The Green Optimistic

NASA has recently been very interested not only in space exploration but as well in the rising energy costs and climate change. NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, has developed a system of growing algae in waste-water for the biofuel production.

Researches from Stanford University have recently published a study on ethanol fuel and its influence over human health. Compared to pure gasoline usage, ethanol increases health problems because of cancer-chemical formation.

According to the researchers this new method can reduce the amount of sludge processed by traditional treatment facilities and turn municipal solid waste into a green fuel.

The company Alkol Inc located in Brazil has developed a new system called 1HourFlex that can convert your car to run on any amount of ethanol or gasoline(E85) in less than one hour.

Every summer, hundreds of thousands of tons of watermelons are transformed in garbage because they aren’t good enough for marketplace. A new research says that the juice extracted from these watermelons could be used to the biofuel production.

This years scholarship prize of $20,000 of Invent Your World Challenge went to a 15 year old fellow from Texas called Javier Fernández-Han, who proved us all that renewable energy is the way we should direct our creativity upon.

More and more research studies show the fact that biofuels, ethanol, and other zero-carbon burning fuels do more damage than they do good in the long run. According to a recent study, it looks like ethanol, the petrol companies’ saving field, consumes up to three times more water than it was previously thought, as MIT’s Technology Review states.

Iowa State University started a new project of developing a thermochemical system that combines production of ethanol and thermal energy. With a low-emission burner and a new catalyst for ethanol production, the technologies use synthesis gas produced from discarded seed corn, switch-grass, wood chips and other biomass.

I don’t know the solution to the perfect energy equation, but as long as we’re producing CO2 it’s not the final one. Anyway, until a new and better method is found to be feasible enough, this is a good one, too.

Michael Scharf, an assistant professor of entomology at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and his colleague Aurélien Tartar describe the way that the enzymes produces by termites and the micro-organisms living inside them, or their “symbionts” could help the scientists produce ethanol from straw or wood by providing some basic chemical processes.

I guess everybody’s complaining about the skyrocketing oil prices these days. This trend is expected to be worse, and it’s expected to reduce the people’s gasoline consumption by big figures. That can be to the benefit of the environment, on one hand, but on the other hand it can be terrifying for the general public, [...]

Ethanol is a promising alternative fuel that, along with improvements in fuel economy and reductions in travel demand, has the potential to help solve many of the problems associated with gasoline use. Though the current form of ethanol made from corn offers limited environmental benefits and limited potential for large-scale displacement of petroleum, it will [...]