In many ways plastics are simply synthetic compounds that mimic and try to improve upon substances we find widespread in nature—polymers such as you might find in wood, leaves, seeds and fur. Bio-based plastics (those derived from biological sources other than fossil fuels) have been around for more than 100 years. In fact, celluloid, the first synthetic plastic ever made was invented in the mid 1800s, and—you guessed it—was bio-based.

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More efficient energy storage has been a difficult issue for scientists to crack. It is a major issue preventing more widespread use of renewable energy, and solar energy in particular.

Is this project, one funded by a true oil giant, the one that will make it happen?

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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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Hawaii’s initiative will make it possible for homeowners and businesses to sell power they generate from small to medium-scale renewable energy projects (i.e. solar panels) to Hawaii’s main power producers at higher than market-value rates.

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The U.S. military has been pushing for the development of alternative fuels for a while now, and nobody paid much attention until the Pentagon finally put a price tag on the oil habit. As reported by Roxana Tiron in thehill.com, last week Pentagon officials disclosed that getting conventional petroleum fuel to remote combat locations in Afghanistan costs a whopping $400 per gallon.

There couldn’t be a more clear illustration of why the “drill baby drill” mentality is a non-sequitur when it comes to energy security.  Regardless of whether petroleum fuels are domestic or imported, they need to be transported to their point of use.  That’s not much of a problem when you’ve got modern seaports, highways and fuel depots, but to paraphrase one infamous former Secretary of Defense, you have to fight the war you have, not the war that’s got the ideal infrastructure to support your fuel of choice.

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For those concerned about the US economy or national security risks, T. Boone Pickens and data from the US Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) show us that foreign oil imports should be at the top of our list. We rely very heavily on foreign oil and send a good chunk of our money to other countries to supply us with that oil — $25 billion last month alone!

Take a closer look.

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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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You might wonder why Iraq, one of the most oil-rich countries in the world, would want to invest in building up its biofuels sector. At first blush it seems like a stretch of resources for a country trying to recover after years of war.

However, In Iraq the agricultural sector has long been the dominant source of jobs. In fact, much of modern agriculture was developed in the Iraqi area over 7,000 years ago. With the recent devastation caused by the instability of war coupled with an extended drought, those jobs have disappeared. So, although Iraq does have the third largest oil reserves in the world, its agricultural sector is in many ways more important to its economic recovery.

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This post consists of a few lines and a link to what’s happened since some of my recent posts where there has been significant action. Each item is identified and linked by the date and title of the original post.

July 2009 - Sable Antelope - One Sold for $ 385 000 and Giant Species Rediscovered in Angola.

Three more Giant Sable Antelopes, have been sighted in Angola. This brings to six the number of this rare species, which was feared to have become extinct, that have been sited in the last few weeks.

July 2009 - Mauling of Baboon by “Fighting Dogs”, Reopens the Cape Peninsular Baboon Debate

Two men were attacked by Pit Bulls in Ocean View ,the same Township in Ocean View this week, prompting a warning from welfare group TEARS.

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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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Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by filmmaker Joe Berlinger, director of Crude. For more information visit the Crude film website.

During the summer of 2005, a charismatic American environmental lawyer named Steven Donziger knocked on my Manhattan office door. He was running a $27 billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorean inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest and was looking for a filmmaker to tell his clients’ story.

Since I am not known as an environmental filmmaker — my last film, “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” was a warts-and-all portrait of a heavy metal band in crisis — I was a little surprised that Donziger had sought me out to me to make his pitch.

The story the lawyer told me was indeed shocking: From the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, Texaco (now Chevron) dumped 18 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste into the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador, creating a 1,700-square-mile “cancer death zone” the size of Rhode Island. The plaintiffs he represented alleged that birth defects, leukemia, miscarriages and other ailments were plaguing the people of the region, and the Amazon itself — one of the few places on Earth to survive the last ice age — was gasping for breath under the strain of oil exploitation.

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This post was written by Paul O’Callaghan, founding CEO of the Clean Tech consultancy, O2 Environmental Inc. and lecturer on Sustainable Energy at the BC Institute of Technology.
There was much furore recently surrounding the story ‘Joule Biotech comes out of stealth with sun-powered biofuel’.

The premise is that the technology can take solar energy and use it to convert carbon dioxide directly into fuel. A one stop-shop to soak up carbon dioxide and produce a biofuel.

Having dug into it a little, the conclusion I came to is that it’s not as radical as it sounds. It is basically directed photosynthesis: same principle as oil from algae, or biofuels. The overall efficiencies are likely to be 10 times lower than that from solar PV processes, but, in terms of where biofuels are heading, it is on the right track.

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Our race to find alternative fuels is critical not only because gasoline-powered vehicles emit lots of CO2–it’s also important because we’re running out of the sticky stuff. But what if the Earth could produce fossil fuels without the fossils?

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Pond scum just got an upgrade.

SunEco Energy is working with J.B. Hunt Transport Services, a leading transportation company, to run trucks on biodiesel mixed with algae oil.

SunEco says a blend of 20 percent and 50 percent algae oil with petroleum biodiesel has cut particulate emissions by 82 percent.

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A lot of concern has been expressed about ethanol.  From the overuse of antibiotics to watering down Waxman-Markey in support of corn farmers, it is questionable as to whether ethanol is the solution America needs for its foreign oil dependency. Thomas R. Blakeslee of the Clearlight Foundation thinks we are better off using corn for Combined Heat and Power (CHP) biomass power plants to run electric vehicles rather than converting it to ethanol.

