The Green Technocrat

The other day I was browsing BBC Mundo and came across an interesting article about a Montana State University professor who made one hell of an interesting discovery; a diesel fuel producing fungus that grows in the Patagonia rainforest.  The article really provided me with a “trifecta of enjoyment”.  One, it was in Spanish and [...]

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On Thursday the Carbon Trust, a UK based company whose mission is to “accelerate the move to a low carbon economy by working with organizations to reduce carbon emissions and develop commercial low carbon technologies”, announced that they were launching the world’s largest publicly algae-biofuel R&D project.
The Carbon Trust estimates that large scale production of [...]

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It’s been a long day.  Somewhere between writing a technical manual on enterprise energy management software, and cloning some genes into a suicide vector so that I can save the world through science, I completely tanked.  Because of this there will be no great blog posts tonight.  I know, I know, when was the last [...]

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Some how I missed this a few months ago, so while this may not be news to some of you it’s news to me.
Back in May of this year Sapphire Energy announced that they had produced 91 octane gasoline, identical to what you currently are getting at the pump in every way except one…they used [...]

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In the October 3rd issue of the journal Science Jerry Mellilo, co-director of the Marine Biological Laboratory’s Ecosystems Center, and 22 other co-authors called for the development and implamentation of science-based policy in the biofuel industry.
The authors stated that “The identification of unintended consequences early in the development of alternative fuel strategies will help to [...]

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We talk about it a lot.  The basic equation  that most people hear about is this.
Corn + Science –> Ethanol
Ethanol + Prius –> Oil Independence + Healthy Happy Planet.
Unfortunately for all of us the equation is not quite that simple.  Neither step is as straight forward as it sounds, and, as the Ethanol + Prius [...]

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