Mar
5
Mini Ethanol Plants to be Built This Year
March 5, 2010 | 4 Comments
The entrepreneurs at eFarms LLC believe they have an answer for farmers with crop overproduction, high fuel costs and the need for quality animal feed. Build a farm size mini ethanol plant.
eFarms Operations Manager Richard Edmonds says, “This is a stand-alone machine that a farmer can put in a 24-by-24 pole barn and run it [...]
Mar
3
A Breakthrough In Biomass Production
March 3, 2010 | 1 Comment
Stanford University molecular biologist Sharon Long says, “We have discovered a new biological process, by which leguminous plants control behavior of symbiotic bacteria. These plants have a specialized protein processing system that generates specific protein signals. These were hitherto unknown, but it turns out they are critical to cause nitrogen fixation.” This is a critical [...]
Mar
1
A New Way to Make Fuel
March 1, 2010 | 2 Comments
James Dumesic, the Steenbock Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with postdoctoral researchers Jesse Bond and David Martin Alonso, and graduate students Dong Wang and Ryan West have published details of a highly efficient, environmentally friendly process that selectively converts gamma-valerolactone, a biomass derivative, into the chemical equivalent of gasoline [...]
Feb
22
DARPA Cracks the Oil Out of Algae
February 22, 2010 | 6 Comments
Late last week saw Suzanne Goldenberg return from her visit with the new special assistant for energy at DARPA, Barbara McQuiston with news DARPA has solved the algae oil production problem. If you saw the original piece at The Guardian, my contact at Darpa is saying it’s accurate other than the timeline. DARPA expects to [...]
Feb
16
Can Ammonia aka NH3 Be a Fuel?
February 16, 2010 | 4 Comments
Last week Houston investment banker and peak oil prognosticator Matt Simmons popped a plan to use wind, the generated electricity and air to manufacture ammonia. Then just use it to fuel cars. The price to start up is “only” $25 billion plus a new generation of cars for consumers to buy. Is ammonia, NH3, remotely [...]
Feb
8
Methane Is the Future
February 8, 2010 | 2 Comments
Its as safe a declaration as can be made, methane, the main part of natural gas is a major future fuel.
Case Item No. 1:
In the U.S. alone, the combination of horizontal drilling and reservoir fracturing services becoming more affordable has moved up the U.S. reserve by 35% in existing fields of 2007 to 2009. Fracking [...]
Feb
1
A Bug to Make Bio Diesel In Just One Step
February 1, 2010 | 3 Comments
Using E. coli, a well-studied microorganism whose natural ability to synthesize fatty acids and exceptional willingness to be genetically modified, LS9 Inc., the University of California at Berkeley, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute have developed a microbe that can produce an advanced biofuel directly from cellulosic biomass in a one-step process.
The [...]
Jan
20
Seawater Fed Bio Jet Fuel Research Underway
January 20, 2010 | 8 Comments
UOP LLC, a Honeywell owned company, the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, Boeing and Etihad Airways announced Monday an agreement to establish a research institute in Abu Dhabi dedicated to pioneering sustainable energy solutions. The project is being called the Sustainable Bioenergy Research Project (SBRP). SBRP will use integrated saltwater agricultural systems (ISAS) to [...]
Jan
19
A New Way to Make Methanol Fuel
January 19, 2010 | 3 Comments
University of Oxford researchers are developing a method for the homogeneous conversion of CO2 to methanol, with methanol as the only resulting C1 product. With momentum building in the methanol powered fuel cell market there is good reason to be on the lookout for the lowest cost and highest efficiency paths for producing methanol.
Andrew E. [...]
Jan
18
A No Fear Oil and Gas Well Fracturing Method
January 18, 2010 | 1 Comment
Darrell Kosakewich was investigating new ways to settle the tailings ponds created by oilsands mining operations. As he was investigating it occurred to him that discharging an electrically charged emulsion would settle out and release the entrained water and oil. Then the first time he froze a coal sample and it shattered into a piece, [...]
