Posters

A Couple of Fantastic posters that I saw at a local Restaurant, totally Apt and amazing!

Xyclose coversion to Ethanol successful

A German scientist says he has discovered an enzyme that “teaches” yeast cells to ferment xylose into ethanol in just one step.

Goethe University Professor Eckhard Boles, co-founder of the Swiss biofuel company Butalco GmbH, said xylose is an unused waste sugar in the cellulosic ethanol production process during which the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is commonly used for ethanol production. But Boles said current bioethanol production technologies can use only parts of the plants, namely the storage sugars such as glucose, sucrose or starch, and that technology competes with food and feed production.

Boles and his team discovered a new enzyme that, in contrast to current cellulosic ethanol technologies, can convert xylose in a single step and isn’t inhibited by other chemical compounds normally present within the yeast cells. The researchers have filed a patent application for their process.

German Engineering is at it again! Innovation coupled with commitment and consciousness propel such innovative methods, and German scientists are regarded as the pioneers with such methodology !

Exxon Valdez Remembrance Day

By Michael Graham Richard

20 Years After the Massive Oil Spill, What Have We Learned?
As we wrote about last week, today is the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, a sad day indeed. There's a lot of Exxon Valdez coverage on the net today, about the lessons learned and those that we still have yet to internalize. Read on for a quick overview of Exxon Valdez coverage.

New York Times: More Oil Moved, Less Lost
The Dot Earth blog on the NYT has a piece about how, since the Exxon Valdez oil spill, more oil is moved around the world, but less is being lost. They don't mention it, but double-hull oil tankers have obviously helped a lot.

They conclude with:

Still, there are lots of important questions related to humanity’s 150-year love affair with petroleum. Can expanded oil extraction take place responsibly in Arctic waters? Should the United States drill more in its own waters to rely less on oil from, say, Nigeria?

Bloomberg: Valdez Ghost Haunts Exxon With Spill-Prone Ships
Speaking of double-hull ships, Bloomberg has a very scary statistic:

Even after 79 percent of the world supertanker fleet has been replaced by craft with two hulls, Exxon Mobil Corp. remains the biggest Western user of the older designs. It hired more of the tankers last year than the rest of the 10 biggest companies by market value combined, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Exxon, the world’s largest oil company, has kept using tankers with one hull even as 151 countries have decided two are better than one for preventing oil spills and pledged to ban single-hull vessels by 2015.

Don't you already have enough problems, Exxon? Don't you have enough money to upgrade your ships? The good news is that this should change soon. In 1990, the U.S. Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act, requiring a phase-out of single-hulled oil tankers in U.S. waters by 2010. Let's hope this is enforced.

Reuters: Interview with an Eyewitness of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
Reuters interviewed Dennis Kelso, who was Alaska's environment conservation chief 20 years ago (the whole thing is worth reading). Here's a highlight:

Beyond the ecological devastation, Kelso said, the damage from the Valdez disaster calls into question whether Arctic offshore drilling should be part of U.S. energy strategy. Clean-up and recovery of oil has never been successfully accomplished in rough, ice-laden Arctic water, he said.

Yale Environment 360: Impacts Of The Exxon Valdez Linger
Soon after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Exxon officials said that "within a few years" there would be no evidence of the disaster left. Well, they were wrong:

Sea otters once again play in the waters of Alaska’s Prince William Sound, and salmon and some other species have rebounded. But killer whale populations have not recovered, and the huge schools of whirling herring that fed both fishermen and animals have not returned, reminding scientists that nature’s responses are complex and unpredictable.

Cleaning up Exxon's mess. Photo: Public domain.

Time Magazine: "some parts of the world are too precious to be risked for a few million barrels of oil."
Time magazine also has an article about the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The most powerful passage is in the conclusion:

[As] soon as the world economy recovers, so will demand for oil and the pressure to drill offshore in Alaska. And that pressure will surely only grow as climate change causes the Arctic ice to recede. But that is precisely the lesson that must be remembered from the Exxon Valdez: that some parts of the world are too precious to be risked for a few million barrels of oil. "This place was a Shangri-la of the Arctic, a very special place," says Williams. "And today it's lost."

The Associated Press: "It's like a death in the family"
The Associated Press talked to a fisherman about the Exxon Valdez oil spill:

"It's like a death in the family," the 70-year-old fisherman said of the Exxon Valdez disaster. "With time it gets a little better, but the pain never really goes away. Until this generation passes on, I don't think it will ever really be over." Smith is among the scores of residents of Cordova and other communities whose lives were forever changed on March 24, 1989.

