Algae Bio Fuel for Ford Cars & Nissan Turns Over a New Green Leaf

There’s been a lot of buzz about algae as an alternative biofuel. Several business and university researchers are looking at algae’s potential as a viable alternative to fossil fuel. Now researchers at Ford are looking into algae as a fuel source for cars. While Nissan has revealed more details of its new electric concept car at the Paris Motor Show this week, designed to indicate the direction the Japanese car maker will take next with its EV technology as its electric Leaf prepares to go on sale at the end of the year.

October 4, 2010 3:47 PM PDT

Ford researchers looking at algae as a potential biofuel

by Suzanne Ashe 1 comment Share 61diggdigg

There’s been a lot of buzz about algae as an alternative biofuel. Several business and university researchers are looking at algae’s potential as a viable alternative to fossil fuel. And earlier this year, the House of Representatives introduced the Green Jobs Act of 2010, which offers investment tax credits for algae-based biorefineries.

Now researchers at Ford are looking into algae as a fuel source, the company announced.

“Algae have some very desirable characteristics as a potential biofuel feedstock and Ford wants to show its support any efforts that could lead to a viable, commercial-scale application of this technology,” said Sherry Mueller, research scientist at Ford Motor Company. “At this point, algae researchers are still challenged to find economical and sustainable ways for commercial-scale controlled production and culturing of high oil-producing algae.”

Certain species of algae have the ability to convert carbon dioxide to oil, carbohydrates, and other cell components through photosynthesis. Unlike soybeans and corn, algae is incredibly prolific; it can be grown almost anywhere in fresh or saline waters. Algae can also be grown year-round–there’s no harvest season.

Earlier this year Ford researchers visited Wayne State University’s National Biofuels Energy Laboratory, which is looking at suitable algae strains that could be used as a feedstock for biodiesel. Researchers at Ford’s Systems Analytics and Environmental Sciences Department are also looking into other bio-based fuel alternatives such as ethanol and butanol, the company said.

“Ford has a long history of developing vehicles that run on renewable fuels; and the increased use of biofuels is an important element of our sustainability strategy now and moving forward,” Tim Wallington, technical leader with the Ford Systems Analytics and Environmental Sciences Department said in a news release. “We look ahead from a technological, economic, environmental, and social standpoint at potential next-generation renewable fuels that could power our vehicles.”

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/greentech/#ixzz11R4LesLC

4 October

Green Car

Nissan has revealed more details of its new electric concept car after the Paris Motor Show opened yesterday.

It’s the first time the new concept has been seen in public and is designed to indicate the direction the Japanese car maker will take next with its EV technology as its electric Leaf prepares to go on sale at the end of the year.

Nissan says the new Townpod is designed to meet the needs of a new breed of professional who does not work fixed hours, and maybe even work for themselves so the lines between their business and social lives blur.  Likewise, the car is designed to be as equally multifaceted. Comparing the new Townpod to a ‘white tee-shirt’ which although usually worn casually, can be combined with a suit to look smart, this genre-busting vehicle is designed to mix the comfort and style of a passenger car with the businesslike utility of a commercial vehicle.

Just as classic sedans and estates have evolved over time into hatchbacks, MPVs, SUVs and now crossovers, to meet the needs of commuting life and weekend pleasure, Nissan’s new EV is the next evolution, it reckons.

François Bancon, general manager of Nissan’s Exploratory and Advance Planning Department explains: “At its core, a car is a means to transport people or goods from one place to another as simply and easily as possible. Nissan Townpod’s design supports the essence of its function. It is a smart car for people who demand more.”

Designed to look more van-like than the Leaf, the car is shaped to maximise internal space while still retaining aerodynamic efficiency.

Externally the Townpod consist of many familiar elements seen in the Leaf and although no details have been released on performance, it is likely that it will achieve similar credentials to the electric Leaf; which goes on sale in the US by the end of the year and in the UK in early 2011. It employs the same zero-emission technology found in Nissan’s first electric production car, with the charging point found in the nose behind an automatically retracting cover.

As it is just a concept car, Nissan has at the moment announced no plans to bring it to full production, but watch this space…

Source: www.thegreencarwebsite.co.uk

Bamboo Shoots High in the Green & Sustainability Stakes

Edible shoots and timber are just two of the most recognised uses of bamboo, a plant of economic, social and cultural significance throughout Asia. However, this fast-growing perennial member of the grass family also has a wide range of environmental applications, including carbon sequestration, wastewater reuse, and soil and water erosion control. Australian scientists and environmental engineers are beginning to take another look at this prolific perennial.

Tuesday, 05 October 2010

By Michele Sabto in Eco Magazine

Barriers towards commercialisation of bamboo is high labour cost.

Edible shoots and timber are just two of the most recognised uses of bamboo, a plant of economic, social and cultural significance throughout Asia. However, this fast-growing perennial member of the grass family also has a wide range of environmental applications, including carbon sequestration, wastewater reuse, and soil and water erosion control. Australian scientists and environmental engineers are beginning to take another look at this prolific perennial.

