Ethanol fuels huge corn planting

U.S. farmers plan to cash in on the fuel ethanol boom by planting the largest area of corn in 63 years, potentially yielding a record crop and calming fears that renewable fuels will steal grain needed for food and feed, the federal government said Friday.

...USDA forecasts corn usage of 12.3 billion bushels in 2007-2008, including 3.2 billion bushels for making ethanol, up 1 billion bushels from the 2006 crop.

...Growers told USDA they will cut back on soybeans in the Midwest and on cotton and rice in the South to sow more corn.

...USDA forecasts only a modest rise in food prices this year, but said, "With high corn prices increasing feed costs, beef and poultry price increases should begin to accelerate in 2007."

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Ethanol fuels huge corn planting

Cummins announces approval of B20 biodiesel blends

Cummins, a big truck maker in the U.S.A., has announced their trucks produced since 2002 are compatible with burning biodiesel B20 fuel. This is good news for improving adoption of this fuel alternative. Good news because truck owners can adopt the fuel with less concern. The article says Cummins was able to take this stance due to standardization improvements by the biodiesel makers, so I suppose that means Cummins feels there is less risk from getting bad fuel.

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Cummins announces approval of B20 biodiesel blends

Mercury in energy-saving bulbs worries scientists

There's a growing awareness of the compact fluorescent lights. That's a good thing because they're generally a good thing, they last longer than incandescent bulbs and use less electricity to produce the same amount of light. BUT, if you're observant you'll see a notice on the package saying they contain Mercury.

Mercury poisoning has played a role in many environmental toxin disasters. There was a fishing village in Japan where mercury was dumped into the ocean near their fishing grounds and the villagers became desperately sick. And mercury poisoning is also known as Mad Hatters Syndrome, because in old England hatmakers used mercury for something or other and ended up injesting lots of mercury and going mad as a result.

With over 150 million CFL bulbs sold every year it's an interesting problem. Yes the lights last longer than incandescent bulbs, but eventually they'll break or wear out and be tossed. So what happens to the mercury afterward? And I think we shouldn't stop at the mercury, because the CFL bulbs I've examined all have a printed circuit board on them with various electrical components, and its well known that other toxic chemicals like PCB's generally are used in the components in electrical circuits.

This is another case of solving one problem and creating several others.

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Mercury in energy-saving bulbs worries scientists

10,000 kW Electrical Power Generation in Your Backyard

Want to get off the grid? the Electric grid that is. The QR5, from U.K.-based Quietrevolution, is a residential-scale wind turbine that generates enough electricity to power a standard U.S. home or a small office. It also looks like a piece of wind-powered sculpture. Unlike the shape of a conventional windmill propeller, it’s a Vertical-axis wind turbine.

Prior coverage of vertical axis wind turbines: Vertical axis versus horizontal axis wind turbines

The maker: quietrevolution

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10,000 kW Electrical Power Generation in Your Backyard

quietrevolution

URL: 

quietrevolution

Description: 

Makers of a vertical axis wind turbine that's meant for use within urban settings. The quietrevolution (QR) was designed in response to increasing demand for wind turbines that work well in the urban environment, where wind speeds are lower and wind directions change frequently. The elegant helical (twisted) design of QR ensures a robust performance even in turbulent winds. It is also responsible for virtually eliminating all noise and vibration. At five metres high and three metres in diameter, it is compact and easy to integrate.

Coal Latte, a boon? Or a mistake?

Oil at $15 a barrel? concerns a process developed by Silverado Green Fuel to turn marginal coal into a liquid fuel. The liquid fuel can function just like gasoline and they claim it can be sold for $15 per barrel, so in this age where we are staring $100 per barrel oil in the face some obviously would see this as an advantage. Plus they've managed to paint this thing as a green fuel.

The claim their products are free of nitrogen, sulfur, particulate matter, and heavy metals and I suppose this is the rationale for calling this a "green" fuel. However it still contains carbon, fossilized carbon, so burning this fuel adds carbon to the ecosphere.

There are a couple keys to this .. first, this sort of coal is under a low demand hence the raw material has a low cost. Second, there is a lot of it and this sort of coal is spread pretty widely around the world. In the U.S. alone, the existing coal reserves hold enough coal to produce liquid fuel that would be the equivalent of 800 billion barrels of oil.

In the cost equation there are high capital costs due to building plants and transportation of the coal to the plants. According to the CNET article this fuel will be attractive only if fossil oil remains above $45 per barrel.

