Ed Ring

We have just released a new feature story entitled "India's Biodiesel Scene" written by Satish Lele, a chemical engineer and entrepreneur from India who has become an expert on biofuels; jatropha in particular. Reading Lele's story on EcoWorld should not substitute for visiting the biodiesel sections of Lele's website, which is one of the most comprehensive websites we've ever seen on the topic of biodiesel. It is important to assess the potential of biodiesel crops to meet the increasing demand for fuel in India and elsewhere. On one page of Lele's website, where he describes in great detail the botanical and chemical features of jatropha, as well as the economics of growing jatropha and the types of land where it can grow (midway down the page), Lele claims that there are 13.4 million hectares of underutilized land in India that could immediately be planted with jatropha. Lele also claims that jatropha yields 250,000 tons of crude jatropha oil per year per...

The California Air Resources Board is holding a symposium in September 2006 to discuss ZEV (Zero Emissions Vehicle) technology. If you want to submit a presentation visit their Call For Abstracts and follow the instructions. It's not surprising the call for abstracts includes topics such as "hydrogen storage technologies" and fuel cells "balance of plant" components. They had better hope some rather dramatic breakthroughs have occurred, or fuel cells will remain a mantra turned into a mandate, but not much in the way of real progress on clean vehicles. What was surprising and encouraging was the call for presentations on topics such as "battery-electric vehicle products" and "plug-in hybrids." Now those are interesting ideas! Read The 100% Electric Car to learn why batteries are currently a superior electricity storage medium compared to hydrogen, and probably always will be. Isn't a "plug-in hybrid" just a battery-powered car with a gasoline...

It may not be soon enough for everyone, but the greening of America's automobile population is happening. Hybrid cars are here to stay, and more and more of them include innovations such as expanded battery packs that can be recharged from an at-home wall socket. As battery technology improves at a faster pace than ever, look for 100% electric cars in the not-too-distant future. Another less noticed but equally significant development is the introduction to the USA of flex-fuel vehicles, which can run on ethanol or gasoline, or mixtures of the two. These cars have been driving around for years in Brazil, where you can get 8,000 barrels of ethanol per year per one square mile of refined sugar cane. Also quietly making its way into the USA is low sulphur diesel fuel, which at 15 PPM sulphur is pretty much as clean as gasoline. Diesel engines are simple to maintain, diesel fuel is simple to refine, and diesel...

Our latest feature story on our website EcoWorld, "India's Water Future," describes a proposal currently being debated in India to link their major rivers in order to move vast quantities of water from the water-rich north and east to the arid west and south of that country. Well it isn't as if it hasn't been done before. In Europe rivers are so interlinked you can sail nonstop on a river from the North Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, or the Black Sea, or even to the Caspian Sea. In California pipelines and aquaducts move nearly 50 cubic kilometers of river water per year from the northern and and eastern mountains to cities to the south and west. Even lifting water isn't as big a problem as some might think. Heck, if some nations use energy to actually distill fresh water from salt water - either by having to boil it or vaporizing it in an artificial vacuum - then pumping water uphill can't be that hard. For...

Fuel cell vehicles are not ready for prime time, and this isn't because of a conspiracy on the part of the auto-makers. If any car threatens the status-quo, it's a battery powered commuter vehicle, or a serial-hybrid using an onboard high-efficiency constant RPM clean diesel to power a generator to charge a battery that powers an electric motor. That sort of car is cheap to build and extremely fuel efficient; far more fuel efficient than hybrid cars, for example. Read "The 100% Electric Car" Fuel cell cars require fuel cells, which still cost $4,000 per kilowatt output. Given a kilowatt is only 1.3 horsepower, a fuel cell powered engine costs a bit. And fuel cells use very expensive materials, such as platinum catalysts, which mean their cost can never drop as low as it needs to get. An electric motor costs maybe $100 per kilowatt! Good nickel metal hydride battery packs packing 200 watt-hours per kilogram...

For many years we've been inspired by the message from the Mahant at the Sankat Mochan Temple in Varanasi, the holy Hindu city on the banks of the Ganges river. As we reported in the article Clean the Ganges, the Mahant at this temple, Veer Bhadra Mishra, has been working for nearly 25 years to clean the river of pollution. His foundation, the Sankat Mochan Foundation, has promoted innovative ways to rid the Ganges of pollution, including decantation ponds where algae is used to remove impurities. For years, religion and science have joined forces to work towards cleaning the Ganges, and to environmentalist observers, that has been an inspiring message from Varanasi. Until now. Last week terrorists detonated two bombs in Varanasi, a first for this peaceful place. Now the news from Varanasi is about security, instead of cleaning the sacred river. Hopefully this will be the first and last time such violence strikes at...

Did you know that biofuel has two distinct types? There's ethanol from crops such as corn or sugar cane, and there's biodiesel from crops such as rapeseed and jatropha and oil palms. Some plants, like corn, can be processed for ethanol and biodiesel at the same time. There is an excellent source of information about biofuel called Journey to Forever, and one of the publishers, Keith Addison, provided the following information: "Ethanol is not derived from corn oil or any oil, it's derived from carbohydrates - starch or sugar - or from cellulose, but not from oil. Nor can biodiesel be produced from sugar or starch, only from triglycerides - vegetable or animal fats and oils. Ethanol and biodiesel are indeed both biofuels but they are totally different products produced from different feedstocks by different processes and by different interests for different applications, biodiesel for diesel...

Wherever, whenever, the price comes down a little more, photovoltaics will solve every energy shortage there ever was forever. Photovoltaics already can produce twenty times the energy in their lifetimes than the energy it takes to make them, and photovoltaic manufacturers have been selling out their product as fast as they can make them for decades. The worldwide output of installed photovoltaics are perhaps 10 gigawatts in 2006, if that. But if the price comes down a little more, manufacturing growth could be exponential. Photovoltaics are the wild card. One breakthrough or a few more incremental steps could make photovoltaics humanity's energy panacea. In South Africa, claims of a solar breakthrough. Will this be the one? Or the next? Is photovoltaic technology going to replace...

The biggest fiscal challenge in America's public sector today, most requiring of a centrist solution, confronted first in California, is that the main cause of budget deficits are the ever-rising costs for government employee benefits. There are tens of millions of government employees in the USA, millions just in California. Don't think how California may or may not handle this challenge doesn't matter. More than anywhere else in the world, California creates technology which creates productivity creating wealth. Our leaps in technology are only beginning to be translated into more per capita wealth. We are ready to spend poverty into the ground and we just don't know it, and California...

From time to time we get articles from people around the world. Many of them we publish, as you can see in our articles listing. But we can't publish everything we're sent, because our credibility is important to us. There are a lot of environmentalists who tout hydrogen as the future of energy. But have they really analysed the practicality of hydrogen? Here then, is my response to the author of yet another story that touted hydrogen as the solution to all our worldwide energy challenges: "Thank you for your email. I'm considering publishing this but have some concerns. Having also studied hydrogen, I don't see in your analysis a treatment of some of the problems with hydrogen. For example, how will hydrogen be stored in a safe and cost-effective manner? Don't bother with liquified hydrogen, or hydrogen pressurized to 5,000-10,000 PSI, because those methods are NOT practical today, and may...