alternative fuel

The United States Advanced Battery Consortium, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, today awarded Johnson Controls-Saft a contract valued at $8.2 million. The contract will focus on the development of lithium-ion battery systems for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and over the course of two years will seek to validate the commercial feasibility of lithium-ion technology for mass market plug-in hybrid vehicles.

Washington, DC - Sue Ellerbusch, President of BP Biofuels North America, describes a new partnership with Verenium Corporation to advance development and commercialization of cellulosic ethanol.

Solutions to the growing problem of fossil fuel dependence, peak oil and the possible crash of western civilization. Part 1 of 3.

An independent new report from the UK's Renewable Fuel Agency concludes that biofuel production must be scaled back. The report says that if this fails to happen, the result could be an increase in greenhouse gases and continuing, problematic rises in food prices.

The report concludes that a sustainable biofuel industry is possible, but it must be carefully regulated to avoid the problems already being seen as a result of large-scale feedstock production for biofuel use.

Rolls-Royce and British Airways have announced the initiation of a program of scientific testing to investigate the viability of alternative fuels in avionic industry. study will reveal practical alternative to the standard fuel used in today industry, the kerosene with the potential to significantly reduce airplanes carbon emissions.

Despite all the challenges, biodiesel wins!

Who's side is he on, anyway?

Students at the University of California Davis Hybrid Vehicle Research Center have been creating plug-in hybrids for national competitions for some time. "Team Fate" members Jungers and Kaufman describe how they "gut" the drive train of a standard vehicle, replacing it with an electric motor, a bank of batteries, continuously variable transmission, and some smart electronics. The resulting vehicle runs on electricity, assisted by a much smaller flex-fuel internal combustion engine only when needed.

Here is a clever design from the Technical University of Berlin that they cleverly named CLEVER. It’s single cylinder 230 cc natural gas engine is capable of going 62 mph with a range of about 125 miles all the while emitting less than 60 g/km of CO2...

 The Cyclone Waste Heat Engine (WHE) is a self-starting engine that operates runs on waste heat emanating from an external source, such as the exhaust from an internal (or external) combustion engine, or the direct burning of biomass (i.e., processing garbage into methane would not be required). The WHE is also designed to run efficiently on solar heat without the installation of costly photovoltaic panels.

The vision of Solix Biofuels is to unlock the complex secrets of one of the simplest organisms on Earth, microalgae, to create a commercially viable biofuel that will play a vital role in solving climate change and petroleum scarcity, without competing with global food supply.

A basic overview of potential alternative fuel sources for use in cars, planes and other modes of transportation.

Seventeen engineering teams from the nation's top universities were challenged by the Department of Energy in a groundbreaking four-year competition called Challenge X: Crossover to Sustainable Mobility. Mississippi State University takes top honors, followed by Wisconsin University in second and Ohio State University in third. The University of Waterloo came in fourth, in fifth place was the University of Tulsa and Pennsylvania State University ranked sixth.

Nancy Young, Vice President, Environmental Affairs, Air Transport Association, is interviewed about airline industry adoption of alternative fuels, from both fuel economy and environmental perspectives, as the industry looks to further reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

General Motors announced today it would be entering into a strategic relationship with Mascoma Corp., a second-generation biofuel company with the technology to produce cellulosic ethanol from non-food sources via a single-step biochemical conversion. This is GM’s second investment in a cellulosic ethanol company, after announcing partnership with Coskata back in January.