The big thread on renewable fuels

[Stragomagus]

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/ar ... %27s-Roads

 

 

 

[hide=]A new carmaker has a plan for cheap, environmentally friendly cars to be built all over the country

 

 

 

An air-powered car? It may be available sooner than you think at a price tag that will hardly be a budget buster. The vehicle may not run like a speed racer on back road highways, but developer Zero Pollution Motors is betting consumers will be willing to fork over $20,000 for a vehicle that can motor around all day on nothing but air and a splash of salad oil, alcohol or possibly a pint of gasoline.

 

 

 

The expertise needed to build a compressed air car, or CAV, is not rocket science, either. Years-old, off-the-shelf technology uses compressed air to drive old-fashioned car engine pistons instead of combusting gas or diesel fuel to create a burst of air to do the same thing. Indian carmaker Tata has no qualms about the technology. It has already bought the rights to make the car for the huge Indian market.

 

 

 

The air car can tool along at a top speed of 35 mph for some 60 miles or so on a tank of compressed air, a sufficient distance for 80% of consumers to commute to work and back and complete daily chores.

 

 

 

On highways, the CAV can cruise at interstate speeds for nearly 800 miles with a small motor that compresses outside air to keep the tank filled. The motor isn't finicky about fuel. It will burn gasoline or diesel as well as biodiesel, ethanol or vegetable oil.

 

 

 

This car leaves the highest-mpg vehicles you can buy right now in the dust. Even if it used only regular gasoline, the air car would average 106 mpg, more than double today's fuel sipping champ, the Toyota Prius. The air tank also can be refilled when it's not in use by being plugged into a wall socket and recharged with electricity as the motor compresses air.

 

 

 

Automakers aren't quite ready yet to gear up huge assembly line operations churning out air cars or set up glitzy dealer showrooms where you can ooh and aah over the color or style. But the vehicles will be built in factories that will make up to 8,000 vehicles a year, likely starting in 2011, and be sold directly to consumers.

 

 

 

There will be plants in nearly every state, based on the number of drivers in the state. California will have as many as 17 air car manufacturing plants, and there'll be around 12 in Florida, eight in New York, four in Georgia, while two in Connecticut will serve that state and Rhode Island.

 

 

 

The technology goes back decades, but is coming together courtesy of two converging forces. First, new laws are likely to be enacted in a few years that will limit carbon dioxide emissions and force automakers to develop ultra-high mileage cars and those that emit minuscule amounts of or no gases linked with global warming. Plug-in electric hybrids will slash these emissions, but they'll be pricey at around $40,000 each and require some changes in infrastructure -- such as widespread recharge stations -- to be practical. Fuel cells that burn hydrogen to produce only water vapor still face daunting technical challenges.

 

 

 

Second, the relatively high cost of gas has expedited the air car's development. Yes, pump prices have plunged since July from record levels, but remain way higher than just a few years ago and continue to take a bite out of disposable income. Refiners will face carbon emission restraints, too, and steeply higher costs will be passed along at the pump.

 

 

 

Tata doesn't plan to produce the cars in the U.S. Instead, it plans to charge $15 million for the rights to the technology, a fully built turnkey auto assembly plant, tools, machinery, training and rights to use trademarks.

 

 

 

The CAV has a big hurdle: proving it can pass federal crash tests. Shiva Vencat, president and CEO of Zero Pollution Motors, says he's not worried. "The requirements can be modeled [on a computer] before anything is built and adjusted to ensure that the cars will pass" the crash tests. Vencat also is a vice president of MDI Inc., a French company that developed the air car.

 

 

 

The inventor of this technology is Mr. Guy Negre, who is the founder and CEO of MDI SA, a company headquartered in Luxembourg with its R and D in Nice, France.

 

Copyrighted, Kiplinger Washington Editors, Inc.[/hide]

 

 

 

I'm sold as long as the air tanks last for 100 miles in a single run. Sadly, this still won't do for service type jobs where you might travel over 200 miles in a day.

