Eideard

Containers on the stern deck of the 47,230 ton Liberian-flagged Rena hang precariously, about 12 nautical miles from Tauranga, on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island October 20, 2011. The recovery of fuel oil from a stricken container ship grounded off New Zealand resumed on Thursday as salvage teams worked to minimize the damage in the country’s worst environmental disaster in decades. Two days of strong winds and high seas had prevented the pumping of oil from the Rena, which has been stuck for more than two weeks on the Astrolabe Reef.

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, cola wars rivals for a century, are now locked in a bottle battle.

PepsiCo Pepsi’s new bottle is made from switch grass, pine bark, corn husks and other materials. Ultimately, Pepsi plans to also use orange peels, oat hulls, potato scraps and other leftovers from its food business.

Two years after Coca-Cola Co. unveiled a bottle made partly from plant materials, PepsiCo says it is introducing a better one. The Purchase, N.Y. company says it has developed the world’s first plastic bottle made entirely from plant-based, fully renewable resources, cutting the use of petroleum. Coke’s PlantBottle is made of up to 30 percent plant sugars…

Beverage companies are trying to design bottles to counter environmental concerns. The bottled water industry is using lighter plastics, dropping the average weight of the 16.9 ounce “single serve” bottle by a third over the past eight years, according to the International Bottled Water Association.

That means less fuel consumed to transport the beverages.

Meanwhile, Coca-Cola’s PlantBottle is available in nine countries and is expected to reach more than a dozen other markets this year. More than 2.5 billion PlantBottles have reached the marketplace, a number Coca-Cola says equates to saving about 3 million gallons of gasoline.

The technology will also appear in Heinz bottles, under a partnership with the ketchup-maker, and possibly in bottles for Honest Tea, a Maryland company Coca-Cola just acquired. The PlantBottle is made partly with natural sugars found in sugarcane ethanol from Brazil. Odwalla, a Coca-Cola juice brand, plans to switch to the PlantBottle within the next few weeks.

Before someone brings it up – yes, I know that glass is one of the easiest after-use commodities to recycle. And we’re not about to run out of sand to make glass bottles either. But, either road, glass production in the traditional manner consumes a boatload of energy. And that, too is a commodity which must be paid for by consumers.

Scientists have found that it is possible to alter the genetic makeup of the bacterium E. coli to and induce it to produce biodiesel. Most microbes, including E. coli, make and process fatty acids, one of the ingredients of biodiesel; however, what they do with it often leaves something to be desired when it comes to fuel production. By modifying E. coli, scientists are able to make it produce fatty esters, which are the primary components of biodiesel.

Engineering bacteria to do a scientist’s bidding is a good way to obtain desired materials, such as natural compounds for drugs, or in this case, fuels. Since E. coli is a well known and often-studied microorganism, and is able to produce fatty acids before any alteration, it is an excellent workhorse for synthetic biology…

The altered E. coli can receive various inputs, including partially processed material like glucose and ethanol, and produce fatty acid methyl esters, or biodiesel. The bacteria also produce some fatty alcohols, waxes, and simple sugars that may be harvested and used for other purposes. The authors of the paper argue that the process has advantages over corn ethanol and other plant oil-derived biodiesels, as its production doesn’t require the use of anything that could be a food source, which means no issues with higher prices or questionable land use practices.

There is no shortage of agri-business giants capable of supplying us with all the e.coli test materials we would ever need.

“It’s engraved – Property of Halliburton Leasing”

In a confidence game that made a mockery of the United States military’s most secure compound in Iraq, a ring of Americans posing as contractors and their Nepalese drivers used tanker trucks, forged documents and sheer brazenness to steal at least $40 million worth of jet and diesel fuel from an Army depot, according to an indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Virginia.

Until they were caught, the dozen or so men in the ring operated an astoundingly successful con game in a war zone, the papers contend, apparently showing up in Iraq with nothing more than fake IDs and a talent for forging official requisition forms. Each time they filled up the tanker trucks at the depot in American headquarters near the Baghdad International Airport, the men would simply drive downtown and sell the fuel on the local black market…

The operation described in the indictment contained elements of an international crime thriller and a Cheech & Chong movie: expletive-filled e-mail messages detailing payment schedules to ring members; a phony security contractor whose nickname was Bong; and the forged signature of a military contracting officer named Sergeant Bonus. The ring members said they worked for a company called Future Services.

An Army spokesman said, “…it would be inappropriate for the Army to comment at this time.”

So, what does “most secure” mean if you can simply drive in and out the gate with stolen goods? Show someone a legit looking piece of paper and you could walk off with the Pentagon bathrooms.

In research that touches on two of Americans’ great obsessions — coffee and cars — scientists at the University of Nevada, Reno, have made diesel fuel from used coffee grounds. The technique is not difficult and there is so much coffee around that several hundred million gallons of biodiesel could potentially be made annually.

Dr. Mano Misra, a professor of engineering who conducted the research with Narasimharao Kondamudi and Susanta K. Mohapatra, said it was by accident that he realized coffee beans contained a significant amount of oil. “I made a coffee one night but forgot to drink it,” he said. “The next morning I saw a layer of oil floating on it.” He and his team thought there might be a useful amount of oil in used grounds, so they went to several Starbucks stores and picked up about 50 pounds of them.

Analysis showed that even the grounds contained about 10 to 15 percent oil by weight. The researchers then used standard chemistry techniques to extract the oil and convert it to biodiesel. The processes are not particularly energy intensive, Misra said, and the researchers estimated that biodiesel could be produced for about a dollar a gallon.

