There’s whiskey in the car-o

According to the Belfast Telegraph an Irish scientist has given new meaning to ‘getting tanked up' (groans) after perfecting a green way to fuel cars with Scotch.

The biofuel made from by-products of Scotch whisky distillation is just as effective as normal petrol and just as easy on the engine, which requires no modifications.

Professor Martin Tangney (45), from Macroom, Co Cork, has been working with some of Scotland's largest whisky producers at the Biofuel Research Centre at Edinburgh Napier University. They have produced a clean, carbon-neutral fuel that can be blended with regular petrol to run an engine.

Prof Tangney said of his research project: “While some energy companies are growing crops specifically to generate biofuel, we are investigating excess materials such as whisky by-products. This is a more environmentally sustainable option.”

Ach I daresay there are people who thinks that this story come straight from stereotype central (along with the inventor of the nuclear shillelagh I’ll be bound!) It certainly does have useful applications – it’s far, far better to use by products than to screw things up royally by going down the idiotic route of turning over valuable land to growing biofuels on a large scale

I can’t see whiskey by products making a huge dent in the world’s thirst for oil but every little helps.

Oily Grail Part II – Bacteria that “shit” petrol.

If the previous item was not enough, yesterday’s Times also carried an article about the development of bacteria that eat waste and excrete crude oil

“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, former software executive, “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.” He means bugs or rather the genetic alteration of bacteria so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as wood chips or wheat straw, they excrete crude oil. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of a car. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. “All of us here – everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency,” Mr Pal says.

Instead of trying to re engineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made. LS9 has already convinced one oil industry veteran of its plan: Bob Walsh, 50, who now serves as the firm’s president after a 26-year career at Shell, most recently running European supply operations in London. “How many times in your life do you get the opportunity to grow a multi-billion-dollar company?” he asks. It is a bold statement from a man who works in a glorified cubicle in a San Francisco industrial estate for a company that describes itself as being “prerevenue”.

Mr Pal explains that LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms. They start out as industrial yeast or non pathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”

Because crude oil is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result. For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known in the bio fuels industry. Anything will do as long as it can be broken down into sugars, with the by-product ideally burnt to produce electricity to run the plant. The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or wood chips in the South.

Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready. The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.

However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago. That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the same results on a nationwide or even global scale.

“Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and, in parallel, we’ll be working on the design and construction of a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,” says Mr Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.

Another great idea in theory but, as with many other developments, it’s a long way from the test tube to the mega production plant... Again is there sufficient waste material to be found to feed such an enterprise without serious harm to the environment?

There’s (black) gold in them there algae

Yesterday’s Times carried this article about Makoto Watanabe and his life’s search to find a species of algae that efficiently “sweats” crude oil. It seems that his quest for this Oily Grail has been successful.

Given sufficient light and carbon dioxide Botryococcus braunii excretes oil. The tiny globules of oil that form on its surface can be easily harvested and then refined using the same “cracking” technologies with which the oil industry now converts crude into everything from jet fuel to plastics. The Japanese Government has supplied him with hefty grants to work on ways of industrialising the algae cultures. The professor admits that there is much work to be done to bring the financial and environmental costs of creating algae oilfields down to reasonable levels: to meet Japan’s current oil needs would require an algae-filled paddy field the size of Yorkshire.

But – in laboratory conditions at least – the powers of Botryococcus braunii are astonishing. A field of corn, when converted into biofuel ethanol, may produce about 0.2 tonnes of oil equivalent per hectare. Rapeseed may generate around 1.2 tonnes. Micro algae can theoretically produce between 50 and 140 tonnes using the same plot of land. The discovery of Botryococcus braunii and its precious excretions has taken years.

The professor has given himself a decade to effect this seemingly implausible conversion: Japan’s export-led economics have always been shaped by their near 100 per cent dependence on foreign energy. In the present world economic climate, those economics are looking especially fragile. “I believe I can change Japan within five years,” the Professor told The Times from his laboratory in Tsukuba University. “A couple of years after that, we start changing the world.”

