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biofuel

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Making biodiesel from coffee grounds

Friday, December 12th, 2008

Researchers at the University of Nevada have come up with an inexpensive way to make biofuel out of used coffee grounds.   In fact, they used Starbucks coffee to do it.    Since used coffee grounds contain about 15 percent oil, and since the world produces over 16 billion pounds of coffee a year, there’s [...]

Popularity: 42% [?]

Bill Gates invests in oil from algae

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

From CNET News:  Cascade Investment, which is Bill Gates’ investment firm, is investing money in Sapphire Energy, a company that is working to produce oil from algae. Sapphire just announced that they have raised more than $100 million to help develop its product, called Green Crude. Last year Sapphire Energy [...]

Popularity: 34% [?]

Cyclone Power Technologies clean, green waste heat engine

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

EngineeringTV has a couple of video interviews and demos with Harry Schoel, whose company Cyclone Power has developed a self-starting engine called a WHE (waste heat engine) that operates in a low pressure, low temperature range. What this means is that the Cyclone Power WHE can run on waste heat - think the exhaust [...]

Popularity: 73% [?]

New source for Biofuels discovered by researchers from the university of Texas at Austin

Friday, April 25th, 2008

Researchers at the University of Texas have created a microbe that produces cellulose that can be turned into ethanol and biofuel. If production can be scaled up, the microbes can produce a large portion of the country’s transportation fuel.  The cyanobacteria also secretes glucose and sucrose along with cellulose. Glucose and sucrose [...]

Popularity: 82% [?]

Range Fuels to put timber in the tank

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

BusinessGreen reports that Range Fuels, which recently secured $100m in funding, is moving ahead with the building of an ethanol plant in Georgia that will be capable of turning wood into biofuel using a thermo-chemical technique. Plans are for Range Fuels to begin producing ethanol from wood waste next year.
Since corn, soy and palm-oil [...]

Popularity: 54% [?]

GreenFuel Technologies to build algae to fuel plant in Europe

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

According to Xconomy, GreenFuel Technologies, the company that has developed a bioreactor that grows algae using the CO2 emissions from power plants, will build an algae-to-fuel plant in Europe. Greenfuel’s bioreactor system takes the algae grown and then uses it to create clean-burning biofuel.
Greenfuel has had some problems with its last generation algae greenhouse [...]

Popularity: 41% [?]

Virgin jet to use biofuel blend in test flight

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, sometime this month a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747-400 will be powered by biofuel during a flight from London to Amsterdam. It will be the first time a commercial aircraft has flown on biofuel.
Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Atlantic, teamed up with Boeing and GE Aviation [...]

Popularity: 40% [?]

Australian CSIRO researchers can turn green waste into fuel

Monday, February 4th, 2008

CSIRO and Monash University researchers have developed a process called Furafuel that can be used to produce gasoline and diesel fuel from “green waste”, i.e. forest trimmings, crop residues, and waste paper, most of which currently ends up in landfills.
“By making changes to the chemical process, we’ve been able to create a concentrated bio-crude which [...]

Popularity: 41% [?]

First Nanosolar panels go on sale

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007

Nanosolar, the developer of thin film solar cells has begun shipping its first solar panels. On Tuesday, Nanosolar announed that they had shipped their first solar panels to fulfill an order for a megawatt of panels to be used in a power plant in East Germany. In an interesting sidelight, Nanosolar [...]

Popularity: 48% [?]

Genetically altered trees may help create biofuel

Thursday, November 22nd, 2007

The New York Times details how a researcher (Vincent L. Chiang) at North Carolina State University has developed a transgenic tree that contains only about 50% of the lignin of a normal tree. Less lignin is important to biofuel creation because lignin, which gives a tree its structural stiffness, also interferes with the [...]

Popularity: 17% [?]

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