Hybrid News

Filed under: Biodiesel, Green Culture, Green Daily

I’m a big fan of Daryl Hannah’s biodiesel El Camino. Now, it turns out, I could buy it. According to Hannah’s own website, this dark monster of a bio-car will be put up for sale on Dec. 20. The price and other details will be announced then, but Hannah is already telling us that she’s offering up a B100 pump and station with “the baddest assest biodiesel ‘el camino’ ever.” While some car sellers tell potential buyers that the vehicle was only driven to church on sunny days, Hannah is targeting a greener audience with this line in the vehicle listing: “this super stealth flat matt black el camino hasn’t seen a lick of petroleum + has been my daily driver 4 several years.” The car has 139,000 miles on it and was turned its exquisite shade of matte black by a custom shop. Very curious to see what the price will be.

As for the pump and station, Hannah claims that it is “oh so easy” to operate. “I can do it myself all dressed up + no mess,” she writes, adding that the buyer will get a 55-gallon storage drum and a guide to find local B100 with the deal.

Once she’s without the black beauty, I wonder what car Hannah will be driving next. She does say that “u know i’ll find another one 4 myself” (I’m beginning to wonder if she’s 14 and posting this listing from her cell phone - either that or she’s channeling Prince). Other items Hannah is offering for sale include a solar boat and a ranch bio-beast.

[Source: DHLovelife via Ecorazzi]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Original post by Sebastian Blanco

Filed under: Biodiesel, Emerging Technologies, Green Daily, Lightweight

The video above from Sky News is of a truck that runs on chocolate and is going around the world. The truck actually runs on biodiesel made from chocolate and they are going to Timbuktu to promote biodiesel. Below the fold is a video of a race car made from potatoes called Eco One. Eco One is made by students at Warwick University and can go up to 160 MPH. Along with potatoes, Eco One is also made from hemp and the students hope to encourage racing to go green. I can’t wait for the day when I can eat my car or the gas that fuels it.

[Source: YouTube]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Original post by Lascelles Linton

Filed under: Diesel, Legislation and Policy

As a blogger for AutoblogGreen, I read about waste vegetable oil used as a car fuel daily but I have to admit to a “WTF?” moment when reading about details of what fuels were used by San Francisco’s new fully biodiesel-capable fleet. According to the New York Times, the fleet uses virgin soy from the Midwest in a B20 mix … and the city of San Francisco wants your used grease. Cue the sound of a record player needle being loudly pushed off an LP. They want what?

Yes, the Times writes about the new SFGreasecycle, which you will remember was launched in November with a website run by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, that will collect waste vegetable oil from homes and restaurants for free and convert it to biodiesel. This is the first city-wide program that collects used veggie oil for its car fleet, an activity usually seen as something done by small garage companies. If you have not seen or don’t recall the hilarious 1977 movie The Kentucky Fried Movie, enjoy the predictive powers of comedy in a clip below the fold.

I am not making fun of San Francisco because I think this is a good program. They have the greenest car fleet in the nation. It will save money, reduce waste and hopefully inspire more agencies and companies to collect waste vegetable oil but can you imagine the average Joe reading about this program in the Times? WTF!

[Source: New York Times]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Original post by Lascelles Linton

Filed under: Biodiesel, Diesel, Legislation and Policy

We told you San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order in May 2006 calling for all diesel-powered city-owned vehicles to run on biodiesel by the end of 2007 and we told you recently it was almost complete. With a month to spare, this week the administration announced the goal has been accomplished: San Francisco’s city-owned fire engines, ambulances, street sweepers and buses all run on biodiesel. Who knew San Francisco was such a liberal place? (I kid) Congrats San Fran!

[Source: SF Gate]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Original post by Lascelles Linton

Filed under: Biodiesel, Green Daily

The city of Orlando, Florida is starting a new test program for their diesel vehicle fleet with a new biofuel. The fuel is being supplied by H2Diesel, a Houston-based company that is producing diesel from vegetable oils and animal fats. The test will start off with one city truck running on the biofuel for the next several months while the emissions and fuel consumption are monitored on a regular basis.

Related:

• H2Diesel, eBarton will market biofuel to North American utilities

[The Auto Channel]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Original post by Sam Abuelsamid

Filed under: Biodiesel, European Union, UK

The UK chemicals group Ineos will be expanding its Baleycourt, France biodiesel complex with a 70 million Euro (around 104m USD) project that will result in a huge facility that can make 230,000-tons of the biofuel annually (up from 110,000) from 400,000 tons of locally produced rapeseed. The French farming cooperative SICLAÉ and German oil mill operator C Thywissen are partners in the project. Ineos has been making biodiesel at Baleycourt for more than ten years with help from the French government. The expanded facilities are expected to be operational by late 2008.