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As a pollutant polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (or PAH’s as we call them in the business), are of concern because they have been identified as carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic (not good things if you were wondering). PAHs are created as a byproduct of the burning of coal, oil, and fossil fuels. Often they are of concern in urban areas where there is a higher carbon footprint, and it forms that nice cloud of yellow smoke you see floating over some of your major cities.

Now, new research out of Columbia University is showing that exposure to PAHs, can reduce neonate’s intelligence. The study performed in New York city where PAHs are in no short demand, showed IQ scores that were 4.31 and 4.67 points lower, respectively than those of less exposed children.

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California State assembly rejects offshore oil, budget still passes

Shortly after winning approval from the California State Senate, a controversial deal that would have allowed the first new offshore oil leases in California state waters in forty years, was rejected by the California State Assembly by a vote of 43-30.

The deal would have revived a lease that had been rejected by the State Lands Commission earlier this year and allow a single oil company, Plains Exploration and Production Company, to bypass the existing public environmental review process and gain access to oil reserves off of the Santa Barbara coast — the site of a massive spill in 1969 that poured 80,000 barrels of crude into the Pacific and onto Southern California beaches, effectively halting the issuing of any new offshore leases in state waters.

Despite improvements in offshore drilling technology, small spills are still fairly routine. In 2007, the oil industry spilled 2,256 barrels of oil, fuels and chemicals, into the oceans off America’s coasts. Even though natural oil seepage rates are much higher, an estimated 1,700 barrels per day off the coast of North America, Californians are still leery of another Santa Barbara.

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Cows Operate Power Company as Side Business
Onion Farmer takes $2.5 Million to Bank For Electricity Production
More Carbon Sequestration Needed: Farmers Paid to Not Plant

Every day there’s more news of the alternative energy that farms can make. From cow poop. From crop residues. From onion skins. From chicken feathers. From wind royalties. From solar power.

But you read cleantechnica.

Of course farmers will benefit from the climate bill. HR2434 is designed to make it cheaper to switch to low carbon energy than to keep using fossil fuels that destroy our future.

Farmers; however, are stuck with Fox News and Rush and the Heritage Foundation and CATO. They are told

Your energy cost will soar under socialist Al Gore climate bill!

So they worry. What Fox News and Rush won’t let them know is that…

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The break up of the Arctic ice sheet–now at record levels –might make an Arctic crossing much easier for a small group of previously untracked Right Whales. And that’s the problem. The Arctic ice-sheet break up is making the “Northwest Passage” across the Pole much easier for everyone–including commercial fishing ships. If this newly discovered group of whales decides to take this short cut (heading south for the Winter), scientists fear, they could swim headlong into the newly opened shipping lanes. It is estimated that collisions with ships cause one third of all Right Whale deaths world-wide.

In 2007 and 2008, marine researchers tracked over 2000 whale songs coming from the waters of Cape Farewell Ground (Just off Greenland’s Southwest coast). The songs are believed to be those of male Right Whales–a fairly rare baleen (mysticine) whale that was hunted to near extinction here back in the late 1800’s. They were named “right” whales because they were deemed the “right” whale to hunt for their prized oil and baleen content. Researchers studying the new group believe that there must be at least two of them, possibly three. Whales in general tend to be creatures of habit, returning seasonally to the same  “grounds” for eating or mating.

Normally, the few Right Whale (Eubalaena glacialis) sightings that there are (in the North Atlantic) have been largely off of Nova Scotia and the New England coasts during the Summer feeding months (the whales feed off off massive up-welling of plankton). Returning to this area (Cape Farewell Ground) is a bit of a surprise, for these were also the former “killing grounds” of these rarest of the large whales.  Dr. Mellinger, the research team’s lead scientist, believes that they are indeed a new group, and are either reoccupying this area, or possibly (despite all odds), may have always been here.

The Right whale “songs” were detected using a high-tech network of submerged listening posts. A version of the system was originally used for monitoring the Right whale population off Massachusetts Bay in 2006. Preliminary analysis of this singular, acoustical phenomenon–produced exclusively by younger male whales–indicates that there may be as many as three whales contributing to these songs.

No one knows, however, if there are any females that have joined the group–a factor crucial for the long-term survival of any would-be whale pod. Female Right whales do not sexually mature until 10 years or age, and they give birth to only one off-spring at a time (after a year long gestation). This possibility (of a pregnant female in the group) makes concern over the arctic ice break-up, and any accidental ship strike, all the more pressing. Right Whales have been under international protection since 1949, but the North Atlantic Right whale’s numbers have not seen the same population rebound as other groups of Rights.

Mellinger’s team reported its findings at the annual Acoustical Society of America meeting in Portland, Oregon.

photo: NOAA

Disclaimer: 60 days have come and gone, but still no sign of the lawsuit. Chances are Palin has decided not to pursue this after all.

For the second time in less than a year, Palin’s administration has sought legal action against an endangered species in favor of the oil industry. This time, the Cook Inlet Beluga Whale is her target.

In August 2008, it was the Polar Bear. Now Palin has the critically endangered Cook Inlet Beluga Whale in her sights.

The Cook Inlet Beluga Whale (Delphinapterus leucas) is a genetically distinct and geographically isolated population. And that population is only about 375 whales.

But Palin doesn’t believe that qualifies as “endangered.”

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