[ElkNight]

Hey strago! (Its knight)

 

Sounds awesome, hopefully it will be as good as it sounds.

[deloriagod]

Haha, I love to see these new cars that aren't dependent on gas. But no matter how much I like to see our society progress, I'm still a huge fan of muscle cars and they're not exactly helping our environment much.

[Kaphias]

Old, old, old news and technology. It's almost more simple than internal-combustion gasoline engines if you think about it. ;)

[Wongtong]

Haiii strago :)

 

Sounds pretty interesting... if it really does work, I doubt people would change over from diesel/petrol to air-powered cars quickly.

 

>_>

[eggzs]

Yeah, it kinda is, you just need a hydrocarbon and air to make it combust but you won't get any explosions with air so the compressed air is nothing but a glorified supercharger that uses its own store of air instead of taking it from the atmosphere.

[Perakp]

I want to buy one. Now.

[Barihawk]

"Interstate" speeds of "35 Miles Per Hour."

 

 

 

I'll stick to my 30 MPG, thanks. Considering gas is only $2.03 per gallon here I don't think we have many reasons to rush out and spend "over 20,0000 dollars" on this.

[dsavi]

"Interstate" speeds of "35 Miles Per Hour."

 

The one that it said "Interstate speeds" about had a small built-in motor, easy to confuse the two. ;)

[ember3579]

If this works, I want one. The egghead who thought this up should be swimming in money inside of one decade if this is a workable idea.

[megakiller32]

Why not my idea of millions of hamsters on wheels?

 

 

 

It works for turbines :|

[RichieMcD]

This will definitely be a good idea for commuting as most commuters always end up stuck in traffic jams where clouds of Co2 and other harmful gases form for those who wish to walk, run or cycle to work. It will mean most major cities will have much less of a problem with high carbon levels or smog.

 

 

 

It wont be effective though for anything other than commuting or short drives though, 35 MPH top speed?

[Stragomagus]

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/co ... 03/1?rss=1

 

 

 

Diesel Fuel From a Tree Fungus?

 

 

 

[hide=]By Robert F. Service

 

ScienceNOW Daily News

 

3 November 2008

 

Petroleum geologists normally look for oil underground. Gary Strobel made his strike by pruning a tree. In the current issue of Microbiology, Strobel, a plant pathologist at Montana State University, Bozeman, and colleagues report that Gliocladium roseum--a novel fungus they discovered hidden within a stem from a scraggly tree in northern Patagonia--produces dozens of the same midlength hydrocarbons found in gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel. The fungus may help companies convert the chemical energy stored in plants into liquid fuels capable of replacing fossil fuels.

 

 

 

The discovery is "a really great contribution," says Stephen Del Cardayre, a synthetic biologist and vice president for research and development at LS9, a South San Francisco-based start-up working to use microbes to produce renewable fuels. Even though the new fungus pumps out only small quantities of fuel hydrocarbons, researchers might use its genes to engineer other industrial microbes to do the job more efficiently. "The beauty is that even if the chemical reaction isn't perfect, you can always improve it," he says.

 

 

 

The search for fuel-producing microbes is one of the hottest areas in synthetic biology (Science, 24 October, p. 522). Strobel, an expert on endophytes--organisms that live within the tissues of other creatures--joined it by accident in 1997, when he discovered a fungus in Honduras that naturally produces volatile antibiotics, now being evaluated as a way to preserve fruit during shipping. Strobel has since identified related fungi around the globe that produce different volatile hydrocarbons.

 

 

 

After discovering the new fungus wedged between cells in a stem from an Ulmo tree (Eucryphia cordifolia), Strobel and colleagues cultured the organism, collected the gaseous compounds it produced, and ran the compounds through a mass spectrometer to identify them. When he saw the printout, Strobel says, "every hair on my body stood up." The list included octane, 1-octene, heptane, 2-methyl, and hexadecane--all common components of diesel fuels.