Even if all the coffee grounds in the world were used to make fuel, the amount produced would be less than 1 percent of the diesel used in the United States annually. “It won’t solve the world’s energy problem,” Misra said of his work. “But our objective is to take waste material and convert it to fuel.” And biodiesel made from grounds has one other advantage, he said: the exhaust smells like coffee.

Perish the thought we decide to run our economy more sensibly. It’s called recycling, folks. There is a small percentage of people who learned about this decades ago.

Our politicians in all their wisdom decided it was unimportant. Maybe we should recycle the politicians into jobs they’re better suited for?

Olive stones can be turned into bioethanol, a renewable fuel that can be produced from plant matter and used as an alternative to petrol or diesel. This gives the olive processing industry an opportunity to make valuable use of 4 million tonnes of waste in olive stones it generates every year and sets a precedent for the recycling of waste products as fuels.

“The low cost of transporting and transforming olives stones make them attractive for biofuels,” says researcher Sebastián Sánchez.

The olive stone, produced in processing of olive oil and table olives, makes up around a quarter of the total fruit. It is rich in polysaccharides (cellulose and hemicellulose) that can be broken down into sugar and then fermented to produce ethanol.

The quantities of stones produced are relatively small in comparison with other agricultural and forestry wastes. However, if similar principles were employed across all agricultural industries, energy gains would be significant.

Some of the olive oil used directly in prepared foods might be better for the world if burned in a diesel engine, anyway. There is some rank old oil floating around the marketplace at any given time.

Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists have produced oils of camelina, canola, Cuphea, lesquerella, milkweed and pennycress by the barrelful in their commercial-scale pilot plant. These alternative crops may be able to provide alternative domestic sources of industrial products ranging from soap to biofuels for cars, trucks and—in the case of Cuphea—even jet fuel.

Plant physiologist Russ Gesch and colleagues…have studied Cuphea since 1999. They work closely with companies such as Procter & Gamble of Cincinnati, Ohio. Procter & Gamble uses the type of fatty acids found in Cuphea to make laundry detergent and other products.

These crops all offer ways to sustainably grow fuel and industrial products without depleting either the U.S. food supply or soils. The Morris scientists also are beginning a long-term study of a corn-soybean crop rotation plan that includes grasses for making cellulosic ethanol: switchgrass, big bluestem, indiangrass, and a sorghum-Sudangrass hybrid. Their goal is to develop cropping systems for optimal biomass production while maintaining or enhancing soil productivity.

Cuphea is one of the few sources of oils in the United States that contain the type of fatty acids needed to make soaps, cosmetics, motor oils and industrial lubricants. These oils currently are produced commercially only in the tropics, from palm kernel and coconut oils.

Interesting research. And discovering the Agricultural Research Service website from the USDA has been rewarding. I’ll be making this a regular stop.

The list begins and ends with Toyota

The EPA website for the environmentally cleanest and best fuel efficient car and truck models is at Green Vehicle Guide.

The best of the best, according to the EPA, is (miles per gallon highway/mpg city)

1. Toyota Prius Hybrid 48/45

2. Honda Civic Hybrid 40/45

3. Nissan Altima Hybrid and Ford Escape Hybrid FWD 35/33

4. Mazda Tribute Hybrid 2WD and Mercury Mariner Hybrid FWD 34/31

5. Smart Fortwo Convertible and Smart Fortwo Coupe 33/41

6. Toyota Camry Hybrid 33/34

7. Volkswagon Jetta (manual, diesel) 30/41

8. Volkswagon Jetta (automatic, diesel) and Volkswagon Jetta Sportwagon (automatic, diesel) 29/40

9. Toyota Yaris (manual) 29/36

10. Toyota Yaris (automatic) 29/35

As much as I like either the Toyota Prius or the Civic Hybrid, for the MSRP of either you could buy a Yaris for each foot.

Bring back the BMW Isetta

Highways in the US are at their safest since the 1960s as the rocketing price of petrol puts a strain on America’s love affair with fast cars. The number of fatalities on US roads is on track to fall by 10% this year to around 37,000 – the lowest since 1961, according to research suggesting that deaths are plummeting as people cut out leisure travel, especially in the evenings, to save money.

When global oil prices accelerated during the spring, the number of fatalities slumped by 22% in March and by 18% in April, the University of Michigan’s transportation research institute found…

As cash-strapped motorists look for savings, they first tend to reduce their mileage on recreational outings. These are often in the dark and are more likely to be on high-speed rural roads than on relatively safe urban commuter routes…

“The unfortunate thing is that the high price of fuel and the recession are accomplishing things that the traffic safety community couldn’t accomplish,” he said. “That is a silver lining to something that’s very bad news to American families and to the economy.”

Yup. I drive to town, now, once a week – for groceries. Want to meet me in town? Better be on a Saturday morning – and you can buy me breakfast.

The White House has made a new push for expanded offshore drilling to help lower fuel prices, days after new government data showed American petroleum product exports hit record levels.

“To reduce pressure on prices, we need to increase the supply of oil, especially here at home,” Bush told reporters…

Critics of the offshore drilling plan noted that the Energy Department released data this week showing that U.S. exports of finished petroleum products, including gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel, soared to 1.592 million barrels per day in May.

The exports set a record for the month and were up 31 percent from a year ago.

Exports were equal to about half the 3.204 million barrels a day in petroleum products that the United States imported during May.

In May, U.S. oil companies shipped 183,000 barrels of gasoline a day out of the country, even as Americans saw prices at the pump steadily rise.

Trying to drill our way out of trouble is absurd. No different from bigots who tried to convince us that “separate but equal” school systems didn’t equate to segregation and discrimination.

Liars and self-deluded hypocrites.