Hydrogen, carbon dioxide, salt, algea, bacteria ... and cover-up
Political Waves
I suspect you already know where the cover-up's going on. You guessed it -- Arkansas! Raw Story is reporting that the oil supposedly diverted away from Lake Conway, wasn't -- and it has video to prove it. As well, people in the effected area are reporting health issues and disputing media reports about the who, what, where and when facts, duly reported and caught in the spin cycle.
Meanwhile, Exxon -- the #2 most profitable oil conglomerate globally -- is behaving with a remarkably heavy hand, sequestering the town of Mayflower away from the prying eyes of the public; even requesting, and receiving, a temporary no-fly zone over the spill, while police screen people entering the area and weeding out reporters.
This ain't pretty, kids and none of it should come as a surprise.
The larger question -- the one we MUST ask and bring pressure to bare on -- is what kind of energy can we ethically support? Carbon-based fuels are killing us and, as you'll find below, R&D has a whole list of possible alternatives that might make all the difference.
Some fine day, coal, nuclear power and petroleum will be considered as antique artifacts from civilizations' past, as outgrown as garters, bowler hats and chamber pots. It can't come soon enough.
Biofuel breakthrough turns virtually any plant into hydrogen
Stephen C. Webster, Raw Story
Thursday, April 4, 2013
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/04/biofuel-breakthrough-turns-virtually-any-plant-into-hydrogen/
Researchers at Virginia Tech announced Thursday that their latest
breakthrough in hydrogen extraction technology could lead to widespread adoption
of the substance as a fuel due to its ease of availability in virtually all
plant matter, a reservoir previously impossible to tap.
The new process,
described by a study in the April issue of the scientific journal Angewandte
Chemie, uses a cocktail of 13 enzymes to strip plant matter of xylose, a sugar
that exists in plant cells. The resulting hydrogen is of an such a “high purity”
that researchers said they were able to approach 100 percent extraction, opening
up a potential market for a much cheaper source of hydrogen than anything
available today.
“The potential for profit and environmental benefits
are why so many automobile, oil, and energy companies are working on hydrogen
fuel cell vehicles as the transportation of the future,” study author and
Virginia Tech assistant professor Y.H. Percival Zhang said in an advisory. “Many
people believe we will enter the hydrogen economy soon, with a market capacity
of at least $1 trillion in the United States alone.”
The rise of such an
alternative fuel could seriously disrupt the pollution-producing industries that
run on oil and natural gas, and potentially spark a new industrial emphasis on
growing plants with high levels of xylose in their cells. The environmental
benefits of that potential future are twofold: the plants absorb carbon dioxide
from the atmosphere, helping in small part to address the climate crisis, and
the resulting portable fuel only outputs water when burned.
Beyond
hydrogen fuel cells in cars and industrial equipment, U.S. space agency NASA
says that hydrogen in its super-cold liquid form makes an ideal fuel for space
exploration due to its low molecular weight and extremely high energy output. If
plants could be grown on a space station traveling to a distant solar system
some day, it is possible future breakthroughs could lead to an onboard system
that actually renders more fuel mid-flight.
Of course, there are
potential downsides to Zhang’s enzyme cocktail, namely in the costs of
production on a large scale, questions about disposal of the enzyme goo and
remaining carbon, and the likelihood of endless legal battles over who owns
patents on which enzymes or combinations thereof. Nevertheless, if the world is
to move forward into a renewable energy future, this is still a pretty big step.
++
Discovery May Allow Scientists to Make Fuel from Carbon
Dioxide in the Atmosphere
Science Daily
March 26, 2013
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130326112301.htm
Now, researchers at the University of Georgia have found a way to transform the carbon dioxide trapped in the atmosphere into useful industrial products. Their discovery may soon lead to the creation of biofuels made directly from the carbon dioxide in the air that is responsible for trapping the sun's rays and raising global temperatures.
"Basically, what we have done is create a microorganism that does with carbon dioxide exactly what plants do-absorb it and generate something useful," said Michael Adams, member of UGA's Bioenergy Systems Research Institute, Georgia Power professor of biotechnology and Distinguished Research Professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
During the process of photosynthesis, plants use sunlight to transform water and carbon dioxide into sugars that the plants use for energy, much like humans burn calories from food.
These sugars can be fermented into fuels like ethanol, but it has proven extraordinarily difficult to efficiently extract the sugars, which are locked away inside the plant's complex cell walls.
"What this discovery means is that we can remove plants as the middleman," said Adams, who is co-author of the study detailing their results published March 25 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We can take carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and turn it into useful products like fuels and chemicals without having to go through the inefficient process of growing plants and extracting sugars from biomass."
The process is made possible by a unique microorganism called Pyrococcus furiosus, or "rushing fireball," which thrives by feeding on carbohydrates in the super-heated ocean waters near geothermal vents. By manipulating the organism's genetic material, Adams and his colleagues created a kind of P. furiosus that is capable of feeding at much lower temperatures on carbon dioxide.
