Green Car Advisor
Butanol
November 20, 2009
The California agency that sets the American standard for automotive emissions today unveiled a much-improved Website that helps consumers choose the least polluting cars on the market.
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Click on art to enlarge.
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The California Air Resources Board Website, using information collected for vehicle certification in the golden state, offers a practical and easy to use system that ranks vehicles according to their emission characteristics and provides tools to compare models.
The site allows visitors to view models by technology/fuel type, smog score, global-warming score and engine family. And there's a very smart tool that, with a click of your mouse, allows you to view all the tax incentives available for a particular model.
Last year, the agency adopted a state regulation requiring automakers to affix the Environmental Performance Label to California showroom models that convey the vehicle's smog and greenhouse-gas emissions. The simply illustrated graphic has two rankings, from one to 10, that depict vehicle emissions. The higher the score, the less polluting it is.
Driveclean.ca.gov puts these same rankings in an online format, making them practical for web research. The Website also provides information about clean-car technology and guides users to consider the emissions of the models they are evaluating.
We salute CARB, once again, for taking another significant step to make the world we live in a healthier place.
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- Scott Doggett November 20, 2009, 8:15 AM
- Categories:
- Alternative Fuels, Biofuels, Butanol, Coal, Compressed Air, Diesel, Emissions, Ethanol, Flex-Fuel, Fuel Cell, Fuel Economy, Hybrid, Hydrogen, LPG, Legislation, Manufacturers, Methanol, Motorcycles, Natural Gas, Oil, Plug-ins and Electric, Solar, Tax Incentives
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- Alternative Fuels and Vehicles
, California Air Resources Board, CARB, Electric Vehicles, Fuel Economy
October 20, 2009
From Gas to Electric, 3-Wheelers to Exotics, Contestants Vie to Build 100 MPG Vehicles
Students from West Philadelphia High School are youngest competitors, but no slouches when it comes to design or performance, as shown by their Alternative category entry, the biodiesel-electric EVX-GT hybrid sports car. The school also has a diesel-electric hybrid Ford Focus in the Conventional class.
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
Judges for the Progressive Automotive X Prize contest have winnowed the field in the race for $10 million in prize money for building the best 100 MPG MPH car to the final 43 teams.
The teams will enter a total of 53 vehicles (there are different categories, so multiple entries are possible) in a competition pitting them against one another in a variety of road and safety tests.
All the finalists already have survived two design judging rounds that pared the number of entries from the original 111 teams with 135 vehicles.
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The Progressive Automotive X Prize was launched at last year's New York Auto Show.
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The contest, aimed at inspiring green-car development, was announced more than 18 months ago. It challenges contestants to design, build and operate a commercially viable vehicles that can deliver fuel economy of at least 100 miles per gallon - or the equivalent.
Part of the competition involves presenting a marketing plan to the judges, who will decide if the vehicle has real-world possibilities.
Among them, the final entrants use 14 different fuels including gasoline and electricity, with battery-electric and hybrid-electric the most popular types of powertrains.
In the hybrid-electric category, teams are entering vehicles whose internal combustion engines run on gasoline, diesel biodiesel, ethanol, butanol and compressed natural gas.
There are even three entries that use plain old gasoline as their sole fuel.
Continue reading...
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- John O'Dell October 20, 2009, 3:20 AM
- Categories:
- Alternative Fuels, Biofuels, Butanol, Diesel, Ethanol, Fuel Economy, Fuels & Technologies, Hybrid, Natural Gas, Plug-ins and Electric
- Technorati Tags:
- 100 MPG Car
, Alternative Fuels, Fuel Efficiency, Progressive Automotive X Prize Finalists
July 31, 2009
Engineers have developed a method for creating high-performance membranes from crystal sieves that could increase the energy efficiency of chemical separations up to 50 times over conventional methods and enable higher production rates.
So say a team of researchers led by chemical engineer Michael Tsapatsis of the University of Minnesota, in an article that appeared in today's issue of Science.
The ability to separate and purify specific molecules in a chemical mixture is essential to chemical manufacturing. Many industrial separations rely on distillation, a process that is easy to design and implement but consumes a lot of energy.
Tsapatsis's team developed a rapid heating treatment to remove structural defects in zeolite membranes that limit their performance, a problem that has plagued the technology for decades.
Rosemarie Wesson of the National Science Foundation said that using membranes rather than energy-intensive processes could increase the energy efficiency of producing renewable biofuels such as ethanol and butanol.
Continue reading...
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- Scott Doggett July 31, 2009, 3:25 PM
- Categories:
- Alternative Fuels, Biofuels, Butanol, Emissions, Ethanol, Fuel Economy
- Technorati Tags:
- Biofuels
, Butanol, Ethanol, Science, zeolite membranes
June 25, 2009
In Old Town, Maine, on the former site of an ethanol project that went belly-up last November, a century-old mill continues to produce pulp and paper.