 

 

 

Although other microbes are known to make individual volatile hydrocarbons common in fuels, Strobel says none can match the synthetic repertoire of G. roseum, which makes a staggering 55 volatile hydrocarbons: "No one has ever observed anything like this with any microbe before." He suspects that the fungus produces the hydrocarbon stew to inhibit other organisms from growing nearby.

 

 

 

Strobel and his colleagues also cultured G. roseum by feeding it cellulosic biomass like that from agricultural wastes, although the yield of volatile hydrocarbons declined. Even if the bug turns out not to produce fuels economically, Del Cardayre says, renewable-fuel companies are likely to try to adopt its synthetic prowess to boost the biofuel output of their own organisms, if they use similar metabolic pathways to convert energy-rich starting materials into hydrocarbons. Strobel is teaming up with his son, Scott, an enzymologist at Yale University, and members of his lab to sequence G. roseum's complete genome and identify its component enzymes.

 

 

 

Other energy-making bugs could be on the way, too. The younger Strobel says a recent sample-collection trip he made to South America with a group of Yale undergraduates found other novel endophytic fungi that turn out a wide variety of hydrocarbons. "There is just huge swaths of biodiversity to be discovered out there," Strobel says. That may persuade the next generation of oil explorers to trade in their seismographs for pruning shears.[/hide]

 

 

 

This Gary guy is on to something in that, if and when oil production starts to decline, then creating artificial microbes such as these might be the way to go in the future. The good thing about such lifeforms is that their design can always be revised to give a higher output, while still keeping negatives fairly low. In other words, expect to see a rising interest in biotechnology in the coming years.

 

 

 

On a related note, a company has raised $25 million:

 

 

 

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/21602/?a=f

 

 

 

[hide=]Cobalt Biofuels, a startup based in Mountainview, CA, has developed a cheap way to make butanol from biomass. Last week, the company announced that it had raised $25 million to expand from a small laboratory-scale production to a pilot-scale plant that can produce about 35,000 gallons of fuel per year.

 

 

 

"Our models tell us it is a very low-cost process that can be competitive with anything on the market today," says Pamela Contag, the company's founder and CEO. The process is cheaper because it uses improved strains of bacteria to break down and ferment biomass, as well as improved equipment for managing fermentation and reducing water and energy consumption, she says.

 

 

 

Butanol could help increase the use of biofuels, since it doesn't have the same limitations as ethanol, the primary biofuel made in the United States. It has more energy than ethanol: a gallon of butanol contains about 90 percent as much energy as a gallon of gasoline, while ethanol only has about 70 percent as much. What's more, while ethanol requires special pipelines for shipping, butanol can be shipped in unmodified gasoline pipelines. And butanol can be blended with gasoline in higher percentages than ethanol without requiring modifications to engines.

 

 

 

Cobalt Biofuels joins a handful of other companies developing biobutanol. The biggest such effort comes in the form of a partnership between DuPont and BP: the companies plan to be selling commercial quantities of butanol made from sugar beets by 2010. Other companies developing biobutanol are Gevo, a startup based in Englewood, CO, that is commercializing advances from UCLA, and Tetravitae, based in Chicago, which is commercializing advances from the University of Illinois. In spite of their progress, Andy Aden, a research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden, CO, says that no company has demonstrated yet that it can make butanol cheap enough to compete in the market.

 

 

 

Cobalt Biofuels uses the bacteria Clostridium to break down components of plant matter, including cellulose, hemicellulose, and starch, and produce a combination of butanol, acetone, and ethanol. That is nothing new: Clostridium naturally produces these chemicals and was employed in the early 1900s to make butanol for use in solvents and to make acetone for explosives and other products. What's new, Contag says, is that a combination of fuel prices, government biofuel mandates, and the company's new technology have made butanol competitive as a fuel.