There remain, however, substantial obstacles before cars and aircraft are all running on algae. Although field tests have proved that there is little technical difficulty in breeding or harvesting the algae, the sums do not add up. A prospective algae-breeding oil concern would either have to invest billions of dollars in expensive breeder tanks – at a cost of around three times what the oil would sell for on the international market over the lifetime of the tanks – or find an enormous expanse of well-irrigated land in a country where labour can be bought very cheaply. It is for this reason that Professor Watanabe believes the world’s first algae farms will be constructed in countries such as Indonesia or Vietnam.

An interesting development for sure, but the final paragraph shows wherein lies the rub. While the growth of corn or other crops for conversion to bio-ethanol will almost certainly have disastrous consequences, sourcing the huge area of irrigated land to grow the algae will probably have a serious effect too and not provide much in the way of financial benefit to the local economy. On the surface it sounds like a great idea but I can’t help thinking that the disbenefits will outweigh the benefits. I would like to be proved wrong.

Zoellick warns on hunger and biofuels

Rocketing global food prices are causing acute problems of hunger and malnutrition in poor countries and have put back the fight against poverty by seven years, the World Bank said yesterday. Robert Zoellick , the Bank's president, called on rich countries to commit an extra $500m (£250m) immediately to the World Food Programme, and sign up to what he called a "New Deal for global food policy".

"In the US and Europe over the last year we have been focusing on the prices of gasoline at the pumps. While many worry about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs. And it's getting more and more difficult every day. In Bangladesh a 2kg bag of rice now consumes almost half of the daily income of a poor family. With little margin for survival, rising prices too often means fewer meals," he said. Poor people in Yemen were now spending more than a quarter of their income on bread. "This is not just about meals forgone today, or about increasing social unrest, it is about lost learning potential for children and adults in the future, stunted intellectual and physical growth. Even more, we estimate that the effect of this food crisis on poverty reduction worldwide is in the order of seven lost years."

The Bank's analysis chimes with research from the International Monetary Fund which shows that Africa will be the hardest hit continent from rising food prices. More than 20 African countries will see their trade balance worsen by more than 1% of GDP through having to pay more for food.

Gordon Brown has written to his Japanese counterpart, Yasuo Fukuda, who is chairman of the G8 industrialised countries, calling for a "fully-co-ordinated response" to the food crisis.Zoellick welcomed Brown's initiative, and said this weekend's meetings of the World Bank and the IMF had to do more than simply identify the scale of the crisis. The Bank also plans to double its loans to agriculture projects in developing countries in 2008, to $800m.

Riots have broken out in several countries, including Mexico and India, as a response to the rapid rise in the cost of basic foodstuffs over the past 12 months. A number of governments have imposed export bans on commodities, to try to bring prices under control. Zoellick warned against such protectionist responses.He was also critical of the dash to grow crops for biofuels. The US and EU have encouraged wider use of such fuels to try to tackle climate change and provide an alternative to oil, but the policy has sometimes diverted agricultural land away from food and exacerbated price rises.

Liz Stuart, spokeswoman for Oxfam, said: "Europe and the US must stop adding fuel to fire by increasing crop production for biofuels. These have dubious environment benefits, and by driving up prices, are crippling the lives of the poor."

By chocolate car to Timbuktu

Keep on scrolling for Photo Hunt, you're nearly there!

Isn’t a chocolate car on par with a chocolate teapot? Perhaps but the car isn’t made out of chocolate, rather it is powered by it. According to today’s Independent two Britons have embarked on a trek across Europe and West Africa which aims to show that chocolate could be a new, clean mode of transport.

