Aug
30
A Natural Gas Boom Sparks an Oil Boom
August 30, 2010 | 5 Comments
The horizontal drilling and fracturing techniques that press’s favorite devil Halliburton pioneered to trigger the natural gas boom are the same technologies spurring a Canadian and U.S. oil drilling boom. The impact of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing are migrating around the world, stabilizing and lowering not only North American gas prices but also international [...]
Aug
27
Oxygen Splitting Breakthrough for Getting Free Hydrogen
August 27, 2010 | 5 Comments
That headline is accurate if a little bewildering. Splitting water to get hydrogen isn’t hard to do, it can be quite simple, and a little lab experiment on the table will do. But doing it the simple way gets you the combined hydrogen and oxygen gases in one mixture called Oxyhydrogen or Brown’s gas – [...]
Aug
20
Meet The Introns of Your DNA and How They Might Help Make Fuels
August 20, 2010 | 2 Comments
Alan Lambowitz a Professor of Molecular Biology and Director of the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Texas at Austin, explains: “Introns are mysterious elements in evolution. Until the 1970s it was believed that genes in all organisms would be continuous and that they would make a continuous RNA, which would then get [...]
Aug
19
Cracking Vegetable Oil Into Gasoline
August 19, 2010 | 2 Comments
TU Delft in the Netherlands and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos of Spain researchers have a concept developed for the efficient catalytic cracking of unsaturated vegetable oil to greatly increase the production of gasoline and light olefins such as propane and butane. The scientists’ paper on their work was published in the journal ChemSusChem on Aug [...]
Aug
17
What Plants for Cellulosic Biofuel Production?
August 17, 2010 | 3 Comments
In an article titled “Feedstocks for Lignocellulosic Biofuels” published in Science, Chris Somerville of the University of California, Berkeley, and Deputy Director Steve Long of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with bioenergy analysts Caroline Taylor, Heather Youngs and Sarah Davis at the Energy Biosciences Institute suggest that a diversity of plant species, adaptable to [...]
Aug
11
Farming Natural Gas
August 11, 2010 | 1 Comment
Luca Technologies harnesses natural processes to sustainably produce natural gas. The Golden, Colo. based company has developed a process to generate and then extract more natural gas from depleted coalbed methane wells by injecting water, microbes, and nutrients into the coal seams. The company is now pursuing permitting in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin to expand [...]
Aug
10
A Sugar to Fuel Genetic Code is Found
August 10, 2010 | 7 Comments
Researchers at LS9 have discovered an alkane biosynthesis pathway, a metabolic pathway that produces alkanes in cyanobacteria for a direct, simple conversion from plant sugar to hydrocarbon fuels. Alkanes are the major hydrocarbon constituents of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Using the bacteria E. coli, with the newly identified alkane operon genetics expressed, the bacteria [...]
Jul
28
Catching CO² to Make Some Useful Fuel
July 28, 2010 | 2 Comments
George Washington University’s Dr. Stuart Licht and colleagues have published the first experimental evidence of their new solar thermal electrochemical photovoltaic (STEP) process, which combines electrical and chemical pathways to convert CO2 to carbon or to carbon monoxide for subsequent use in synthesizing a range of industrially relevant products including hydrocarbon fuels. According to the [...]
