Sep
3
Is There A Future for Coal To Liquid Fuels?
September 3, 2008 | 1 Comment
There is a lot of coal on earth. The short view is that coal can be substituted for oil products in liquid fuels from natural gas up to diesel and jet fuel. The method for converting coal to liquids, which has been in use since the early 1920s, is called the Fisher-Tropsch process. F-T has [...]
Aug
27
Methane (aka natural gas) In Your Tank
August 27, 2008 | 1 Comment
Utah is seeing a “boom” in natural gas i.e. methane fueled automobiles sold and converted from gasoline entering the local fleet. With gasoline still well beyond $3.00 and the local natural gas equivalent at $0.87 the motive is strong. With the incentives from the State of Utah up to $3,000 for a new vehicle and [...]
Aug
26
Making Some Sense of Biomass
August 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Robert Rapier who writes the R-Squared Blog offered up a useful post yesterday that describes Mr. Rapier’s thinking in two important areas. All of us can use Mr. Rapier’s quick and easy guides in forming thoughts about where to invest, have expectations and judge how to save for future investments in tools that use energy. [...]
Aug
22
Is Biomass to Gasoline Ready?
August 22, 2008 | 2 Comments
Probably, and it is rushing to a sure thing. The news broke that Byogy Renewables has licensed the methane to liquid fuels technology from Texas Engineering and Experiment Station (TEES), a part of Texas A&M University.
The Byogy process is a stack of processes starting with pre-treating the “energy crop” such as municipal waste in the [...]
Aug
6
Here Is Where to Get Plenty of Biofuel
August 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Al Fin collected a few pages about biofuel sources that just beg a little closer look. (Monday August 4, 2008) That and I’m adding a research result from the University of Illinois to do first.
Professor Stephen P. Long at U of I has run a field trial of miscanthus and compares it to switchgrass and [...]
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
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
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, [...]
Jun
30
A Fuel Cell Breaks Out
June 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The U.S. Department of Defense has adopted the Dupont and SFC Smart Fuel Cell AG product as the “M-25” with the announcement that the M-25 is already deployed. The M-25 is a Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) that uses the Dupont fuel cell technology with the expertise of SFC in manufacturing and fuel cell control [...]