Indeed, the Exxon Valdez oil spill was a disaster for plants and animals, but also for the people who lived in the area.

Huffington Post: Three Lessons We Still Haven't Learned 20 Years After the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
The Huffington Post has a piece by J.S. McDougall about lessons we haven't learned yet, according to him.

It can be summarized by his subtitles: 1. Big Energy Means Big Energy Corporations. 2. Corporations Will Not Clean Up After Themselves. 3. We Must Build Our Own Future

You can read the whole thing here (it includes footage from 1986).

Source: TreeHugger

Tree hugging

Tree hugging to Help Rebuild New Orleans Isn't So Bad After All - FOXNews
Tree hugging to Help Rebuild New Orleans Isn't So Bad After AllFOXNewsLooking at a muddy field of cypress saplings that should soon grow to rival the 15-footers that one hugged the banks of the lake, it occurred to me that maybe sometimes being a earth-loving, Tree-hugging hippie isn't always bad %26mdash; and maybe sometimes it ...

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Ethanol from forages

Cellulosic ethanol is being hailed as the biofuel that will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent, reduce U.S. dependence of foreign oil and won’t take prime ag land away from food production.

Yet the biofuel, made from grass, wood or other non-edible plant material, is probably five years from commercial production despite U.S. Department of Energy funding and university and private company research.

At the same time, growers are wondering where they may fit in this new market and how they can prepare for it. Pilot cellulosic ethanol facilities are being built in a number of states, including Tennessee, South Dakota, Louisiana, Kentucky and Florida.

Pilot plants are scheduled to begin production this year, starting with readily available crop residues like corn cobs and stover. But there are challenges, including finding an efficient way to convert plant materials to produce cellulosic ethanol and creating government policies that encourage biorefinery investments and growth as well as allow biomass crop production on Conservation Reserve Program land.

One piece of the cellulosic ethanol puzzle that is in place is switchgrass. Varieties bred as dedicated energy crops are now being marketed commercially. Growers in Tennessee and Kentucky are learning to raise switchgrass, deemed by the Department of Energy as a prime crop that can provide good yields with low inputs on marginal land.

“Switchgrass has a lot of things going for it; it’s got a seed that’s easy to plant,” says Ken Vogel, USDA-ARS forage breeder at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “It’s easy for farmers to handle and, for the first generation of energy crops, we’re furthest along on this and we’ve got the most information on it.”

Source: http://deltafarmpress.com/biofuels/forage-fuel-0313/

Save Planet

Prince Charles: world must act now to Save Planet - The Associated Press
WorldChangingPrince Charles: world must act now to Save PlanetThe Associated PressRIO DE JANEIRO (AP) %26mdash; Britain's Prince Charles warned on Thursday that mankind has 100 months or less to Save the Planet from a climate-caused disaster. Charles told some 150 business leaders in Rio de Janeiro that "the best projections tell us that we ...Prince Charles says time running out to Save Planet Reuters UKCharles: 'Race to Save the Planet' ITV.comCharles: 'Only 100 Months To Save The Planet' Sky NewsTelegraph.co.uk�- The Sunall 489 news articles

UK - CO2 Emissions down in 2008

Average CO2 emissions from new cars sold in the UK in 2008 fell to 158.0 g/km in 2008—4.2% less than the 2007 figure and 16.8% down on the 189.8 g/km base level in 1997, according to figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders’ (SMMT) annual New Car CO2 Report. The drop marks the sharpest annual decline yet. (Using US EPA conversion factors (earlier post), 158 g/km is roughly equivalent to 34.8 mpg US for gasoline and 39.9 mpg US for diesel.)

Although the UK new car fleet has made above-EU15 gains in six of past seven years to 2007, the UK average new car CO2 emissions remains 3.7% above the EU15 average, which reached 158 g/km in 2007, according to the report.



The report calculates that the average CO2 figure for all cars in use in the UK since 1997—i.e., the car parc—is 173.7 g/km. This is 0.9% down from the 175.3 g/km figure average estimated for the 1997-2007 parc. This improvement reflects the arrival into the fleet of lower CO2 emitting cars and the removal of older, less efficient ones.


The parc average CO2 figure is some 10% above the new car average. New cars emit around 15% less emissions than cars from a decade earlier. The SMMT report notes that the slowdown in the overall new car market in 2008/09 is likely to mean a reduction in the pace of fleet renewal, resulting in a slower pace for dropping emissions in the parc. Existing cars will be kept going for longer as consumers try to stretch their resources in a time of economic hardship.

