Primus Green Energy has inaugurated a new US$7 million demonstration plant in Hillsborough, NJ. The event was attended by politicians and industry representatives.
The company develops an alternative fuel, a kind of non-petroleum type of gasoline that does not require
What is green? What is a viable economic alternative? What is reasonable and will do more bad than good? Welcome to Biofuels. Two scientists are challenging the currently accepted norms of biofuel production. A commentary published today in GCB Bioenergy reveals that calculations of greenhouse gas (GHGs)
The Heslin Rothenberg firm’s Clean Energy Patent Growth Index (CEPGI) 2011 Year in Review was published earlier this month.
The 2011 roundup found that granted green patents were at an all time high of 2331 for last year, a rise of 450 patents, or 24%, over 2010.
Always an interesting read, the CEPGI is quarterly
The Danish government has approved a series of goals to significantly reduce its carbon emissions and increase its use of green energy by 2020, an “ambitious green transition” officials say will affect all levels of society.
The agreement, which was approved by parliament
As oil prices soar, the exploration of alternative fuel sources continues. Primus Green Energy, based in Hillsborough, New Jersey, has created a high quality, 93-octane bio-gasoline at a price that will be both competitive and profitable once production is scaled up.
A U.S. biotechnology company is planning to build the nation’s first commercial-scale cellulosic biofuels plant in Mississippi, where it will be able to use wood chips and other plant matter as an alternative to corn in the production of ethanol.
Virdia, a California-based company formerly known as
How Waste = Food
Imagine if we could create a super-efficient world where there was no waste… Actually, there’s no need to imagine it: nature is already ahead of us on this one.
In nature, almost all “waste” from one organism can be used as “food” or fuel by another organism—a
concept explored by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in their seminal book Cradle To Cradle.
For example: a fruit tree’s blossoms fall to the ground and decompose into food for other living things. Bacteria and fungi feed on the organic waste of both the trees and the animals that eat its fruit, depositing nutrients in the soil in a form ready for the tree to use for growth. And so one organism’s waste is food for another, and nutrients flow indefinitely in cycles of birth, death, decay and rebirth.
Humans—the only creatures on the planet that produce landfills—are not quite so efficient. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States alone generates about 250 million tons of waste annually, with nearly 175 million of those tons being thrown into landfills. To make matters worse, the decomposition of waste in landfills releases large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, making landfills the most significant human–related source of methane in the United States.
Clearly, humans need to change their ways to avoid turning the earth into one massive landfill. Fortunately, a number of clean technology companies are taking innovative steps to address this problem by turning what seems to be waste into energy, fuel, or other useful materials.
For example, California-based Enventix is developing proprietary conversion systems for turning waste, biomass, and other low-grade feedstocks into ultra-clean energy. This technological breakthrough rids waste and biomass of impurities in an economical manner—helping municipalities generate renewable power that is free of harmful emissions at efficiencies that were previously unattainable.
Meanwhile, Washington-based General Biodiesel, Inc. has tackled the seemingly dirty job of collecting used cooking oil from hundreds of Seattle-area restaurants. But instead of burning or burying it, the company recycles the grease as biodiesel, the ultimate non-foreign fuel. Springboard Biodiesel, based in Chico, California, takes this idea “on the road” by providing smaller biorefinery machines that can process used cooking oil wherever it’s generated, whether it’s at a restaurant, a community co-op, or a university.
California-based Micromidas is tackling an even dirtier form of waste than used cooking oil: sewage sludge. The company has found a way to harness microbes to naturally transform the carbon and other nutrients in sewage into biodegradable plastics that are safe enough to be used as food packaging or as biomedical sutures.
Across the Atlantic, French company Pyrum Innovations is developing a tire-recycling machine that “deconstructs” used tires back into separate quantities of rubber, metal, and usable petrol. This invention provides a way to tackle the existing mountains of used tires that never degrade and thus pose a huge environmental problem. It also offers tire factories a way to more effectively handle new waste that they produce. Given that European tire plants generate 2,000 to 7,000 tons of production waste annually—and have to pay €200 to dispose of a single ton—Pyrum’s potential impact is sizable.
With each of these innovations, our wasteful ways can come a little bit closer to nature’s closed-loop system—one where “waste = food”.
Israel’s Aqwise is proving to be a success story of international proportions in the arena of biological wastewater treatment. The Company began as a small start-up offering innovative biological treatment of urban wastewater, and today offers a variety of solutions for municipal and industrial customers, due to intensive R&D and expansion into new arenas of
The energy industry is particularly adept at taking raw material and turning it into products. Whether producing heat, power, or fuel, the model has proven exceptionally efficient at moving highly concentrated and homogenous resources over long distances through intricate supply chains.
CoolPlanet Energy Systems (CoolPlanet) is a Camarillo, California, company that is developing a “negative carbon” drop-in gasoline replacement fuel from biomass.
According to the company’s web site, the fuel is made using proprietary biomass fractionator
According to a recent study released by the Texas Forest Service, as many as 500 million trees in the state – roughly 10 percent of the state’s forests – succumbed to heat and water stress over the past year as a result of 2011’s unrelenting drought. The study does not include the 4 million acres already
Adding a charred biomass material called biochar to glacial soils can help reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists. Studies by scientists with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) are providing
The Canadian chapter of Greenpeace yesterday released a report that highlights the dangers of the large-scale use of wood and tree harvesting for heating, electricity generation or liquid biofuels. The report is called ‘Fuelling a Biomess’ and it argues that burning woody biomass on an industrial scale could severely
Deere and Company, known more famously as John Deere is one of the leading manufacturers of agricultural machinery around the world. This American corporation, based in Moline, Illinois, is a Fortune 500 company and sells everything from tractors, cotton harvesters, and combine harvesters, to planters, seeders,