In 2006 I attended a BIO meeting in Toronto focused on the new bio-based economy.  Oil had just risen to $70/barrel and it was a time when environmental NGOs, biotech companies and even oil companies seemed to be on the “same page” in terms of their enthusiasm for moving to plant-based feedstocks as the perfect alternative to oil dependency.  With the very obvious international security costs of the oil economy, and what were then thought to be unimaginable energy costs, it was a remarkable sort of celebration event for all the alternative energy and materials folks who has suffered under the decades of cheap oil.  As much as I was happy to see such “multi-stakeholder” agreement, I was sad because anyone with an agricultural perspective could see a train-wreck coming.

People were making presentations about cool second generation innovations like “Cellulosic” ethanol from sources like switchgrass or Miscanthus and also about ethanol alternatives like butanol.  People were talking about bio-materials for even things like the auto industry.  However; the side conversations were about the huge boom underway in the corn ethanol industry.  Orders for stainless steel tanks were back-logged two years.  What had started as a local, farmer-cooperative funded industry had become a venture capital frenzy.  I could see that long before the promise of “second generation” biofuels could be realized, corn ethanol would get to be big enough that it would end up fracturing the amazing consensus about the bio-economy that was functioning at that conference. 

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A new study led by Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) senior scientist Jerry Melillo says no, they aren’t green (when it comes to climate change). However, there are still many important factors to keep in mind before claiming this is the end of a long and complicated discussion.

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Today, Coskata Inc. unveiled their semi-commercial flex ethanol factory in Madison, PA. This factory will serve as the first commercially viable flex ethanol factory, which produces ethanol from a variety of feedstocks other than just grain—which is an important step to satisfy food vs. fuel issues and start moving past ethanol from corn.

According to Coskata, their process uses less than half the water needed to make a gallon of gas, while producing seven times the energy of the fossil fuel used in the process.

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With the attention on first generation corn ethanol fading, the next big thing on the sustainable fuel horizon is nonfood biofuel crops. Within that category, inedible weeds are taking a front-row seat due to their relatively low demands on water, pesticides, and herbicides, and their reduced need for tilling and other mechanized soil prep. Some weeds with biofuel potential can also thrive on contaminated soils, absorbing and cleaning pollutants in a process called phytoremediation.

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A team of researchers at MIT are engineering a strain of bacteria, which is similar to the type that causes tuberculosis, to produce biofuel.

The researchers say that the bacteria are useful because they are hungry for a number of sugars and toxic compounds and produce lipids that can be converted to biodiesel.

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Arizona Public Service, the state’s largest electricity provider, has secured $70.5 million in stimulus funds to expand an innovative project that turns carbon dioxide emissions from a coal power plant into biofuel using algae. While part of the funds will be used to scale up the algae processing portion, some of the funds will also be used to investigate the potential benefits of turning the coal into a gas prior to burning it for power.

The concept of creating two products — electricity and fuel — from the same process is known as cogeneration. In this case, the cogeneration also helps to reduce environmental pollution. It’s an idea that has been gathering support as a way to make coal less polluting while finding an additional revenue source to pay for the pollution control itself. In fact, a while back I reported on a similar pilot project in Oregon.

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Shaq Wants Your Leftover Beer and Wine for Making Ethanol

First, who ever has leftover alcohol except maybe these guys? The Shaq-backed MicroFueler is a 250-gallon tank for organic feedstock, such as waste wine and beer, that converts it into pure ethanol. It also doubles as a fuel pump and the only waste product is distilled water.

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Angola has been riven by conflict and it’s more than three decades since the government subsided sugar cane production, but now a 30,000 hectare area of land is to be planted with sugar cane in a dual attempt to establish a biofuel industry and to rebuild the poor agricultural sector which suffered after years of conflict.

Oil rich but food poor

Angola’s economy has been largely dependent on oil and diamonds since the civil war ended in 2002. Now the government aims to recreate some farming sectors. The country used to produce sugar, but for many years the entire sugar consumption of Angola has been imported. Now, in an attempt to decentralise industry away from Luanda, to boost farming and to create new jobs, the sugar cane project is taking shape.

It’s hoped the plantation will produce 280,000 tonnes of sugar from its own processing plant, and that the waste will be used, along with the ethanol harvested from the cane residue, to produce around 217 megawatts a year of electricity.

