In its annual Human Development Report released yesterday, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) highlighted the untenable environmental impacts of palm oil production. As a supposedly environmentally-friendly biofuel and healthier food ingredient, it is becoming clear that palm oil comes with a pretty heavy ecological cost.
The Swedes at Koenigsegg just revealed their 2.9-second 0-60 CCXR Special Edition. Instead of regular petrol/gas, it runs on biofuel -- giving the car that's already beaten the Bugatti Veyron around the Top Gear racetrack a few more horses under the hood. Oh and because it's bio-powered you can pretend you're being environmentally friendly.
LiveFuels Inc.
is an alliance of scientists expecting to make algae ‘biocrude’ a
viable biodiesel oil source by 2010. They believe if the Manhattan
Project took only 3 years that their project can be done in 4 years.
The alliance is being lead by Sandia National Laboratories, a U.S.
Department of Energy Nation Laboratory and they expect to sponsor
dozens of labs and hundreds of scientists. According to Lissa
Morgenthaler-Jones, CEO of LiveFuels, she believes they have the
“expertise in process engineering, bioscience and biotechnology” to
create ‘biocrude’ from algae that will be able to be processed into
biodiesel by the “millions of barrels of biocrude oil per day.” She
states that “the initial focus of LiveFuels’ team will be
algae-to-biocrude.”
Here’s a segment about “algae-to-biocrude” from their site:
Algal oil is similar to soybean oil but can be grown on
marginal lands unsuitable for food crops. Thriving on sunlight and CO2,
algae can be grown in fresh or brackish water. This makes algae an
ideal solution for farmers dealing with issues of agricultural run-off.
Moreover, a shortage of vegetable oil has been predicted within 3 to 5
years in the United States, and algal oil could fill the gap for
non-edible uses like biofuels.
In order to make biocrude for less than $60 a barrel, algae must be
high in fats or oils. Commercially-grown algae like Spirulina are high
in protein and starch but low in fat. A few high-fat species of algae
like Haematococcus are promising, but the fats — at prices around
$1,200 a pound — are too expensive to fuel America’s vehicles today.
“Fat algae” doesn’t sound like a biocrude oil feedstock, but the
petroleum we use today is derived from prehistoric biomass (including
algae). Nature’s biomass decomposition process occurred over millions
of years under conditions of enormous heat and pressure. Much of the
petroleum we use today began some 200 million years ago in the
Carboniferous Period. The deposits of oil pumped from the North Sea,
for example, consist partly of decomposed haptophyte algae called
coccolithophorids.
The challenge facing LiveFuels’ scientists will be growing and
transforming algae cheaply into biocrude within days rather than
millennia. The entire United States’ supply of imported oil could
potentially be grown on 20 to 40 million acres of marginal land,
leaving the 450 million acres of fertile American soil that are
presently farmland still available to feed the nation.
“LiveFuels will enable American farmers to replace imported oil with
home-grown biocrude and supply it to the United States,” said
Morgenthaler-Jones. “Other countries are ahead of the U.S. in biocrude
research, but other countries were once ahead of us in the space race
too. America put a man on the moon in eight years, and America can make
its own biocrude in four.”
CNET recently did an interview segment with Lissa Morgenthaler-Jones that I’ll include below:
Fuel pumps run by the Navy at an Annapolis, Md. facility are now offering biodiesel to both Navy personnel and the general public. The move is in accord with a Navy directive to get more of its vehicles, especially trucks, to run on biodiesel. Making the alternative fuel available to civilians expands the Navy’s stance on the eco-friendly and energy security benefits of the biofuel.
Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford, spoke yesterday at the 2007 Los Angeles Auto Show about the automaker’s plans for what it calls a “blueprint for sustainability.” He outlined Ford’s plans to design future vehicle with a greater awareness of the environment. Mulally spoke specifically about the development of a small-displacement turbo-charged engine line that could be implemented as early as 2009.
Seven years after the first hybrids were introduced in the U.S. market, there are still no gas-electric minivans, wagons, subcompacts, or pickup trucks. General Motors plans to fill one of those gaps in the market—the fuel-efficient hybrid pickup—when the two-mode Chevrolet Silverado Hybrid goes on sale in late 2008.
Join a group of musicians, artists and engineers on a bus ride from San Francisco to New York powered entirely by100% recycled vegetable oil. This engaging documentary has a vibe and a vision"
Advanced Energy, a Raleigh-based non-profit research firm is experimenting with plug-in hybrid technology with the hopes of finding solutions for achieving even higher fuel economy than the current hybrid standards. Advanced Energy joins a growing number of non-profits, universities, and private companies who are doing similar testing in an effort to push automakers to continue raising the bar on efficiency for consumer markets.
