Well I’m heading back to South Carolina for another year at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. It’s been a great summer with many triumphs. Just to give you a heads up, posting will be sparadic the next could of days. Hopefully everyone is enjoying the last few weeks of summer.
The Brazilians, who I need not remind you are the world leaders in sugar ethanol production, are looking into biofuel production from micro-algae. Interesting.
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Remember that problem with algae I wrote about yesterday? Well it seems that researchers are already beginning to tackle this problem.
Allied Minds, a seed investment corporation specializing in early stage university business ventures, has partnered with the University of Washington to establish AXI, LLC to commercialize novel technology to develop and create commercially advantageous strains of algae for the production of biofuels.
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AXI is developing algal strains that will bridge the gap between the promise of clean energy generation and the reality of economical biofuel production systems. Of the many feedstocks that can be used for biodiesel, algae are emerging as the clear winner because significant biomass can be produced on non-arable lands (thus avoiding the food vs. fuel debate) and CO2 (a greenhouse gas) supports their growth. “Our proprietary methodology for developing specific growth and productivity traits will help any algal production system improve its output of inexpensive, oil-rich algae as the raw material for the generation of biofuel,” says Biology Professor Rose Ann Cattolico, developer of the AXI technology at the University of Washington.
Like I said before, I do not doubt the capabilities of man to solve almost any problem they are faced with and this is surely one that falls into that category.
And the reason for that is we haven’t found a cost effective way to sustain high growth in bioreactors. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can already convert the algae into anything that traditional crude can be turned into (gasoline, aviation fuel, etc.)
According to Hu, the technology to help algae reproduce effectively is still five years away.
“The critical issue is the biomass feedstock, not oil conversion,” Hu says. “To bring the cost down we need much more breakthroughs and innovations. Bioreactors are expensive at this stage. We need a cost-efficient way to sustain high growth.”
Once algae reach a critical mass, traditional methods can be used to extract oil from the plants. In turn, these oils can be refined into gasoline, biopolymers and jet fuel.
I have faith in man’s problem solving ability. I wouldn’t be surprised if they solve this problem in half the time (as long as there is an incentive). With big companies like Boeing offering research grants to help develop this technology, I’m sure the technology will be there in no time.
Australia’s Gold Coast is experiencing some chilly weather this year that is breaking some records.
THE Gold Coast yesterday had its coldest August temperature on record.
The Seaway dropped to an icy 4.2C at 6.30am and there were reports of ice on cars in Nerang.
The previous record minimum was 4.3C on August 1, 2003.
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And there is no sign of warmer weather any time soon.
Mr Mitchell said the wicked winter cold spell was set to continue well into next week.
“We will have very cold nights and early mornings,” he said.
One thing to remember is that the southern hemisphere and thus Australia is experiencing their winter right now so cold weather is to be expected.
This is funny. Al Gore’s newest boat, “Bio-Solar One,” supposedly will run on biofuels such as ethanol (which, as you know from some of my past articles, isn’t that environmentally friendly in its current state). The funny thing about this is the lake its located on only has regular GASOLINE. Ironic? I think so.
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This should be fairly obvious but it is worth stating that McCain is against subsidies for ethanol.
Republican presidential hopeful John McCain stopped by the Iowa State Fair on Friday, repeating his opposition to ethanol subsidies and vowing to open markets around the world to Midwest commodities.
McCain has long opposed subsidizing the production of ethanol and has never shied away from making his point known, even in farm country.
“My friends we will disagree on a specific issue and that’s healthy,” McCain said as he stood behind bales of straw at the fairgrounds. “We will disagree from time to time. I believe in renewable fuels, I don’t believe in ethanol subsidies, but I believe in renewable fuels.”
Here is more on the subject from his campaign website:
John McCain Believes Alcohol-Based Fuels Hold Great Promise As Both An Alternative To Gasoline And As A Means of Expanding Consumers’ Choices. Some choices such as ethanol are on the market right now. The second generation of alcohol-based fuels like cellulosic ethanol, which won’t compete with food crops, are showing great potential.
Today, Isolationist Tariffs And Wasteful Special Interest Subsidies Are Not Moving Us Toward An Energy Solution. We need to level the playing field and eliminate mandates, subsidies, tariffs and price supports that focus exclusively on corn-based ethanol and prevent the development of market-based solutions which would provide us with better options for our fuel needs.
Agricultural Meteorologist Drew Lerner is unarguably considered a denier but is lending his voice to the growing number of dissenters who are predicting that Global Cooling is right around the corner.
This brave, against-the-grain prognostication that the Earth’s average temperature could be actually starting to decrease comes from agricultural meteorologist Drew Lerner, who in circles of the global warming in-crowd is known as a “denier.”
Apparently this is because his opinion is based on a well-grounded theory that global warming and cooling are largely affected by factors such as solar radiation, Arctic winds, water vapor and the El Niño/La Niña phenomena, and less by the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere.
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Lerner bases his cooling forecast on cycles of the sun — the single driving force for the entire energy equation on the planet. How much energy we receive from the sun determines how warm or cold temperatures are in the oceans and polar regions, which in turn affects climate.
The amount of energy emitted by the sun started a downward cycle around 1983, according to Lerner. If information Lerner has gathered is correct, there is evidence that a decline in the sun’s energy will correlate to a decline in Earth’s temperatures within 25 to 30 years. If it’s 25 years, the cooling off process should be starting this year and will continue over the next 10 to 15 years. His theory is that it will take a few years before the cooling is uniform throughout the atmosphere. “We could start seeing actual cooler temperatures in 2013 and beyond.”
As you could probably tell from reading this blog, I am pretty vehemently against any kind of biofuel that comes from crops that take up agricultural land, requires freshwater, and receives obnoxiously large subsidies. This means that the only biofuel that I really support at the moment is algae based biofuels and that I’m a strong opponent of ethanol. So it saddened me to see that the EPA ruled against Texas Governor Rick Perry’s request to lower the ethanol mandate.
The Environmental Protection Agency today denied Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s request to reduce federal ethanol requirements this year.
The decision dealt a blow to Perry and a broad consortium of industry groups that claim rising U.S. ethanol output is inflating corn prices, hurting livestock and food producers and boosting grocery bills.
But in a noon conference call, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson said the the federal Renewable Fuel Standard that sets the ethanol requirement isn’t causing “severe economic harm,” which would be required to justify a waiver, and is improving national security and benefiting farmers.
In a statement, Perry said he was “greatly disappointed with the EPA’s inability to look past the good intentions of this policy to see the significant harm it is doing to farmers, ranchers and American households.”
“For the EPA to assert that this federal mandate is not affecting food prices not only goes against common sense, but every American’s grocery bill,” he said.
Crop based ethanol is just a bad idea both environmentally and economically. I wouldn’t be against ethanol nearly as much as I am if the government wasn’t propping up the industry through subsidies and artificially creating a market for it through a mandate. There are other options out there, such as algae biofuels, that could potentially stand on their own in the free market and wouldn’t have the negative environmental effects associated with crop biofuels (clear cutting forests for new land, increased freshwater usage, etc.).
This website seems to be the central point for all of the GOP’s online subversive operations against Barack Obama. This website has been done well and I feel it is effective at driving home its message (as long as people actually go to the site). My personal favorite is the BarackBook (like Facebook). Utterly brilliant.
