New York’s Ontario County is exploring the possibility of turning garbage into gas at the county’s landfill.

The county is debating whether to let Casella Waste Systems, which runs the landfill in the town of Seneca, build a $5 million pilot plant there. If the pilot proves successful, a $100 million plant could eventually be built on the site, reports the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. The idea will be debated at a public hearing tonight.

Currently the landfill takes in about 2,200 tons of trash a day from 33 counties, other states and Canada.

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10 kids ingested windshield wiper fluid at a daycare in Little Rock, AR. The kids, aged 2-7, each had about one ounce of the fluid.  One child had a high blood level of methanol, which can cause blindness.

Mmm.  Delicious florescent drinks. This is what happens when electric blue kids’ beverages look just like poisons.

But no, really: how did this happen?

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Ever wish you could buy a car that would run on just about anything?  An engine that gave you something approaching the efficiency of diesel, and the convenience of gas?  Last week, the forward-thinkers at Lotus announced just that.

It’s called the Lotus Omnivore, and we’ve got all the details on this little, all-aluminum marvel.

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If you’re in Tokyo tomorrow, make sure to check out Sony’s exhibit at the FC EXPO 2009. The company will display the newest version of its hybrid fuel cell, which contains a Li-on battery and a methanol fuel cell.

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If you’ve been itching for a portable methanol fuel cell charger, MTI MicroFuel Cells has you covered. The company’s prototype Mobion charger comes with a USB interface and provides up to 25 hours of power with each removable cartridge. A single cartridge can charge the average cell phone over 10 times, play 10,000 songs, or take over 6000 pictures.

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Fuel cells are seemingly attractive in comparison to lithium ion batteries because of their high energy potential: around sixteen times more energy than lithium ion batteries.

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The Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry has discovered a new method of producing methanol from glycerol Waste. According to the research team, ninety percent of methanol is currently produced from natural gas and the new process wont need to rely on any fossil fuels.

“We’re turning a waste material - glycerol - directly into a very useful product - methanol,” said Professor Edman Tsang, an expert in the development of new catalyst materials, and the main inventor behind the new method. “Around 350,000 tons of glycerol is incinerated in the US each year, and converting this to methanol gives you a portable store of energy, and potentially an economically viable new biofuel business.”

“Essentially, this is a way of getting methanol ‘for free’ from biomass,” said Tsang.  “Methanol itself is useful either as a fuel on its own or in biodiesel manufacture. It is also used widely in industrial chemistry.”

The advantage of the new process is that it is direct - not requiring multiple costly processing steps - and it works at a low temperature and low pressure.

“In industry, temperature costs money, but high pressure is even more expensive. This process operates under readily achievable, mild conditions of 100 degrees C and 20 bar of pressure.”

There is no large-scale industrial demand for glycerol right now, so utilizing this process would not only use something that would otherwise be wasted, it will help save energy in the production phase.

Isis Innovation has patented the technology, and will be working with Prof Tsang to commercialize the technology.

Source: Biofuel Review
Photo: Courtesy of Odd Bod via Flickr Creative Commons License

Yamaha Tesseract: Green Bike or Decepticon?

The future of transportation is in no way restricted to cars, considering that most of the world’s population gets by on some sort of bike. If you want to see what the future of individual transport might look like, take a look at the Yamaha Tesseract (above), and a slideshow of 11 other green motorcycles put together by Wired.

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The process works something like this: concentrated solar power from a giant solar furnace is used to superheat a set of catalytic cobalt ferrite rings that, once activated, literally rip carbon dioxide (CO2) molecules apart. As a result, CO2 is transformed into carbon monoxide, which can be converted into methanol, jet fuel, or even gasoline.

Sounds a little too good to be true, but researchers say it works and claim a prototype facility will be completed by April.

The idea of recycling carbon dioxide is not new, but has generally been considered too difficult and expensive to be worth the effort. But with oil prices exceeding $100 per barrel and concerns about global warming mounting, researchers are increasingly motivated to investigate carbon recycling. Los Alamos Renewable Energy, for example, has developed a method of using CO2 to generate electricity and fuel.

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