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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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