In South-East Asia, where bamboo is used primarily as a building material for low-cost structures, it is mostly harvested from wild stands. In other parts of the world, the area under plantation has been increasing at a fast rate; India and China dominate, with approximately 9 million and 5 million hectares respectively.1 In China, the growth in bamboo plantations has been partly driven by fast-growing domestic demand for wood: the country’s need for wood is expected to reach 260 million cubic metres in 2020, with an expected domestic production of only 139 million cubic metres.2 But, demand has also arisen for bamboo construction products from outside China.

Professor David Midmore, of Central Queensland University, has been involved in an Australian government-funded aid project that investigated silvicultural management of bamboo for shoots and timber in the Philippines and Australia.

Says Professor Midmore, ‘Bamboo growth rates are significantly faster than most woody species soon after planting and for this reason bamboo can be harvested much earlier than forest species. It can produce harvestable culms within 4–7 years of planting, which can subsequently be harvested annually for timber.’

In Australia, initial interest in bamboo in the 80s and 90s as a commercial crop had resulted in 200 hectares under plantation by 2002. However, Mr Bob Gretton, President of the Bamboo Society of Australia, explains that development of an Australian industry has struggled to compete with competitively priced imports, mostly from China.

‘In the late 1990s Australian bamboo growers planted commercial areas of Dendrocalmus asper, Bambusa oldhamii, Dendrocalamus latiflorus and a couple of other species for shoots,’ he says. ‘However, shoots are being imported at about anything between $2.50 and $4.50 a kilo and it is hard for Australian producers to compete.’

A small number of growers have found niche markets in the supply of fresh shoots to the restaurant market. Hans Erken, who runs a business called Earthcare, is an example. He sends the fresh shoots in the early season straight down to restaurants in Sydney.

Competitively priced imports have also hampered Australian growers interested in supplying bamboo for timber. Other barriers to commercialisation include high labour costs.

‘There are some aspects of bamboo growing that are less like a plantation and more like a horticulture project, so that increases the cost, as against a tree plantation’, says Mr Gretton.

Bamboos require summer water, and (edible) shoot production has a high water demand. This poses problems when water supply is affected by dry conditions. Professor Midmore and Mr Mark Traynor, of the Northern Territory Department of Primary Industries, investigated the ability of bamboo to continue to produce biomass under dry conditions, trialling practices designed to capitalise on this feature.3 They identified management strategies with the potential to allow for both shoot and culm production under seasonally dry conditions, including strategic irrigation and thinning regimes. Factors found to affect shoot and culm yields included the number of culms of different ages in each stand and the age of culms at harvesting.

Professor Midmore and other scientists, such as Dr Jeff Parr of Southern Cross University, point out that in addition to the wide range of human uses, bamboo may also provide a variety of potential ecosystem services, including erosion control. Bamboo has an extensive fibrous root system, and new culms are produced from underground rhizomes. This means that harvesting can occur without significant disturbance to the ground or even the dense leaf litter, which also contributes to protecting the soil from wind and rain events. The thick leaf litter produced by bamboo also collects and conserves moisture. Bamboo has been extensively used in South America, China and India for remediation and protection of degraded landscapes.

Dr Parr has been investigating the potential for soil organic carbon sequestration by bamboo leaf litter in collaboration with researchers from the Fujian Academy of Forestry Sciences in south-east China.

‘All bamboo leaves a prolific amount of leaf litter on the ground, and we’ve been looking at the leaf litter because the rest is often harvested,’ says Dr Parr. He explains that the Chinese are interested in this research.

‘A lot of bamboo in China is economic bamboo that is used for the production of lots of things, from flooring to clothing. They are interested in the sustainable harvest and use of bamboo, and at the same time are interested in what it’s doing in the way of locking up carbon. They’re interested in carbon trading,’ he says.

According to Dr Parr, leaf litter is often overlooked in carbon inventories. This is significant, because he says that it is mainly the phytoliths, or plantstones, produced in the epidermal cells of a plant’s leaf, sheath and stem that are good at occluding carbon. Phytoliths form as microscopic silica grains in the leaves and stems of many plant species (see Ecos Issue 145). They are particularly prolific in grasses such as bamboo species, and become incorporated into the soil matrix during decomposition of leaf matter. In a paper published in Global Change Biology, Parr and his co-researchers state that ‘relative to the other soil organic carbon fractions that decompose over a much shorter time scale, the carbon occluded in phytoliths is highly resistant against decomposition’.4

1  Midmore DJ (2009). Bamboo in the global and Australian contexts. Proceedings of a workshop held in Los Banos, the Philippines, 22–23 November 2006. Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research.http://aciar.gov.au/publication/PR129

2  Meyer D (2009). Demand for bamboo grows as wood substitute and food, China Daily, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2009-11/16/content_8975436.htm

3  Traynor M and Midmore D (2009). Cultivated bamboo in the Northern Territory of Australia. Proceedings of a workshop held in Los Banos, the Philippines, 22–23 November 2006. Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. http://aciar.gov.au/publication/PR129

4  Parr J, Leigh S, Chen B, Yew G and Zheng W (2009). Carbon bio-sequestration within the phytoliths of economic bamboo species. Global Change Biology, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2009.02118.x

A story provided by ECOS Magazine – Australia´s most authoritative magazine on sustainability in the environment, industry and community.  This article is under copyright; permission must be sought from ECOS to reproduce it. Visit ECOS to sign-up for a print subscription

Source: www.sciencealert.com.au

Last Word – Shocking, But Did the Message Get Through?

