An excellent video describing the development of next generation biofuels in the United States. Next generation biofuels aim for greater efficiency than ethanol while avoiding the food supply issues associated with first generation biofuels.
Archive for the 'Biofuels' Category
Researchers are developing an algae which could be used for biodiesel and requires much less area to grow than alternatives such as canola.
Courtesy : National Geographic
Tiny microbes that live inside termites may one day help cure the world’s energy woes, according to scientists.
The researchers are trying to understand how bacteria that help termites digest wood and other plants release the hydrogen that’s trapped in the material.
“We don’t understand the full details of how the process occurs,” said Jared Leadbetter, an environmental microbiologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
“But once we learn more about it, many things become possible.”
For example, he says, biotech engineers could mass-produce the tiny microbes for hydrogen production on an industrial scale.
The hydrogen could then power hydrogen fuel cells, a type of battery that emits only water.
But reaching large-scale production, Leadbetter cautioned, “is a pretty tall order.” It would depend on how well the research is funded and how it progresses over the coming years, he said.
Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, agreed there are hurdles to overcome, but he said the potential applications are “very positive.”
“Neat stuff can happen in this area,” he said.
Kammen imagines a day when “little digesters”—a termite germ-derived technology—sit in people’s garages and process piles of woody waste to produce enough hydrogen to power cars and homes.
The concept would mean no more trips to the gas station or having to pay the electric company for power. (Read “The End of Cheap Oil.”)
“I think that’s the natural way to go long term,” Kammen said.
More on link - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0314_060314_termite.html
Below is a link to Thursday’s Guardian of an article warning that Indonesia’s rush to cultivate palm oil as a fuel substitute could release billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in one go. This is because deep peat bogs that contain massive amounts of carbon would need to be cleared to make way for palm oil cultivation.
The article is written by John Vidal and he aims it at UK supermarkets because they use a lot of palm oil but the context is our hope that palm oil could be an oil subsitute.
Its a pretty stark article.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/08/climatechange.biofuels
Jeremy C
With 65% of its energy already coming from renewables, New Zealand is in a much better starting position than Australia. That said they are now planning an agressive strategy to cut their dependance on fossil fuels even more.
Biofuels push to make more Kiwis fly - World - theage.com.au
The NSW government is planning to set a 2% target for ethanol based fuel supplies. Personally I’m still not 100% convinced of the benefits of widespread adoption of biofuels as a gasoline replacement. I’d be interested to hear from others.
Ron Oxburgh, chairman of D1 Oils in the UK, discusses the change in attitudes to biofuels. He says the way forward for biofuel production is to decouple them from the production of food crops. Jatropha curcas is a tree with fruits which produce good diesel oil. It yields fully after 5 years, produces for 50 years and is cleaner than diesel produced from fossil fuel.
Read the transcript or listen to MP3 audio:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2007/2010598.htm
Fungus Makes Biodiesel Indian Researcher’s Finding
Ravichandra Potumarthi, a researcher in India, has demonstrated and presented his findings at a conference (the International Conference on Bioengineering and Nanotechnology) that using the enzyme lipase as the catalyst he can convert vegetable oils into biodiesel. The trouble, of course, with that, conceptually, is that lipase is a complex protein, difficult and expensive to synthesize. Naturally it would not be a significant breakthrough if Ravichandra did not start thinking “outside the box”, so to speak. He saw no reason to go to the trouble of refining the enzyme to a pure form, he simply found an organism that produces plenty of it, and tossed it into the mix. The main advantage here is that you don’t have to heat the oil at all for the process to work as in (many, if not most) of the more conventional methods of using methanol (or ethanol) and sodium hydroxide. The mechanism Ravichandra chose was a simple fungus called Metarhizium anisopliae. Interestingly this particular fungus is not all that difficult to obtain at the moment, because it is being investigated as a means to control malaria carrying mosquitoes.(op.cit. Wikipedia.org) It is also already being used as a means to destroy thrips (nasty little things that curl the leaves of citrus trees — we have an infestation of these in our own back yard), grasshoppers and termites.
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