Silverado Green Fuel

URL: 

Silverado Green Fuel

Description: 

Silverado Green Fuel Inc., is working on the development of an environmentally friendly oil substitute produced from low-rank coal (LRC). Silverado’s Low-Rank Coal-Water Fuel (LRCWF) or Green Fuel is not a new fuel, but a new fuel form. Green Fuel is a stable liquid fuel which provides a non-hazardous, low cost alternative to petroleum derived fuels that can use existing oil infrastructure for handling, storage and transportation.

The process creates derivative fuels from subbituminous, lignitic, and brown coals, which are characterized by high moisture levels and a low carbon to hydrogen ratio. The derivative fuel is liquid allowing it to be handled by the existing infrastructure used for liquid fuels derived from fossil oil, and it can be converted by any one of a number of commercial Fischer Tropsch processes to yield a myriad of clean fuels and petrochemicals.

They are a subsidiary of the Silvarado gold mining empire, http://www.silverado.com/

Manure power goes live in Texas

In some places they call that the smell of money. One way this works, which I think we can expect to become more common, is to collect biological material such as manure and run it through a biodigester. If you let biological material sit around, in the right circumstances, it will pretty much automatically start to rot, right? And the smell of rotting biological material is often a fuel, methane, which can be burned. And, yes, one should think back to the keepers of the blue flame.

While methane is a hydrocarbon, and while it's generally recognized carbon in the atmosphere means global warming, this non-fossil hydrocarbon is not a problem.

The problem is when we dig up fossilized hydrocarbons and burn that. This adds carbon into the ecosphere, carbon that had been sequestered millions of hears ago. But methane produced from manure, as well as other forms of biofuels, is derived from carbon already in the ecosphere.

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Manure power goes live in Texas

Saving wind power for later

Wind power is intermittent. One day the wind blows, the next day it doesn't, and often the days you need power the most, on hot days, are also the ones with the least wind available. Hence it's desirable to find a way to store the power generated by the wind, the question is what's the best way of doing so. Many who oppose wind power use this intermittency as a flaw of wind power, and use that flaw as a weapon against the deployment of wind power.

While this is a flaw of wind power it's not an unsolvable problem. Instead it's just a matter of engineering a way to store power.

General Compression is a company developing one means to store wind power. In their design the tower does not have a generator at the top, but an air compressor. The air compressor sends compressed air down the tower and that compressed air can be stored in tanks, in underground caverns, or piped to remote locations. The compressed air is released as needed to power turbines which generate electricity.

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Saving wind power for later

General Compression

Refining 101: Summer Gasoline

Just what is summer gasoline? Twice a year, in the fall and in the spring, you hear about the seasonal gasoline transition. The article goes into great depth explaining what this is.

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Refining 101: Summer Gasoline

Wind Power Is Spain's Top Energy Source This Week

This seems to be an interesting threshold to have reached ... for a whole country, Spain, to get the majority of their electricity from a renewable resource like wind power.

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Wind Power Is Spain's Top Energy Source This Week

Powerful Little Light: LED With 1,000 Lumens

Lights is perhaps something we take for granted but have you tried living without electric lights? I haven't, though I have spent some time in places where there are no electric lights. The people who live there have all sorts of ways to create light when there's no electric lights.. like, candles. Anyway the ability to have light when it's dark is one of the miracles of the modern age. But it's also a curse of sorts because electric lighting has become so ubiquitous that it's using a tremendous amount of power. The most common light bulb, the incandescent bulb, wastes 95% of the energy sent into the bulb, yet the companies that make them have done a great job keeping costs down, and the inexpensive price is a barrier to entry for any other product.

There are two sorts of electric lights which are more efficient than incandescent bulbs. The compact fluorescent is about 3x as efficient, and those bulbs last 10x longer (or thereabouts) so the higher price for the compact fluorescent pays for itself over the life of the bulb but I suspect the much higher price puts off most people and hence they are not so popular. However LED lighting is even more efficient, using about 1 percent the power required for an incandescent bulb, while lasting hundreds of times longer. Unfortunately LED bulbs which could adequately light a room were astronomically expensive and almost nobody knows these exist much less own any.

Osram has developed a small light-emitting diode spotlight that achieves an output of more than 1,000 lumens for the first time. That's the same brightness as a 75 watt bulb.

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Powerful Little Light: LED With 1,000 Lumens

Osram