The research team then used hydrogen gas to create a chemical reaction in the microorganism that incorporates carbon dioxide into 3-hydroxypropionic acid, a common industrial chemical used to make acrylics and many other products.
With other genetic manipulations of this new strain of P. furiosus, Adams and his colleagues could create a version that generates a host of other useful industrial products, including fuel, from carbon dioxide.
When the fuel created through the P. furiosus process is burned, it releases the same amount of carbon dioxide used to create it, effectively making it carbon neutral, and a much cleaner alternative to gasoline, coal and oil.
"This is an important first step that has great promise as an efficient and cost-effective method of producing fuels," Adams said. "In the future we will refine the process and begin testing it on larger scales."
The research was supported by the Department of Energy as part of the Electrofuels Program of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy under Grant DE-AR0000081. ++
Tina Casey via Clean Technica, Raw Story
Saturday, April 6, 2013
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/06/salt-based-solar-thermal-power-plant-takes-shape-in-nevada/
The notorious Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant near Tonopah, Nevada
passed another milestone this month, as workers finished placing receiver panels
on top of a 540-foot tower that forms the centerpiece of the facility. Crescent
Dunes is based on molten salt thermal technology and we say notorious because
when completed, Crescent Dunes will give the U.S. bragging rights to the largest
renewable energy plant of its kind in the world. In certain quarters, however,
the project is also notorious because it benefited from a federally backed
construction loan to the tune of a whopping $737 million, creating another
potentially juicy opportunity for critics of the Obama Administration’s
renewable energy policies.
Unfortunately for anyone who is still rooting
for failure, Crescent Dunes is on track for completion by the end of this year.
++
Making Fuel from Bacteria
Science
Daily
March 13, 2013
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130313112211.htm
In the search for the fuels of tomorrow, Swedish researchers are
finding inspiration in the sea. Not in offshore oil wells, but in the water
where blue-green algae thrive.
The building blocks of blue-green algae –
sunlight, carbon dioxide and bacteria – are being used by researchers at KTH
Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm to produce butanol, a
hydrocarbon-like fuel for motor vehicles.
The advantage of butanol is
that the raw materials are abundant and renewable, and production has the
potential to be 20 times more efficient than making ethanol from corn and sugar
cane.
Using genetically-modified cyanobacteria, the team linked butanol
production to the algae’s natural metabolism, says Paul Hudson, a researcher at
the School of Biotechnology at KTH who leads the research. “With relevant genes
integrated in the right place in cyanobacteria’s genome, we have tricked the
cells to produce butanol instead of fulfilling their normal function,” he
says.
The team demonstrated that it can control butanol production by
changing the conditions in the surrounding environment. This opens up other
opportunities for control, such as producing butanol during specific times of
day, Hudson says.
Hudson says that it could be a decade before production
of biofuel from cyanobacteria is a commercial reality.
“We are very
excited that we are now able to produce biofuel from cyanobacteria. At the same
time we must remember that the manufacturing process is very different from
today's biofuels,” he says. “We need to improve the production hundredfold
before it becomes commercially viable.
Already, there is a demonstrator
facility in New Mexico, U.S. for producing biodiesel from algae, which is a more
advanced process, Hudson says.
One of Sweden's leading biotechnology
researchers, Professor Mathias Uhlén at KTH, has overall responsibility for the
project. He says that the use of engineering methods to build genomes of
microorganisms is a relatively new area. A bacterium that produces cheap fuel by
sunlight and carbon dioxide could change the world.
Hudson agrees. “One
of the problems with biofuels we have today, that is, corn ethanol, is that the
price of corn rises slowly while jumping up and down all the time and it is
quite unpredictable,” he says. “In addition, there is limited arable land and
corn ethanol production is also influenced by the price of oil, since corn
requires transport.
“Fuel based on cyanobacteria requires very little
ground space to be prepared. And the availability of raw materials - sunlight,
carbon dioxide and seawater - is in principle infinite,” Hudson says.
He
adds that some cyanobacteria also able to extract nitrogen from the air and thus
do not need any fertilizer.
The next step in the research is to ensure
that cyanobacteria produce butanol in larger quantities without it dying of
exhaustion or butanol, which they cannot withstand particularly well. After
that, more genes will have to be modified so that the end product becomes longer
hydrocarbons that can fully function as a substitute for gasoline. And finally,
the process must be executed outside of the lab and scaled up to work in
industry.
There are also plans to develop fuel from cyanobacteria that
are more energetic and therefore particularly suitable for aircraft
engines.
The project is formally called Forma Center for Metabolic
Engineering, and it involves researchers Chalmers University in Sweden. It has
received about EUR 3 million from the
nonprofit Council Formas. ++
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have
the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger
than evil triumphant.”
~ The Reverend Martin Luther
King
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