 

 

 

One of Cobalt Biofuels' key advances is a technique for genetically engineering strains of Clostridium so that they produce a luminescent protein whenever they produce butanol. "When the Clostridium are happy and producing butanol, they're also producing light," Contag says. When they're paired with light detectors, the company can quickly sort through new strains of the bacteria, as well as tailor their environment, to increase production. The company has further increased butanol production by engineering a bioreactor in which biomass flows in, the bacteria processes it, and a mixture of primarily butanol and water flows out.

 

 

 

While increasing the amount of butanol produced can decrease costs, two other factors are also important: the consumption of energy, and the consumption of water. Cobalt Biofuels has reduced both of these by 75 percent. To reduce energy, the company has licensed a new technology, called vapor compression distillation, for separating the butanol and water. The addition of pressure to the distillation process, together with the use of an effective heat exchanger that reduces wasted heat, lowers energy consumption. To reduce water use, the company has turned to proprietary water purification and recycling systems.

 

 

 

Eventually, the company plans to produce butanol using waste from paper manufacturing and sugar refining, as well as other sources, and then sell it as a fuel additive for reducing carbon monoxide emissions. As Cobalt Biofuels scales up production, it plans to sell the butanol as a substitute for gasoline.[/hide]

[Lenticular_J]

You'd be surprised how much can be used instead of diesel or petroleum. The best I've seen so far is algae, being studied by folk in Arizona. They don't have enough funding, though.

[Ginger_Warrior]

I hear turning glucose into ethanol is becoming a lucrative trade in America now. The BBC even went so far to say that McCain lost in (I think) Indiana last night because he rejects the idea.

[Kill_Life]

The cruelty! Where is the world going to?

 

Cars consuming alcohol? C'mon!

 

 

 

On a side note: Looks really nice. Very, very nice actually.

 

2011 is still quite far away, perhaps aqua-cars are more advanced then and better?

 

I would celebrate a lot more if they were on the market sooner.

 

 

 

Still, these cars come atleast 10-15 years too late.

[Lenticular_J]

It's not the part that it's alcohol that he rejects, it's the part that dips into a major American food source that he does.

 

 

 

Too bad hydrogen cars are still way too expensive, Hyundai (is that the one?) makes one that looks like a usual car. Desalination techniques might need to be fixed a bit, though.

[Randox]

I have had the plesure of seeing an air powered go-cart. It used 2 scuba tanks and a modified [bleep]el Rotery Engine (a buetiful engine design that unlike a piston engine, does not lose power at high RPM). Unfortunatly, as great a preformance as they could get from the car, it was short lived. It had minutes of fuel. Ran longer on sunny days. They tried it in th ewinter and the cooling from the air tanks caused problems because parts start to sieze. When you let pressure off from any compressed gas, the gas will become very cold (depending on how fast you let the air out). For this to be a viable technology a few things have to hapen.

 

-Like electric cars, you need a clean source of energy to compress the gas in the firstplace.

 

-You need the gas to be under incredible pressure so you can store a viable amount of fuel.

 

-You have to solve the cooling issue.

 

 

 

Piston engines are not the most suited for this sort of design. Roteray engines are probably better, but they use up fuel a bit faster too. Personaly, I am in favore of Hydrogen fuel cells that are charged by the only clean source of electricity that can fill teh demand to replace all fossil fuels and general electricity on earth. Nuclear Power. The other stuff is nice, but the curret technology in teh Nuclear industry can replace all powerplants and fossil fuels without any aditional research. Nothing else can do that.

[RSBDavid]

Meh, just use crappy american beer to power cars tbh.

 

 

 

 

 

OT:

 

 

 

AIr wouldn't be that bad of a source of fuel.

[thrash-boy]

i certainly wont be buying one if they come to aus, even if they are as cheaper than other cars.

 

sounds like another pma (people moving appliance), certainly not a car. sadly thats what all modern cars are like, appliances. you dont drive them, they drive you.

 

ill be sticking to old cars until the day that i can no longer afford to drive anywhere, and even then i wont be moving to an appliance. even if it sends me broke.

 

hopefully these stupid things will be all painted white like all other appliances.

 

 

 

btw, this is my kind of car