[Source: Forbes, Ineos]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Original post by Sebastian Blanco

Filed under: Biodiesel, Emerging Technologies, Green Daily, Pacific Region

I wonder if this is the kind of thing the San Francisco Green Party would have a problem with: according to C-NET, two companies in Australia announced they will work together to run emissions from a coal plant through a bioreactor to make biodiesel. C-NET’s Martin LaMonica writes that Linc Energy and Bio Clean Coal will create a prototype bioreactor (cost: $1 million) that will grow the algae that eat the carbon from the coal plant’s emissions. Dry those suckers out and you’ve got a biomass that can be turned into biodiesel (or fertilizer; or even burnt to produce more power). One more step in the road to turn waste into fuel, one more step to turn algae into biodiesel.

[Source: C-NET]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Original post by Sebastian Blanco

Filed under: Biodiesel, Green Daily

We just revisited the moves that San Francisco is making to add biodiesel to the city fleet, with the latest news being the establishment of SF Greasecycle. In response to the city’s latest progress on the biofuel front, Eric Brooks, the co-chair of the San Francisco Green Party sustainability working group, has lashed out at the idea of biofuels in general and biodiesel in particular. The response comes in a guest editorial in Beyond Chron called “The Terrible Illusion of Biodiesel.” Brooks writes with the gloves off. Check out these selections:

• Those who trumpet “the valor of biodiesel and other biofuels, need to knock it off immediately.
• The new biofuels boom is -worse- than global warming. And unwitting starry eyed supporters of it like Willie Nelson and E. “Doc” Smith are the keystone that is helping massive multi-national corporations get the planet’s increasingly environmentally conscious public to become blindly hooked on a devastating, diseased, biofuels illusion.
• The problem is one of sheer scale. The amount of fuel that can be produced from recycling used cooking oil is only a tiny fraction of the total fuel used every day by diesel automobiles. What this means is that projects like San Francisco’s waste oils biodiesel program will quickly run out of those waste oils long before even a small part of San Francisco’s fleet of diesel cars, trucks and construction equipment is converted to biodiesel. At that point there is only one place to get the supposedly magical biodiesel; from massive corporate plantations of monocrops grown specifically to produce biodiesel.

You can read the whole thing here.

I take Brooks’ point that biodiesel won’t solve everything. Long-time reader can guess (sorry I’m so predictable) that I’m once again about to point out the Australian government’s advice to its citizens last year: Drive less. Of the three Rs of the green movement (reduce, reuse, recycle), the one that has the best chance of helping our planet is the first. Reducing the amount of stuff we use is key. I don’t think criticizing someone who is following that last R is a good way to go about enacting positive change, though. Turning a waste product into a usable fuel is good news. No question.

[Source: Beyond Chron]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Original post by Sebastian Blanco

Filed under: Biodiesel, Green Daily

The City of San Francisco announced earlier this week that it will start a free grease recycling service called SF Greasecycle. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, commercial food preparation establishments (think restaurants and hotels) can donate used oil to the city, which will send out trucks to pick up the fuel and deliver it to local biodiesel producers that will turn it into biofuel. The Chronicle says that “San Francisco officials believe theirs will be the largest such effort” and that the hope is to expand the service to home and individual oil users in the future. The biodiesel will initially be used by MUNI buses, but eventually all city diesel vehicles will likely be run on this locally-recycled fuel.

This is sensible and good news. The Biodiesel Blog, where I first caught wind of the announcement, calls it great. By taking the waste oil out of the garbage stream (lots gets illegally dumped into sewers) and into the fuel system, San Francisco is showing other cities how to solve multiple problems at once. Since the city has long had a plan to use more biodiesel in its fleet (see links below), shifting the biomass source from Midwest soybeans to local waste is just smart planning. Read the details in the Chronicle.

Related:

• San Francisco opens first commercial B20 station
• San Francisco gets Executive Directive to use more biodiesel
• San Francisco will use biodiesel in emergency fleets

[Source: Biodiesel Blog]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Original post by Sebastian Blanco

Filed under: Diesel, Emerging Technologies, Green Culture, Manufacturing/Plants

Remember the “Back to the Future” movies staring Michael J. Fox? Remember the Professor character played by Christopher Lloyd who refueled his DeLorean-based time machine with banana peels and half-filled beer cans? Well, we are approaching a similar solution. Not banana peels for fuel, but pond scum instead. Pond scum biodiesel fuel!

Diesel fuel is a small market next to gasoline - only 40 Billion gallons a year or thereabouts compared to about 140 Billion gallons. Still 40 Billion is nothing to laugh at. Biofuels production in the U.S. is still under one billion gals/year. In all of Europe it is 1.4 billion gallons. To ramp up production may cause as much disturbance in soy and other oil-rich crops as ethanol has caused in corn and other food prices. But algae, well that’s another story. It grows where and when people don’t want it. It is part of nature’s system of reprocessing chemicals in water and air, powered by sunlight. Algae grows very quickly and, like all plants, it eats CO₂.

I am not a biologist. The information on algae biodiesel is available in the Nov. 3 issue of BusinessWeek’s What’s Next section. One venture firm is Imperium Renewables of Seattle, which readers will likely be familiar with. Investments and research are now underway to get to the most commercially viable production system and to get that system up to sufficient size. What strain of algae is most productive and resilient? Which is easiest to process to biofuel?

