Mar
30
UCLA Researchers Use Electricity and CO2 to Make Butanol
March 30, 2012 | 4 Comments
A research team at UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has for the first time demonstrated a method for converting carbon dioxide into the liquid fuel isobutanol using electricity. The study paper is published today, March 30 2012, in the journal Science. The study explains how James Liao, UCLA’s Ralph M. Parsons [...]
Mar
28
US Consumers and Environmentalists Win One on Oil Shipping
March 28, 2012 | 5 Comments
It didn’t take long for the oil industry to go to Plan B to get the massive new supplies of Bakken Formation oil in North Dakota and the Canadian Oil Sands to the remaining refineries at the Gulf Coast. It may not overcome the closing of refineries on the US east and west coasts, but [...]
Mar
23
Biofuel Is Big Business and Going to Get Bigger
March 23, 2012 | 1 Comment
2011 saw 30 billion gallons of biofuel produced worldwide – or 136.4 billion liters or 4 billion cubic feet. It’s a huge tank if it all was stored on one enormous site. Pike Research has looked into the commercial efforts of 10 independent “Big Oil” firms to see what’s going on. As you can imagine [...]
Mar
16
The Base For Perfume Makes a Great Base for Fuel
March 16, 2012 | 1 Comment
Research presses on for better plant oils to make fuels. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) has engineered E.Coli bacteria to produce significantly more of the compound methyl ketone from glucose. Methyl ketones are a class of chemical compounds we’re most familiar with in fragrance and flavoring products and might provide the [...]
Mar
14
More Natural Gas For the Glut
March 14, 2012 | Leave a Comment
Soon America won’t be alone with a glut of natural gas. Statoil, the Norwegian oil company, made big oil industry news late last month announcing it had found huge volumes of natural gas off the coast of Tanzania thus confirming east Africa’s reputation as one of the energy world’s most promising new frontiers. The area [...]
Mar
9
Starting Seaweed Cultivation Research
March 9, 2012 | 1 Comment
The numbers for productivity of seaweed are stunning compared to everything other than algae on land. The problem is the cultivation, growing the preferred species, harvesting it and getting it to shore for processing. Prof. Avigdor Abelson of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Zoology and the new Renewable Energy Center, with his colleagues Dr. Alvaro [...]
Mar
8
A Solar Powered Nanostructure Generates Hydrogen
March 8, 2012 | 1 Comment
Using silicon and zinc oxide a University of California San Diego team has built a forest of nanowires that split hydrogen free from water. Deli Wang, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering quoted in the University press release said, “This is a clean [...]
Mar
5
Oil In a Fight With Itself
March 5, 2012 | 3 Comments
The renewable fuel producers are about to up the pressure on the world oil industry, and for consumers it’s not a moment too soon. First off, South Dakota’s government has approved a subsidy of 20 cents per gallon for ethanol plants to transition over to butanol. The cap for the subsidy is $4 million per [...]
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