“While other 16-year-olds were watching TV and hanging out with their friends, St. Petersburg, Florida-native Evie Sobczak was hard at work in her garage developing a device that turns algae into fuel. Sobczak told the Tampa Bay Times that she spent about an hour each day tinkering in her garage on the project. After about four years, her hard work paid off, as Sobczak figured out a way to harvest and extract algae oils — without using any chemicals — and turn them into biofuel. And the technique is 20 percent more efficient than existing technologies. Sobczak’s algae-to-biofuel invention recently won first place at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix.”
Think about how hot air rises while cooler, denser air sinks. This all happens due to gravity here on earth, but what would happen without this force of nature? If the air isn’t rising or sinking around the flame, then how does the air mix to supply fresh oxygen to the candle to keep it burning?
UC San Diego student, Sam Avery is trying to understand this by taking his team aboard NASA’s Zero-G airplane. The flight follows a parabolic path and causes a dozen or so 30 second bursts of zero gravity. During this time Avery can ignite a flame in a special chamber to observe the effects of microgravity.
He led a team last year doing a similar experiment. During that time the flame was still able to burn, but at a much lower rate. It was able to get new oxygen to burn by a process known as molecular diffusion. So, why does it matter? By doing these tests, scientists can better understand a flame’s burn rate and possibly lead to developing more efficient biofuel engines.
16-year-old Egyptian Muslim discovers catalyst to turn Egypt’s plastic waste into biofuel
Azza Abdel Hamid Faiad is not your average 16-year-old. While most teens were delivering pizza or working on their tans this summer, Faiad was discovering a way to turn Egypt’s plastic waste into roughly $78 million worth of biofuels each year.
The idea to use plastic as biofuels is not new, but Faiad, a student at the Zahran Language School in Alexandria, Egypt, has found an inexpensive catalyst that could make the process not only economically feasible, but economically profitable for her country. Egypt’s plastic consumption is estimated to total 1 million tons per year, so Faiad’s proposal could completely transform the country’s economy, while also handling their plastic waste issues.
Faiad says that her catalyst, called aluminosilicate, could inexpensively break down plastic waste while producing gaseous products like methane, propane and ethane, which can then be converted into ethanol. She calculates that her discovery could inexpensively generate about 40,000 tons of cracked naphtha and 138,000 tons of hydrocarbon gases per year — equivalent to $78 million.
The green teen has already won an award for her findings at the 23rd European Union Contest for Young Scientists, and she is currently looking into patenting her idea through the Egyptian Patent Office.
An innovative process that starts with an algae slurry efficiently produces crude oil in less than an hour, researchers say.
The biocrude oil can then be refined conventionally into gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory engineers say their method is a continuous process that beats previous attempts to harness algae as fuel.
They say their work has led to a cheaper and less energy intensive technique. It also results in a wastewater stream from which flammable gas can be recovered and nutrients that can grow more algae.
“Cost is the big roadblock for algae-based fuel,” said lead researcher Douglas Elliott in a statement. “We believe that the process we’ve created will help make algae biofuels much more economical.”
Suzanne Hood’s Biofuel is an exhibit that combines science with the imagination. Hood currently lives in Montreal and works as a medical writer, and this influence is clear throughout her works. As she describes the visuals throughout the series:
“I like the combination of old medical illustrations and paper that has an aged appearance, like old maps. I think it’s something to do with the idea that each conveys a kind of instructive, authoritative feel, yet each represents information that’s still unfamiliar and constantly changing.”
E. coli is capable of producing a diesel substitute
Strains of E. coli bacteria are capable of producing a biofuel almost identical to diesel.
The importance of the discovery hinges around the idea of “drop-in” fuels – that existing technology which runs on diesel would not need to be modified in order to utilize the biofuel meaning the costs to business of switching energy sources would be minimal.
“Producing a commercial biofuel that can be used without needing to modify vehicles has been the goal of this project from the outset,” said Professor John Love from the University of Exeter’s Biosciences department.
“Replacing conventional diesel with a carbon neutral biofuel in commercial volumes would be a tremendous step towards meeting our target of an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Global demand for energy is rising and a fuel that is independent of both global oil price fluctuations and political instability is an increasingly attractive prospect.”
The E. coli uses a natural oil production process to convert sugars into fats which are then used in the bacteria’s cell membrane. By genetically altering the E. coli the researchers were able to convert the sugars to the imitation fossil fuel (perhaps faux-sil fuel?) instead.
Unfortunately the process only yields tiny amounts of biodiesel at present meaning that before we can switch energy sources bioscientists will need to find a way to refine the process and produce industrial quantities of fuel.
The team at the University of Exeter received support for their project from multinational oil company, Shell. According to Rob Lee from Shell projects & technology: “While the technology still faces several hurdles to commercialisation, by exploring this new method of creating biofuel, along with other intelligent technologies, we hope they could help us to meet the challenges of limiting the rise in carbon dioxide emissions while responding to the growing global requirement for transport fuel.”
Researchers have figured out how to reduce a key component in trees and plants that makes it difficult and expensive to turn them into fuel. The new technique could sharply reduce the cost of making biofuels. http://scim.ag/1cK9f0e IMG: Lisa Sundin
The analysis of gene activity by researchers at Iowa State University and determination of protein structures by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences independently identified three related proteins that appear to be involved in fatty-acid metabolism. The researchers used thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) as the model plant.
The research groups then joined forces to test this hypothesis, demonstrating a role of these proteins in regulating the amounts and types of fatty acids accumulated in plants.
The researchers also showed that the action of the proteins is very sensitive to temperature and that this feature may play an important role in how plants mitigate temperature stress using fatty acids.
The discovery is published online in the journal Nature.
“This work has major implications for modulating the fatty-acid profiles in plants, which is terribly important, not only to sustainable food production and nutrition but now also to biorenewable chemicals and fuels,” says corresponding author Joseph Noel, a professor and director of the Jack H. Skirball Center for Chemical Biology and Proteomics at the Salk Institute and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
In this photo: The blue areas in this thale cress plant indicate where the fatty-acid-binding protein one gene is expressed and also correspond to regions where high fatty acids would be synthesized by the plant. (Credit: Eve Syrkin Wurtele and Micheline Ngaki)
“WASHINGTON — When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law”
“We found that if you harvest wood for energy, whether it be for fire prevention or simply for energy itself, the emissions associated with these activities are more than the savings that you get by substituting for fossil fuels.”
Thanks to a new technique for coaxing the sugar out of dry plant matter, making the biofuels we need to replace dwindling petroleum-based fuel sources may be less of a challenge, a new study reports. In this video, Jeremy Luterbacher, a UW-Madison postdoctoral researcher and this paper’s lead author, explains how the Dumesic Lab uses gamma valerolactone, or GVL, to deconstruct plants and produce sugars that can be chemically or biologically upgraded into biofuels.
Read more about this research from the 17 January issue of Sciencehere.
[Video courtesy of Matthew Wisniewski/Wisconsin Energy Institute]
Biofuel researchers have dramatically improved microalgae hydrocarbon productivity by using non-destructive extraction, akin to “milking” algal cells as opposed to the conventional harvest and destruction.
The algae species Bortyococcus braunii is known for its oil production however its slow growth rate for a conventional growth/harvest has made it unattractive for commercial production.