But along with its usual pulp-making business, the mill is doing something unprecedented: Developing technology to produce bio-butanol, a jet fuel, from parts of trees that would otherwise go to waste.
Although production is still two years away, Reuters reports that the reinvention of Maine's Old Town Fuel & Fiber mill is already drawing interest as a potential model for a new wave of biofuel companies that could slash dependence on oil, create jobs and reduce the emissions that lead to global warming.
Loggers, the news service reports, see the mill as a lifeline for their crippled industry. Environmentalists see it as a test of the Obama administration's push for a big expansion in biofuels.
And chemical and oil companies are waiting to see if the mill can do what none has done before by extracting sugars from wood chips into a biofuel that many regard as more efficient than corn-based ethanol as a possible substitute for gasoline.
"There has been a lot of interested parties in what we are doing here," Old Town's president, Dick Arnold, told Reuters. "There have been several oil companies that have been interested in our extract and production of biofuels. There has been a number of chemical companies that have expressed the same desire."
Behind the project is Lynn Tilton, a New York venture capitalist who owns one of the nation's largest helicopter makers. Tilton's Patriarch Partners bought the mill in November, invested about $40 million and shifted its focus to cellulosic bio-butanol.
According to Reuters, Tilton can use bio-butanol in her own helicopter and aircraft businesses but is eyeing a potentially huge market after Congress decreed that the United States must use 21 billion gallons of "advanced" biofuels such as cellulosic ethanols, bio-butanol and "green gasoline" a year by 2022.
The Reuters report is well worth the time it takes to read.
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- Scott Doggett June 25, 2009, 12:27 PM
- Categories:
- Alternative Fuels, Biofuels, Butanol, Emissions, Energy Companies, Ethanol, Tax Incentives
- Technorati Tags:
- Alternative Fuel
, Bio-Butanol, Congress, Ethanol, Lynn Tilton, Obama, Oil Companies, Old Town Fuel & Fiber, Reuters
May 28, 2009
Space will be the final frontier for tourists if Sir Richard Branson has his way.
Getting there won't be easy on the wallet - but it won't be so hard on the planet, either, contends the British adventurer and Virgin Group founder, who touched down at Washington's National Press Club recently.
"Very environmentally friendly," Branson said, according to a Greenwire report (subscription required). "The [carbon] cost of us putting someone into space will be less than flying to London and back on a commercial plane."
Five years and $150 million into his Virgin Galactic venture, Branson has a bona fide spaceship to show for it.
Over the past few months, pilots have conducted several test flights of the space-launch vehicle Eve, a model of which is pictured here with Branson. The mother ship is designed to ferry SpaceShipTwo and its two pilots and six astronauts more than 50,000 feet above the Earth's surface.
From the stratosphere, SpaceShipTwo would blast to a sub-orbital altitude of about 360,000 feet using hybrid rockets.
A "whole new era of space travel" may be nigh, boasted Branson, who plans to go boldly where just a few tourists have gone before. SpaceShipTwo is slated for completion by the end of the year, he said, followed by about 18 months of testing. A ticket to ride is $200,000.
Eve's jet engines will run on kerosene initially but are also capable of running on butanol, a biofuel that can be made from algae. SpaceShipTwo's rockets will burn nitrous oxide - but only briefly - as the spaceship would require no fuel for takeoff, re-entry and landing.
Carbon-dioxide emissions per passenger on a Virgin Galactic spaceflight would be about 60 percent of a passenger's carbon footprint on a round-trip flight between New York and London. About 70 percent of a spaceflight's CO2 emissions would come from mother ship Eve, which must carry SpaceShipTwo into the stratosphere.
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- Scott Doggett May 28, 2009, 9:57 AM
- Categories:
- Alternative Fuels, Biofuels, Butanol, Emissions
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- Alternative Fuels
, Biofuels, Carbon Dioxide, Carbon Emissions, Carbon Footprint, Emissions, Sir Richard Branson
May 5, 2009
By Greg Johnson, Contributor
It's been four years since David Ramey fueled up his unmodified 1992 Buick Park Avenue with butanol derived from biomass and made a 10,000-mile road trip that took him from Blacklick, Ohio to San Diego and back.
The trip, which included stops along the way to court members of the media and environmental agency personnel, was conceived as a way to prove that "biobutanol" had inherent environmental and fuel-economy benefits over its better-known cousin in the green fuels family, ethanol.
Flash forward to 2009 and biobutanol still isn't getting the respect that Ramey and other proponents say the fuel deserves. Ramey, for example, continues to make demonstration drives - he'll fuel up a vehicle with biobutanol for the Fourth off July parade in nearby Gahanna, Ohio.
