Jul
18
Spotlighting the Dark Horse of Alternative Fuels
July 18, 2008 | 2 Comments
While the world is watching with horror or glee at the price of oil and its products there is a dark horse out there growing stronger, gaining resources, gathering intelligence and innovation all pointed to pushing oil off of its pedestal. It’s methanol, the one carbon, four hydrogen and one oxygen atom molecule that has [...]
Jul
17
Picking on the Pickens Plan
July 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment
“Ah! Out with the sharp knives mates.” T. Boone Pickens has his idea of launching wind power so strongly made and out so fast that natural gas could be used for cars instead of some of the gasoline we’re using. Can it stand the test of close examination? Make no mistake; this Pickens fellow is [...]
Jul
14
It’s Not What You Use, It’s What You Waste
July 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The popular attention is getting a tighter focus on the costs for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel – the fuels we use to get ourselves where we want to be and get the things we want close enough to buy them. Those costs are on a steep climb up. You’re going to hear a lot [...]
Jul
11
A Bacterium that Makes Hydrogen from Cellulose
July 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Elizaveta Bonch-Osmolovskaya and her colleagues at the Winogradsky Institute of Microbiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences discovered the rare archaeon, a kind of ancient bacteria called Desulfurococcus fermentans, in the Uzon Caldera on the Kamchatka Peninsula, an isolated spit of land in eastern Siberia that is full of volcanoes and their remnants. D. fermentans [...]
Jul
9
Watchin’ The Energy Policy Yo Yo
July 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I’ve been asked over the past week about the Bureau of Land Management’s awakening to the “need” for environmental impact statements for the areas where the solar people hope to set up gigawatts of new power production. Last week the BLM asserted that there would be a two year delay in new permitting and within [...]
Jul
8
A New Source of Natural Gas?
July 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment
David Karl, an oceanographer in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa has published a paper on a new pathway to methane production. The article appears in Nature Geoscience and discusses the aerobic decomposition of organic phosphorus containing compound called methylphosphonate that might be responsible for [...]
Jul
4
It’s the 4th of July and the celebration is on for freedoms thought through and made real for the American portion of mankind now some 230 years on. There is a list of complaints about federal efforts to cut those freedoms back, but on the whole we’ve slipped but a little. The scary one though, [...]
Jul
3
Toyota Graphs The Way
July 3, 2008 | 2 Comments
Masatami Takimoto, Executive Vice President of Toyota gave a presentation at the Toyota Environmental Forum held in Japan that outlines the company’s strategy for meeting the needs for as they put it, “a sustainable mobility society.” That might be music to rural, suburban and others who need to cover miles for life to go on [...]
Jul
2
Another Biodiesel Payoff
July 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Rice University has announced that they have a new process for the glycerin that remains when bio oils are made into biodiesel. About 10% of bio oil products in making biodiesel is glycerin, the stuff you might have used to soften hands and such. Not long ago industries that used glycerin were buying the stuff, [...]
Jul
1
Greater Expectations
July 1, 2008 | 3 Comments
The bad news is piling up and making many feel that the way out isn’t in sight. I saw a poll earlier today that reported on folk’s feelings of hopelessness and wish now I’d kept the link, as it’s bugged me all day. Hard numbers will do to support the sensation; in 1970 3/4ths of [...]