Andy Pag and John Grimshaw left Poole ferry yesterday in a Ford Iveco Cargo lorry powered by fuel which began life as chocolate, in an attempt to raise awareness of "green" biofuels. Their 4,500-mile (7,250 km) trip across the Sahara desert to Timbuktu in Mali should take about three weeks. The pair has taken with them a small processing unit to convert waste oil products into fuel, which they will then donate to an African charity, along with the lorry. They are taking 2,000 litres (454 gallons) of biodiesel made from 4,000kg (8,818lb) of chocolate misshapes – equivalent to 80,000 chocolate bars.

The pair will drive across France and Spain and then catch another ferry to Morocco. The will then cross the country to Mauritania and from there, they will drive to Timbuktu in two converted 4x4 Toyota Land Cruisers, which are carried in the main lorry. The pair wanted to come up with a trip that would be carbon neutral. They contacted a Preston company, Ecotec, which had been testing a biofuel made from waste chocolate collected from factories. Ecotec turned the waste chocolate into bio-ethanol by mixing it with vegetable oil collected from restaurants.

Mr Pag said: "Timbuktu is renowned as being the back of beyond, the furthest place away that you can possibly imagine. If we can make it there with biofuel, there is no reason why motorists can't use it on the school run or their commute to work." Mr Pag said he hoped the expedition would encourage people to think about their carbon footprint when travelling. He added: "I have made many expeditions and visited these amazing landscapes but to get there I have contributed to their destruction by driving a guzzling diesel engine."I wanted to do something that is carbon neutral. What we have actually done is carbon negative."

There’s nothing wrong in what Messrs Pag and Grimshaw are doing and converting waste products into biofuel is not a great idea (if the energy input involved in conversion is significantly less that the fuel’s output of course). What does concern me greatly is the prospect of a large amount of arable land in the third world being turned over to biodiesel crop production just to sate the fuel thirst of developed nations. That could well be a (yet another) recipe for disaster

Biofuels, a double-edged sword?

The rush to switch from oil to energy derived from plants will drive deforestation, push small farmers off the land and lead to serious food shortages and increased poverty unless carefully managed, according to a United Nations survey of energy crops.

The report points to crops like palm oil, maize, sugar cane, soya and jatropha. Rich countries want to see these extensively grown for fuel as a way to reduce their own climate changing emissions. Their production could help stabilise the price of oil, open up new markets and lead to higher commodity prices for the poor. But the UN urges governments to beware their human and environmental impacts, some of which could have irreversible consequences.

Global production of energy crops is doubling every few years, and 17 countries have so far committed themselves to growing the crops on a large scale. Last year more than a third of the entire US maize crop went to ethanol for fuel and Brazil and China grew the crops on nearly 50m acres of land. The EU has said that 10% of all fuel must come from biofuels by 2020. Biofuels can be used in place of petrol and diesel and can play a part in reducing emissions from transport.

On the positive side, the crops have the potential to reduce and stabilise the price of oil, which could be very beneficial to poor countries. But forests are already being felled to provide the land to grow vast plantations of palm oil trees. Environment groups argue strongly that this is catastrophic for the climate, and potentially devastating for forest animals like orangutans in Indonesia. "Where crops are grown for energy purposes the use of large scale cropping could lead to significant biodiversity loss, soil erosion, and nutrient leaching. Even varied crops could have negative impacts if they replace wild forests or grasslands."

According to the report, the crops could transform the rural economy of rich and poor countries, attracting major new players and capital, but potentially leading to problems. "Large investments are already signalling the emergence of a new bio-economy, pointing to the possibility that still larger companies will enter the rural economy, putting the squeeze on farmers by controlling the price paid to producers and owning the rest of the value train," it says.

The crops are not guaranteed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Producing and using biofuels results in some reductions in emissions compared to petroleum fuels, it says, but this is provided there is no clearing of forest or peat that store centuries of carbon.

"Bioenergy provides us with an extraordinary opportunity to address climate change, energy security and rural development. [But] investments need to be planned carefully to avoid generating new environmental and social problems," said Achim Steiner, executive director of UN Environment programme yesterday.