"There has been very little funding for biobutanol research over the past 30 years and we are simply in the infancy of this new technology," Ramey wrote in a recent email to Green Car Advisor. "Many are talking about biobutanol but few are producing it."
That situation is about to change, according to biobutanol backers who describe the fuel as a worthy challenger to ethanol. When properly formulated, they say, butanol burns cleaner than ethanol, has a higher energy density, can be transported in existing petroleum-product pipelines and won't hurt seals, gaskets or other parts of internal combustion engines.
Continue reading...
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- Greg Johnson May 5, 2009, 3:00 AM
- Categories:
- Alternative Fuels, Biofuels, Butanol, Emissions, Fuel Economy, Oil, Transportation Alternatives
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- Biodiesel Adventure
, BP Global biobutanol, Butanol, Dupont, Ethanol Pipeline
February 27, 2009
Illustration of Lotus Engineering's omnivore engine doesn't disclose much about its inner workings.
It's not a particularly lovely beast, but Lotus Engineering says its prototype "omnivore" engine will thrive on all kinds of fuels and that's likely to make it a winner in the world to come -- when petroleum is fading away and biofuels from a variety of sources and in a variety of chemistries are developing to fill the void.
Lotus says the blocky internal combustion engine has the "potential to significantly increase fuel-efficiency" for sustainable alcohol-based fuels (ethanol, methanol. propanol and butanol ) and can also run on gasoline.
The prototype one-cylinder engine will be displayed at the Lotus Cars stand at the Geneva Motor Show next week (media days begin Tuesday and the show opens to the public Thursday for an 11-day run).
Lotus Engineering -- the research and consulting arm of Lotus Cars -- says the engine is a two-stroke, single-cylinder monoblock (the cylinder head and block are one piece) that uses a unique variable compression system and direct fuel injection.
The design can utilize high octane, alcohol-based biofuels better than the four-stroke (intake-combustion-power-exhaust) engines now used in cars and trucks, the company said.
We'll let our engineering gurus explain the precise working of the system in a later posting, but the short version is that Lotus claims the engine design and mechanics permit asymmetric exhaust timing, a continuously variable exhaust opening point and a compression ratio that changes to meet load demands.
Lotus has been deeply involved in alternative energy and powerplant technology for years.
It is collaborating on development of the Omnivore engine with Queen's University of Belfast, in Northern Ireland, and Orbital Corp. Ltd. of Australia, and said the program is being sponsored by Britain's Renewables Materials Link program, which helps fund collaborative industry and scientific segment research into uses of renewable materials for sustainable development.
The Omnivore program is one piece of Lotus' research into the processes involved in operating an engine on mixtures of alcohol-based biofuels and gasoline.
A previously displayed effort was the Lotus Exige 270E Tri-fuel concept (gasoline, ethanol, methanol or any combination of the three) shown a last year's Geneva Motor Show.
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- John O'Dell February 27, 2009, 3:00 AM
- Categories:
- Alternative Fuels, Auto Shows, Biofuels, Butanol, Ethanol, Flex-Fuel, Lotus, Methanol
- Technorati Tags:
- Biofuels
, Geneva Motor Show, Lotus Engineering
December 23, 2008
The U.S. Department of Energy said Monday that it was making available up to $200 million for advanced biofuel pilot refineries, expecting to award five to 12 projects over the next six years.
The department said that if deployed on a large scale, the commercial facilities could produce volumes that would contribute significantly to the new national renewable-fuels mandate.
"This funding opportunity will look for the most promising technologies that can advance the potential of renewable biomass as a resource for second generation transportation biofuels," John Mizroch, acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, said in a statement.
"The Department of Energy will select breakthrough integrated biorefinery projects that have technical and economic performance data at the bench or pilot scale to prove they are ready to move a step closer toward commercial readiness," he said.
The department intends the projects to come online within three to four years of each funding award. The biofuels produced from the projects are part of the effort to cut automotive emissions that contribute to global warming while increasing security of supply and weaning the country off energy import dependence.
Last week, the Energy Information Administration said it believed the country would fall short of being able to produce the 36 billion gallons of biofuels required by 2022 under the mandate. Of that, 21 billion gallons are required to come from advanced fuels such as cellulosic ethanol and biobutanol.
Continue reading...
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- Scott Doggett December 23, 2008, 6:29 AM
- Categories:
- Biofuels, Butanol, Emissions, Energy Companies, Ethanol, Methanol
- Technorati Tags:
- Automotive Emissions
, Biobutanol, Biofuel, Cellulosic Ethanol, Department of Energy, DOE, Ethanol, Global Warming, Renewable Fuels
The California agency that sets the American standard for automotive emissions today unveiled a much-improved Website that helps consumers choose the least polluting cars on the market.
