Energy
The latest national survey of 100% biodiesel (B100) "blend stock" samples by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) found that 95% of the samples from 2011-12 met ASTM International fuel quality specifications, a big improvement over 2007 when less than half of the samples met quality specifications.
The ASTM standards serve as guidelines for industry and are designed to ensure quality at the pump for consumers, along with reliable operation of the nation's vehicles powered by biodiesel blends.
B100 is not commonly used as a fuel, but is…
It takes about as much energy to make the nitrogen fertilizer for an acre of corn (150 lbs) as it takes to drive a car 600 miles, and because it is made using natural gas it has a carbon footprint equivalent to driving the car 650 miles. Now imagine that for more than 90 million acres of corn. That is a lot of energy. But what if that energy and greenhouse gas footprint could disappear? This might actually be possible.
By way of background, nitrogen is one of the three most important minerals that plants need to grow, and the basis of the protein we require in…
So you want to be in the energy biz. Do you have what it takes? It’s April Fools' Day--- test your energy IQ and find out where you belong in the dynamic energy sector.
Prefabricated Housing
1) Is prefabricated housing cheaper and/or greener than stud built construction?
2) Did a Chinese developer build a prefabricated 30 story hotel in 15 days?
Oil Pipelines
3) Canada has a glut of oil and gives the United States bargain pricing. So, why does the United States buy oil from Venezuela?
4) For the Keystone XL Pipeline, what does the XL stand for? Hint, don’t confuse pipelines with men’s boxer…
Solar cells act something like leaves, capturing sunlight and turning it into energy - unfortunately the manufacturing of solar cells, unlike trees, is something of an environmental disaster. From rare earth metals to all kinds of other materials due to substrates and cells, solar panels have to function for decades before they break even, as far as any ecological savings are considered. If only solar cells could instead be made from trees.
Georgia Tech and Purdue researchers say they have done it; they have developed efficient solar cells using natural substrates derived from trees.…
Carbon dioxide created by the widespread burning of fossil fuels is the key factor in climate change, so researchers are looking for new ways to generate cleaner power.
Researchers from the University of Georgia have shown they can take the carbon dioxide trapped in the atmosphere and turn it into industrial products - a roadmap to biofuels made directly from the carbon dioxide in the air.
During the process of photosynthesis, plants use sunlight to transform water and carbon dioxide into sugars that the plants use for energy, much like humans burn calories from food. These sugars…
Fluctuating wind speed and direction means turbines generate power inconsistently. Coupled with customers' varying power demand, the results is that many wind-farm managers end up wasting power-generation capacity and limiting the service life of turbines through active control, including fully stopping turbines, in order to damage to the power grid from spikes in supply.
Incorporating wind power into existing power grids remains challenging and a new paper in Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy outlines a strategy is based on continuous predictions of how fluctuating winds…
The earth has abundant energy sources, if only we would bother to tap them. Wind power has had its financial and ethical ups and downs, with wind farms using gargantuan, expensive wind towers decorating or despoiling the scenery,depending on your esthetics:
Wind power resources on the eastern U.S.continental shelf are estimated to be over 400 GW [gigawatts], several times the electricity used by U.S. eastern coastal states…. The furthest advanced of a handful of proposed U.S. offshore wind developments is in Nantucket Sound,off the Southern coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. This proposal has…
An innovative new process releases the energy in coal without burning, while capturing carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas that is the target of emissions reduction goals. How close is it to commercial use? It has passed an important milestone - a successful 200-hour test on a sub-pilot scale version of the technology using two inexpensive but highly polluting forms of coal.
Researcher Liang-Shih Fan and colleagues have been working on this technology because carbon capture and sequestration ranks high among the approaches for reducing coal-related emissions of…
Mandates and subsidies have created an artificial green energy industry. In the case of ethanol, that has led to escalating corn prices. Higher prices have encouraged some farmers to switch to growing corn continuously and they are seeing unusually high yield reductions.
A six-year study has identified three key factors affecting yield in continuous corn (CC) systems.
Corn can be and has long been cropped continuously, but it is widely accepted that there is a yield reduction compared to corn rotated with soybean schemes. This difference is referred to as the continuous corn yield…
New Yorkers are not happy about the boom in Pennsylvania due to increased natural gas in that state - but politicians have been against it. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says he will soon decide whether to approve gas drilling but engineers writing in Energy Policy say that wind, water and sunlight could hypothetically be sustainable, inexpensive and reliable and save the state billions of dollars in pollution-related costs.
Their model claims to fulfill all of a state's transportation, electric power, industry, and heating and cooling energy needs with renewable energy, and to calculate the…