Websites

The trusty Gribble donned it’s little hard hat  and went to work. Their first task will be trying to eat some willow and straw and once the little fellow excretes his waste,  he produces almost pure biofuel. The problem scientists are having is breaking down the waste cells and releasing the polymers that are required to produce biofuels.

The Gribble has an intestinal tract in which certain enzymes will break down wood and release the polymers, making it easier to extract the biofuels.  So straw and other non food supply threatened plants, should be easy for the little critter to eat.  Willow and straw were picked because they are so easy to grow and nobody but the Gribble will eat them.

 Great Britain has given 27,000,000 pounds to scientists, to come up with a plan, to make second generation biofuels a reality within 10 years and the Gribble is only a part of the testing that will be performed.  We will keep our eyes peeled and report when more information becomes available.

View Gribbles at home:

Billionaire oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens has a plan to reduce U.S. reliance on imported oil. His plan is to build fields of windmills across the Great Plains to generate electricity so that cleaner burning natural gas, which currently costs about $1.50 a gallon, and is used to power many electric plants, can be freed up for Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) automobiles. Windmills and a cleaner and cheaper fuel, sounds great, right? In fact it almost sounds too good to be true, which might explain why Boone is spending $58 million on an ad campaign pushing his “Pickens Plan” on TV, the internet and in town hall meetings where he touts that his plan would create thousands of new jobs, reduce foreign oil dependence and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

 

 

Could the Pickens Plan be nothing more than a con to bilk taxpayers into lining Pickens’ pockets even farther than they already have? As Richard Holober, executive director of the Consumer Federation of California said: “This is an attempt to divert public money away from zero-emission vehicles to a dead-end technology that gets us nowhere.” The Pickens Plan isn’t all bad however; windmills are an ideal method of power generation, especially if coupled with Electric Vehicles (EVs) for transportation because windmills produce so much more power at night when most EVs would be plugged in to charge

.

Pickens plan

Pickens commercial

The additive does not require any modifications to the engines which makes it even better.  The two hour test flight went off without a hitch.  There was no difference in how the engines ran and there was no distinguishable difference at any level to using kerosene, which is jet fuel.

Today’s test does not mean that we will instantly be using Jatropha world wide on every flight.  It does mean that an airline opened there minds to helping the planet and that if it goes well for them, other airlines will follow suit.  Jatropha still is not being grown in large enough quantities to facilitate the airline industry but through planning and growing demand to purchase this wondrous fuel, we are sure that farmers will also follow suit.

This video brings to light the advantages of a union between Jatropha and the airline industry.

There are new ways to use green power for your home, business and vehicle.  The Internet is one of the best places to get started on investigating how you can green up your power usage. Here at Green Earth Friend, we also will keep our eyes open for new green technology and post it here for your information. 

Here are some videos so you can see what people are doing with Green Power.

Jatropha

This relatively unknown plant produces more oil than soy or palm oil which are the preferred plants used today.  Estimates of Jatropha seed yield vary widely due to a lack of research data.  What is known about the plant is the genetic diversity of the crop, the range of environments in which it is grown, and Jatropha’s perennial life cycle.  Seed yield under cultivation can range from 1,500 to 2,000 kilograms per hectare, corresponding to extractable oil yields of 540 to 680 litres per hectare (58 to 73 us gallons per acre.

Air New Zealand is planning a  747 jumbo jet flight from Auckland on Dec 3rd, 2008 (local Spring Northern Autumn) with one of the four engines being powered by fuel refined from the seed of the fast-growing Jatropha plant.  The three-hour test flight could mark another promising step for the airline industry to find cheaper and more environmentally friendly alternatives to fossil fuel.  Air New Zealand announced plans to use the new fuel for 10% of its needs by 2013. 

View video of Jatropha Project.

John Kanzius, a retired TV station owner and broadcast engineer, was looking for a cure for cancer. He got up in the middle of the night, with a revolutionary idea, to eliminate cancer cells from the human body. By injecting small amounts of metals into the body which are attracted to cancer affected cells and exposing them to radio waves. The radio waves superheat the metals and the surrounding cancer tissues thus killing the cancer. After much experimentation he found that his invention could also burn salt water. Conventional hydrogen generators require electrically charged metal plates submerged into salt water to release the hydrogen. What he had discovered is another way to extract the hydrogen from salt water.

Could a car running on radio waves and hydrogen be in our future? Only time will tell. Is building a piece of equipment that emits enough radio waves to be effective, going to be cheaper and more efficient than a battery and some electrodes. The problem with electrodes is that they corrode during the process of extracting hydrogen. So having a separate unit that has no contact with the salt water could be invaluable. Therefore, a car running on radio waves and hydrogen maybe the way to go.

About 4 years ago inventor Jim Sears from Colorado came up with the idea of extracting biofuels from algae. He knew, this being a new technology and a new industry, that he had a long way to go and a lot of people to convince. Algae, which can provide a 100 times more oil per acre than conventional crops, is very hard to grow in ponds due to the uncontrolled temperature that our environment supplies. Under controlled temperatures the algae doubles overnight, making it the fastest growing plant on the planet.

With half a million dollars from a friend of the Colorado State University, they started Solix Biofuels. Soon they had a patent pending on Photo Bioreactor Technology, the technology used in growing the algae under perfect growing conditions. Solix is in the process of building a 305 ft by 50 ft reactor which will be able to produce 10,000 gallons of oil per acre, per annum. Carbon dioxide is what algae needs as fuel to grow. In other words, carbon dioxide is its main diet. The plan is to have the bioreactors close enough to power plants and other carbon dioxide emitting processes to work symbiotically with them, thus creating a win-win solution for fuel generation. When and if this plan goes into effect, it will only use 1% of farm land being used to grow our crops in comparison to the massive amount of acreage that would be needed for ethanol produced from corn. Half of algae’s body weight is oil, whereas the oil palm tree, the largest oil producing plant, at present is at 20% body weight is oil. Soy produces 50 gallons of oil per annum, Canola 150 gallons, Palm 650 gallons, Algae 10,000 gallons. Anyone looking at these statistics can see that algae will be a big part of what we are going to be putting in our gas tanks in the foreseeable future.

Using water with electrically charged metal plates submerged into the water produces hydrogen gas, which if ran into your intake manifold, can save you some gas. The internet is flooded with this hydrogen generator and manuals on how to build it and install it. Why car manufacturers are choosing other avenues is a mystery. There are cars being made that are electric and run on hydrogen fuel, however, there are not many stations around that carry hydrogen, so where ever you go, may be a one way trip. Ethanol is produced with corn. It takes a lot of energy to produce. If you went a 100 miles with a gas vehicle, you would need one-third more ethanol to go the same hundred miles. Since it takes so much to produce Ethanol it will not be cheap and it will eat up food resources and since we will be growing for fuel, not food, corn and wheat prices will increase. There is research ongoing trying to extract ethanol from non food crops. You also need a bigger tank to store the Ethanol and one that is not prone to corrosion. That coupled with stronger hoses and equipment needed to run this fuel will increase the price of the vehicle.

BioGas is gas produced by anaerobic digestion. Essentially, gas produced by rotting garbage. Landfills are covered with plastic then buried with a pipe sticking out to release the pressurized gas. If it is not stored or burned these gasses are a potent form of greenhouse gas. This gas can be used in a couple of different ways, such as heating and the production of electricity.