jet fuel from sustainable bio-jet fuels.

Crucially, the report also reckons that growing the feedstock needed for advanced biofuels would require significantly less land and be more sustainable than first generation biofuels such as bioethanol and biodiesel, generally used by road transport.