Sometime you have to shock people to get them to sit up and take notice – a la smoking ads and gruesome road safety scenes. But for the first time when climate change is presented in this fashion, going further than Al Gore’s pedestrian powerpoint approach, people are not only shocked they get the ads taken off the air in the UK. Here’s what Sara Philips wrote about it in her environment section of ABC:

Violent ending to climate change ads

BY SARA PHILLIPS

ABC Environment | 1 OCT 2010

The 10:10 campaign shows a bloody end for students who do not want to reduce their carbon emissions.

Timed to capture the zeitgeist generated by the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen last year, the British government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change released a TV advertisement outlining the dangers of climate change, and encouraging people to take action.

It showed a little girl being read a bedtime story in which the nasty CO2 monster seemed set to take over the world. “Is there a happy ending?” she asked her dad, at which point the public service announcement kicked in with: “it’s up to us”.

The advertisement attracted hundreds of complaints. It was viewed by those that opposed the ad as being “upsetting and scaremongering”.

Heaven only knows what the people making those complaints would make of the latest ad doing the rounds on the Internet.

10:10 originally started as a British campaign but has spread beyond that corner of the world. It is supported by green groups 350 and Do Something in Australia. The latest offering from this organisation is titled “No pressure”. It shows a school teacher encouraging her class to get behind the campaign to reduce their own emissions by 10 per cent. “No pressure,” she says, before noting which kids are not planning to participate. She then presses a little red button on a black box and blows the non-conforming children to smithereens. Nearby children are splattered with gore.

The same theme is then repeated in an office, with a soccer team and with Gillian Anderson in a radio studio.

This ad is clearly supposed to be funny and shocking. Franny Armstrong, 10:10 founder told The Guardian, “Clearly we don’t really think they should be blown up, that’s just a joke for the mini-movie”.

But the reaction has not been universally positive. On Twitter, Tim Hollo (who is media advisor to Christine Milne, but was expressing his own views) tweeted, “I cannot possibly imagine this vid convincing one single person to take part in 10:10 #badcomms #climate #fail”.

Meanwhile, Graham Readfearn, freelance journalist and occasional writer for ABC Environment found it “so funny, I had to watch it twice.”

For better or worse, violence seems to be a recurring theme of climate awareness campaigns.

Earlier this year another British green group, Plane Stupid tried to make people aware of the climate impact of flying. They released an ad in which distant objects appeared to be falling from the sky. On closer inspection they are revealed to be polar bears plummeting towards to Earth, where they land with a bloody thump.

Another ad from the US Environmental Defence Fund showed climate change as a racing locomotive. A man on the tracks manages to step aside in time, but a child is left, demonstrating to us that climate change will have the most impact on our children.

Earlier this year, Greenpeace campaigned to have Nestle stop using palm oil in its products. The Internet ad showed a man enjoying a break from work and a Kit Kat, which was in fact an orang-utan’s finger that spattered his keyboard with blood.

Violence in ads can work: the Greenpeace orang-utan campaign was successful.

Australia’s famously graphic transport accident ads have been exported to the world. According to a 2003 study from the Monash University Accident Research Centre, “An international review of road safety media campaigns found average crash reductions of between 8 per cent and 14 per cent”. Support with vigorous policing also contributed.

The UN also employed violence to emphasise the damage that landmines do everyday around the world.

But there is a difference between car crashes and landmines and climate change. With the first two, a gruesome outcome is possible: the ads warn of conceivable risks.

Climate change is not likely to end in a bloody puddle, however. Although wars over diminishing resources have been predicted by some, the worst-case scenarios usually centre around starvation, drowning and natural disasters.

So far, the ad has gone viral. All over Twitter and the Internet, people are sharing the video. By this standard, the violence used in the 10:10 ad has been successful.

When asked about whether they were concerned about offending people, Armstrong told The Guardian, “Because we have got about four years to stabilise global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that’s not worth jumping up and down about, I don’t know what is.”

But as the panel from the Gruen Transfer repeatedly remind us, it’s not whether people see the ad, it’s whether people do anything after seeing it. The success of this ad will be determined by its ability to make people feel good about 10:10 and encourage more people to sign up to the campaign.

Judging by most of the comments on Youtube so far, it would not seem it has succeeded.

Source: www.abc.net.au

Believe it or not, I’m in Singapore again, in advance of a complete business move in November. I’ve mentioned before the setting up of Sustain Ability Showcase Asia, which is now operational with our first clients on board. This time, I’m in the heart of South East Asia to attend to business, meet old and new friends. But we will return to Australia – Melbourne to be exact – for next week’s Carbon Expo and still have some more time in Brisbane to be part of a flurry of October climate friendly events. No need to worry about ABC Carbon – book, newsletter and consulting – as it will continue and we will make sure we look after our loyal Australian supporters as well as the growing number from other parts of the world.