While the number of cars on the road and the distance travelled has increased, their share of total UK emissions continues to fall. Cars now account for 11.5% of the country’s total CO2 emissions, largely as a result of new technology, improved fuel consumption rates and better consumer awareness.


CO2 emissions have fallen across all automotive market segments with the larger end of the market making some of the biggest improvements. In addition, increased consumer awareness and changes to vehicle taxation have resulted in a move towards ‘best in class’ choices with most consumers opting to buy a model with CO2 emissions within the bottom quarter of their preferred segment’s range.

The adoption of the new car CO2 regulation in December 2008 set a phase-in target for vehicle manufacturers to ensure their average fleet emissions do not exceed 130 g/km by 2015. In the UK, there are already 236 models emitting less than 130 g/km on the UK market but for the target to be met, an annual improvement of 2.5% per year must be maintained.




The UK market in general continues to shift towards lower-emitting cars, the SMMT report finds. In 1997, no cars were sold with emissions below 120 g/km. By 2000 that sector still only accounted for 0.1% of the market. It rose to 5.4% by 2007 and doubled in 2008 to 11.0%. In the distribution chart (at right), the peaks have shifted from 171-175 g/km in 1997 down to 136-140 g/km in 2008.

In 2008, 48.7% of the market was 150 g/km or below. This compares with 38.0% in 2007 and 7.8% in 1997. There remains a long tail on the chart, but the proportion of cars over 200 g/km in 2008 was just 7.8% compared with 28.1% in 1997.

Resource:
The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders New car CO2 report 2009

Liquid Eco Battery - 100% greenest

If there's anything less environmental sounding than battery fluid, we don't know what it is. Kids are trained to fear leaking batteries as angry anthrax-covered Aliens with especially acidic blood, but MIT scientists may have made the greenest battery yet entirely out of liquid. At least, according to them.

The new system is an fully liquid battery, a chemical cocktail which can contain charge and is even color coded. The batteries you know only have one liquid component, and still depend on a solid electrode - thereby limiting the scale of the system. With three liquids you can literally pour yourself a bigger battery, without any hardware bottlenecks - if your existing connections aren't good enough, pull them out and stick in better ones.

Professor Sadoway of MIT reports that the liquid cell can handle currents an order of magnitude greater than any other battery, are easier to make, will last longer and for only a third of the cost. Then again, he's only been reporting to the MIT-printed Technology Review so far.

In any event, a truly scalable and easily chargeable battery system could revolutionize green-power. A major problem in power production is simply storing the stuff from when it's plentiful for when it's in major demand. To supply a city, you'd need a huge field of liquid batteries to soak up all the juice, and where could you put them? Maybe under the huge field of solar panels providing the juice in the first place? Even without the eco-factors, easily storing electricity for any length of time without major losses is a system with guaranteed application.

More info @ MIT Liquid Battery

Range Fules to produce Ethanol from biomass

Range Fuels announced a new strategic partnership with Emerson that aims to build America’s first industrial-scale cellulosic biofuels plant.

Range will build the facility in Soperton, Ga., by 2010. The plant will ultimately have a production capacity of 100 million gallons of cellulosic biofuels per year.

The plant will produce ethanol and methanol from non-food biomass such as wood.

Range Fuels was recently awarded an $80 million loan guarantee by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to build the plant. The loan was the first ever to be dedicated to a cellulosic biofuels program.

Range Fuels is a privately held company based in Broomfield, Colo. It is funded by a number of greentech venture capital firms, including Khosla Ventures.

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2. First Cellulosic Ethanol Plant In USA Up And Running Gas2.0: After a $90 million shot in the arm from...
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OshKosh - Spring Sale Coupon

Green Tips

Green Tips for eco quilting: know your roots - Examiner.com
Examiner.comGreen Tips for eco quilting: know your rootsExaminer.comBut let's face it, no matter how many Tips and tricks and fancy products you buy, the ultimate trendy, eco-quilt is no eco-quilt unless it is used, cuddled and loved. In fact, we might just say a quilt isn't really Green unless you can sneeze on it ...

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Green Tips

Green Tips for IT workers - Chicago Tribune
Green Tips for IT workersChicago Tribune,�United StatesCommunications Supply Corp. and Wesco Distribution are hosting a Green and Sustainability Summit on Thursday at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare, 9300 Bryn Mawr Ave., Rosemont. The event, which is geared toward senior-level IT, operations and facilities ...

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