Looking for a sustainable fuel to power your fleet of semi trucks? If you are a dairy farm, we'd bet that the one thing you've got too much of is cow manure. Hilarides Dairy happens to have this exact problem, and it's turning it into a solution. Over 10,000 cows will happily provide enough dung to generate 226,000 cubic feet of biomethane gas each and every day. That amount of ga
The world now has its first ecolabelled fuel. Great... what's it mean? First of all, the certification itself comes from the Nordic Ecolabel, "the official Nordic environmental award [that] is given to products and services that fulfill stringent environmental criteria." All right. What's the award signify? "Reduction of emissions that negatively affect global warming and climate change, an absolute threshold value to the amount of CO2 that may be released to the atmosphe
Talk about going full circle. A garbage truck running on methane picks up the trash out in front of your home and deposits it in a landfill. Over the next few years, that garbage begins to deteriorate, releasing methane gas in the process. That methane waste gas is captured and re-used by the same garbage trucks to pick up your trash. While we aren't necessarily proponents for landfills, at least some good can come out of their creation. Methane gas is a pretty horrible greenhouse gas, so it's m
Hydrous methane is sometimes called "white gold." But what is it, exactly? It's the result of the decomposition of live matter which is usually stored in non-deep layers of our soil. Currently, the common source is under permafrost. Now, because of an increase in overall temperatures, hydrous methane is being released into the atmosphere, and contributing to the greenhouse effect. There's also a good amount of hydrous methane under the sea inside the upper layers under water. This, some say, is
Photo by foxypar4. Licensed under Creative Commons license 2.0.
Creating methane gas from waste products in anything but a new concept, with the gas being pumped and burned off from landfills the world over. What is a newer idea, though, is taking care of the problem right from the point of its creation... your own toilet or garbage pile. In emerging countries like India, and even in rural areas in the U.S., there are many households which are not directly connected to a sewage system, and there is no big garbage truck on its wa
According to Michael Abberton, a scientist at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research in the U.K., "there are approaches within plant breeding that can lead to reduced emissions." How is that, you might be wondering? Are we talking about a new plant-based fuel source? Not exactly, at least, not for your car. We are talking about cows. Besides being a favorite statistic to quote for t
Aside from from carbon dioxide, one of the other main greenhouse gases is methane. While hydro-electric dams are considered by most people to be a clean form of energy, it is far from perfect. One of the problems with dams is that organic material that would normally be washed down a river gets trapped at the bottom of a reservoir. The anaerobic conditions in the relatively still water in a reservoir means that the organic material is broken down by bacteria which then give off methane which dis
Great, just what I need! One more thing to be worried about covering... my dog's gaseous emissions. Yeah, I realized that they had odor issues every once in a while, especially when I share my food with them, but I didn't realize that all their methane production could be covered with credits! I guess you learn something new every day... Notice too that I put this one under "
The rather oddly-named Panda Panda (shown) is a flexible-fuel vehicle that can run on either methane or conventional gasoline, going on sale in Italy beginning January. Using the floor-plan from the four-wheel-drive Panda but driving only through the front wheels, the supplemental methane tanks are placed where the 4WD mechanicals would be, giving the Panda Panda the bonus of increased range.
Team at Leeds University is perfecting a method to extract hydrogen from cooking oil and other possible sources, such as scrap tires and waste oil.
Next time you're driving in Denton, Texas, and smell french fries or catfish from the big rig or school bus near by, don't cuss or give it the finger (unless it illegally cuts you off.) That vehicle is most likely powered by biodiesel made by a local company.
In another sure sign that the greening of the automotive industry is not about to stop, BMW announced Friday that they were going to run one of their paint shops on methane gas from a nearby landfill, according to this article in TCMnet.
