biofuel

In 2014, corn biofuel is out, wood biofuel is in

Biofuel sounds like a pretty good idea — down with power plants, up with regular plants! — but if the country switches over to corn ethanol we will basically be unable to grow any other crops. A new study has calculated that corn destined for ethanol production would have to take over 80 percent of […]

Map shows avalanche of cellulosic ethanol projects on the way

In the battle between food and fuel, cellulosic ethanol might not be a great idea or even a viable solution to our energy woes, but enzyme company Novozymes says it's coming, regardless.

Pollan’s Food Rules, animated. With vegetables

This video uses vegetables -- so many, many awesome vegetables -- to illustrate Michael Pollan's Food Rules.

Pooping robots could run off organic waste

Okay, buckle up, because there’s a lot of poop in this story. The EcoBot, developed by Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the U.K., can collect its own material for its microbial fuel cells, then dump leftover waste at the end of the day. That means it can eat poop and also it can poop, and I […]

You can make fuel cells out of cockroaches

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University have figured out how to make cockroaches into creepy-crawly batteries. Finally, living in filth can pay off by lowering your electrical bill!

The man whose algae could take over the world

If life is really a disaster movie in which humanity is wiped off the face of the earth, J. Craig Venter will probably be the hubristic genius who gets us there. The man sequenced the human genome in like three years, and now he's focused on the genetic possibilities of algae. The goal is to program those little cells to produce biofuels.

Here's his pitch, as told to Scientific American:

Everybody is looking for a naturally occurring alga that is going to be a miracle cell to save the world, and after a century of looking, people still haven’t found it. We hope we’re different. The [genetic] tools give us a new approach to being able to rewrite the genetic code and get cells to do what we want them to do.

Eek! Mutant algae!

Cooking grease is now so valuable that people are stealing it

Who says that clean energy policies don't create jobs? The boom in biodiesel has created not only a new commodities market in cooking grease, but a new business opportunities for security professionals -- not to mention providing work for thieves and black-market fences, which is a kind of job? That’s because fryer oil is now such a valuable resource that people are straight-up stealing it.

In recent years, a couple of state governments have realized that cooking grease has a use as a biofuel source and have regulated grease collection. At the same time, though, some less-than-savory characters have realized the grease’s value as well and are boosting it, costing some small rendering businesses losses on the order of $750,000 per year. And so the world comes to this impasse, as described by The New York Times:

The grease is often stored in black Dumpsters that reek of death, in back alleys, which is why pickups usually take place in the middle of the night.

Energy-producing toilets kill two birds with one … well, you know

Leave it to MIT geeks to figure out how to solve one problem (the need for a sustainable energy source) by solving another (insufficient sanitation). Sanergy, a company founded by a group of MIT grads and newly funded by USAID, provides low-cost toilets to sanitation-challenged communities in Kenya, then harvests the waste to convert into […]

Airlines race to be first to fly with biofuel

One day, maybe, planes will be able fly on electricity alone, but until then, the best chance they have to get off gasoline is to switch over to biofuels. And that's actually happening! Over the summer, two biofueled flights made it across the Atlantic, and now Alaska Airlines is pushing an ambitious commercial biofuel flight […]