A production rate of 8 billion gallons a year would allow every US gallon of diesel fuel to be B20 biodiesel. I just hope we get the algae to work with us. What if the best kind of algae for biofuel smells like skunk? Or eats thru piping? Or is toxic to the touch? We’ll have to go to the near future to find out.

[Source: BusinessWeek]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Original post by Art Vatsky

Filed under: Biodiesel, Emerging Technologies, EV/Plug-in, Green Culture

NBC News got a look at mechanic John Goodwin’s soon-to-be-released add-on kits for diesel cars in this video. The NBC video also takes a look under the hood of John’s turbine, hybrid H3 that will get 60 MPG. That’s not the only TV interview John has done recently. As promised, here is the article and full video of singer Neil Young and John Goodwin’s appearance on CNN. In the CNN interview, John says “it’s not cost-effective for someone to run out and spend $40,000 to double the fuel economy, but I have no shortage of customers.” The CNN article also says John’s $200 green conversion kit will include downloads to your car’s computer.

John also did an interview with NPR’s Weekend Edition last Sunday spreading the world that cars can be green and powerful. “The ironic thing is you can have a 1,000 horse power vehicle and get 25 MPG,” says John. Below the fold is a video John did in June with Media Talk. Is John the first green, celebrity mechanic?

Related:

• Neil Young’s 1959 Lincoln runs on biodiesel and can be plugged-in
• Biodiesel turbine, super capacitor, series hybrid… HUMMER! (60 MPG and 0-60 in 5 seconds)

[Source: CNN, NPR, NBC News, Media Talk]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Original post by Lascelles Linton

Filed under: Biodiesel, Green Culture, Green Daily, Holidash, North America

In the last few years, there have been a lot of people who have changed the cooking device for the holiday bird from the oven to a big deep fryer. As our DIY readers probably know, all of this frying oil can create a great opportunity to later make biodiesel. Since it takes around 3-5 gallons of oil to fry a turkey, the days after Thanksgiving are a great time to collect for your home Appleseed reactor. This is what my friends and I did a few years ago and it worked quite well.

If you’re a cooker but not a biodiesel brewer, you can still contribute. Last year, Reuters had an article about biodiesel producers in Plano, Texas (north of Dallas) that says that in the week following Turkey Day they gathered up 500 gallons of used oil from people who had friend their birds. Not a bad idea. So, on this American day of giving thanks, if you’re going to fry a bird but don’t know what you’re going to do with the leftover fuel, call up a local biodiesel organization and tell them that you’ve got something to give them. They’ll probably thank you for it.

The deep-fried turkey photos in the gallery are by Nukeit1, NikiSublime and Dnigh. CC 2.

[Source: PlanetArk and Flickr]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Original post by Sebastian Blanco

Filed under: Ethanol

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released a report called “Biofuels: Is the cure worse than the disease?” (download the PDF link seems to be broken) earlier this fall. One of the authors of the report, Ronald Steenblik (who is also the Director of Research for the Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI) of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)), was interviewed by Renewable Energy Access about the critical tone the report took towards biofuels and, IMHO, does a fine job of defending his attacks on government subsidies of biofuels and of suggesting we wait until second-generation biofuels (e.g., cellulosic ethanol) are commercially ready before investing heavily in an ethanol infrastructure.

Read the whole thing.

Related:

• USA and Europe ethanol producers peeved with OECD’s report on bad biofuels
• The OECD says yes to biofuels, but with conditions

[Source: Renewable Energy Access]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Original post by Sebastian Blanco

Filed under: Biodiesel, Manufacturing/Plants, Africa

Zimbabwe has opened the first biodiesel plant in its territory. Considered the fifth largest one in the world, the plant was built in Transload, 15 km north of the capital Harare. The capital came from a joint venture of Zimbabwean and South-Korean companies and is expected to produce about 100 million liters of biodiesel per year from wheat, soy and sun-flower seeds.

It is expected that this plant will help the country save $80 million in imported oil. Something very necessary for a country which is currently under international sanctions against president Robert Mugabe.

[Source: Afrol news]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Original post by Xavier Navarro

Filed under: Biodiesel, Etc., Green Culture, Green Daily

We all agree that global warming is caused by too much greenhouse gas in the air, right? And global warming can deal a serious blow to the skiing season. Therefore, it shouldn’t be all that surprising to hear that at least some ski resorts in the Western U.S. are considering ways to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Two of these are on Vail and Beaver Creek mountains, where the idea is to use biodiesel in the fleet of snowcats.

According to the Vail Trail, the Vail resorts are considering using the biofuel in part because Aspen resorts have been using B20 in the snowcats for at least five years, even though the biodiesel costs a bit more. One issue, of course, considering where and when this biodiesel will be used, is gelling. Beaver Creek is doing a lot of research into fuel blends that will work in the cold temperatures, a spokeswoman told the Vail Trail. Some ski resorts also use biodiesel as a backup fuel for the generators that power the ski lifts.

If you’re a ski bunny or a biodiesel lover, hit the Vail Trail for more on greening the slopes.

[Source: Steve Lynn / The Vail Trail via Domestic Fuel]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Original post by Sebastian Blanco