Alternative Energy / Biofuels

• New Technique Discovered to Help Harvest Algae

  At the UKs Sheffield University (SU) a team led by Professor Will Zimmerman in the Department of Chemical and Process Engineering believes they have developed an inexpensive way of producing microbubbles that can float algae particles to the surface of the water, making harvesting easier, and saving biofuel-producing companies time and money. One of the cost of production problems that holds algae back as a major biomatter resource is an efficient cost-effective method of harvesting and removing the water from the algae for it to be processed. Algae have the potential to be a very efficient biofuel producer.  The one cell…

• The Dirty Truth: Some Biofuels are More Polluting than Fossil Fuels

  Biofuels are a clean, alternative energy that many are hoping will become the next source of liquid fuels for internal combustion engines; a clean substitute for polluting fossil fuels. The US is a huge supporter of biofuels, last year producing 1 billion gallons, and the EU has also stated its intentions for 10% of all transport fuel to be biofuel by 2020. Wait a minute though, new data obtained from a leak by the European Commission provides evidence that not all biofuels are clean. In fact some are more polluting than fossil fuels. The EU proposed a default value of…

• Algal Biofuels - Time for Grand Scale Production?

  Though there is much mention of the promise of algal biofuels and word of their commercial development, it seems timely to view what precisely has been achieved in terms of significant algal biofuel production rather than laboratory-based research, which has been going on for about 50 years. The U.S. Navy has fuelled a destroyer ship using 20,000 gallons of algae-based biofuel for a 20-hour trip, and is its largest alternative fuel experiment to date. Thus a decommissioned destroyer made a successful journey from San Diego to Port Hueneme, in California. In terms of air-transport, United/Continental Airlines have made a second…

• Has Algae.Tec Cracked Algae's Biofuel Pricing Ability to Compete with a Barrel of Oil?

  Amidst the relentless promotion of renewable biofuel alternatives to traditional fossil fuel hydrocarbons, the three leading contenders are jatpropha, camelina and algae. But among the many barriers holding back industrial production of biofuels is that no company up to now has yet figured out how to produce a gallon of biofuel at a price that can compete with gasoline. Apparently until now, if press releases by Algae.Tec are anything to go by. The company, founded only three years ago, has offices in Atlanta, Georgia and Perth, Western Australia. Algae.Tec founders, Earl McConchie and Roger Stroud, have been involved in the…

• Indian Seaweed - Biofuel's Aquatic Future?

  The long-term impact of yesterday startling announcement by Standard & Poor's that it was downgrading US government bonds to one notch below AAA, a rating that the U.S. had maintained since 1917, has yet to be seen on Wall Street. But there is little doubt that it will spook the investor community, all of whom are looking for the next Big Thing to park their cash and hopefully make piles more money. One of the few financial markets certain to prosper over the next decade is that of renewable biofuels. The ASTM as certified them for civilian aircraft used, and…

• Move Aside Corn Ethanol - Sweet Sorghum Being Engineered as a New Biofuel

  This is one to take seriously.  A deal has been made by Pioneer Hybrids, the corn seed company started by the Vice President back in one of Roosevelt’s terms, Henry A. Wallace who introduced hybrid corn seed and started the green revolution we and billions of other people rely on for food today.Sweet Sorghum at an Oklahoma State U. Test Plot. Now a division of DuPont, Pioneer has entered into a deal with NexSteppe for collaboration in developing sorghum varieties.  The expectation for expert observers is that the collaboration is meant to bring a new high-yield crop to growers, or…

• U.S. Abandons Renewable Fuels, China Picks up Slack

  There’s stupid, and then there’s Washington. The U.S. government is ending a three-decade-old policy of subsidizing corn ethanol, dating back to the Carter administration, which in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran pushed development of alternative fuels to lessen U.S. dependence on oil from the Middle East. The tax credits are now 46¢ per gallon. Congress mandated that the United States produce 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel by 2022, of which nearly half must be corn-based ethanol, which had the ethanol lobby in ecstasy when it was introduced. Furthermore, many states now require gasoline to contain…

• Are Biofuels the Best Use of Our Limited Land Resources?

  About seven million tonnes of grain corn was grown in Ontario in 2011, and by year’s end roughly 30 per cent of that is expected to go toward ethanol fuel production. Let’s ignore for the moment the whole food-versus-fuel debate, and assume that devoting nearly a third of Ontario corn production to making renewable fuel doesn’t help drive up global food prices, or for that matter, reduce our capacity to feed the world. Let’s focus instead on the use of corn as part of a greenhouse-gas reduction strategy that returns more economic value per harvested bushel. Through this lens, is…

• U.S. Biofuel Camelina Production Set to Soar

  The U.S. biofuel industry has long been stymied by the lack of USDA federal crop insurance, leaving only the most adventurous farmers willing to plant renewable energy crops. Biofuel sources currently under development include algae, jatropha and camelina. Of the three, camelina is increasingly emerging as the frontrunner in attracting initial investment worldwide, as global demand for aviation fuel for passenger flights is now more than 40 billion gallons annually. Camelina has a number of advantages over its competitors, including using far less water, thus allowing it to be grown on marginal land, thereby not taking food acreage out of production. Furthermore…

• Biofuel Advances: Obtaining More Energy From Switchgrass

  Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) a DOE Bioenergy Research Center led by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have made an important step in switchgrass production. The team of JBEI researchers, working with researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS), has demonstrated that introducing a maize (corn) gene into switchgrass, a highly touted potential feedstock for advanced biofuels, more than doubles (250 percent) the amount of starch in the plant’s cell walls and makes it much easier to extract polysaccharides and convert them into fermentable sugars.  Switchgrass With…