Foreign investment fears

While this is a multi-layered project, the tendency of African nations to invest in non-food crop is worrying the FAO which says that private and foreign ownership of large tracts of African land could destabilise local communities who will be deprived of access to water, food and other natural resources. The company managing the project, Biocom, is a three way partnership between Brazil’s Odebrecht, Angola’s Damer, and Sonangol, the Angolan state oil company. African governments need support to build the agricultural infrastructure that will allow them to become food secure, but partnership processes like this one are often viewed with suspicion by local people who fear that they will lose their land, or that the crops will be grown or processed in ways that have been outlawed in the developed world.

Sugar cane courtesy of Cristobal Alvarado Minic at Flickr under a creative commons license

360,000 Tons of Watermelon Spoil Every Year in the U.S.

Almost 40% of all watermelons grown here in the U.S. never make it to market due to imperfections, bad spots, or for being oddly shaped (um, haven’t these farmers seen the square ones). But waste not, want not. The watermelon juice could actually be used to produce ethanol.

Truck Runs on 100% Recycled Coffee Grounds

The truck above is powered by a wood gas generator, except it runs fully on coffee grounds. The Cafe Racer is a 1975 GMC pickup that essentially burns used coffee to create a combustible gas. The gas is filtered on its way to the engine. I hope it’s fair trade coffee.

The Innards of 45 Million Turkeys Turned in to Fuel

On Thanksgiving–which is just around the corner–Americans will gobble down over 45 million turkeys. But we don’t eat the whole turkey so slaughterhouses are left with rotting heads, feet and all those innards. So a factory farm in Carthage, Missouri is turning all that waste into fuel using a thermal conversion process from Changing World Technologies.

Guy Builds Engine that Runs on Mountain Dew

Inventor Paul Patone has created the GEET (Global Environmental Energy Technology) Fuel Processor. A mod that allows you to run your car on about 80% water. Or possibly, just a nice cold Tab. He prefers Mountain Dew.

5,000 Miles Traveled Using 80,000 Chocolate Bars

A chocolate powered Ford Iveco Cargo lorry traveled for almost an entire month through France, Spain, Morocco, Mauritania and all the way to Timbuktu and doing so while facing the unforgiving Saharan Desert. The whole trip took about 80,000 chocolate bars.

Farm Saves More Than $700K Using Onion Juice for Energy

Gills Onions has saved a whopping $700K off their electricity bill by using onion juice to power most everything on the farm. They saved an additional $400K just on disposal costs alone. Using an anaerobic digester, they convert onion waste into biogas which is then conditioned and finally turned into methane.

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In an effort to drum up attention and support for their algae-based biofuel, Sapphire Energy has announced they will conduct a coast-to-coast journey in their “Algaeus” plug-in hybrid. Part electric hybrid, part biofuel vehicle, Sapphire claimes the Algaeus will get 150 miles per gallon from its hybrid/biofuel drivetrain.

The Algaeus will visit 10 cities, starting in San Francisco on September 8th and ending in New York City on the 18th.

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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.

Under this agreement, BP will provide the cash — up to $10 million for just the first phase — and Martek will provide the research expertise in algae fermentation technology. The idea is to develop a cost effective method of converting basic sugars derived from biomass into lipids, or microbial oils, with fermentation microorganisms. Chemical and thermocatalytic processes would then convert the oils into various types of biofuels.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 a vitally important one in terms of this nation’s “energy future”.

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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.

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Traditional farming is about to make a come-back across Uganda, according the country’s Agriculture Minister, Hope Mwesigye. Traditionally, Ugandan’s rich soil and fairly abundant rainfall allowed farmers to grow a range of staple foods, from plantains, cassava and sweet potatoes through to grains like millet, sorghum and corn as well as beans, and groundnuts.

Since the 1980s, the major cash crop in Uganda has been coffee, closely followed by tobacco, and then tea and cotton, although the ‘70s and ‘80s saw collapses in the infrastructure which meant that cotton and tea in particular lost their markets and farmers started to sell their staple crops for cash in regional and local markets instead.

Diversification was the message of the 1990s and many non-traditional exports were attempted, supported by the World Bank and the Ugandan Development Bank. So why now does the government want to return to traditional farming practices?

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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.”

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