Biofuel. Ethanol is made from corn, right? Well, no, not exactly. Ethanol is basically, well, alcohol. And as we all know, alcohol is produced by fermenting sugars. Corn, relatively high in starchy goodness and complex carbohydrates that can be turned into sugars, has been a leader in ethanol production in the United States. Of course sugar beets and sugar cane are also highly suitable to this task, and used elsewhere around the world.

But the thing is, corn, sugar beets, sugar cane, these are all food. To use them to produce gas for our cars means that we have less food. To farm the land for them to make gas means that we can’t farm that land for food for us to eat. And let’s face it, to power all of our cars with green ethanol biofuel would take more farmable land than this planet has, not to mention really put a damper on our ability to live since, you know, we’d all have gone hungry and died of starvation to fuel all of our cars. As you can see, ethanol from corn and sugar is part of a solution, but it is not the solution. World hunger hasn’t exactly gone away on its own yet, and turning food into gas isn’t helping it any.

What if there were a crop that could be grown in arid desserts though, that could still make good ethanol? Where might one find such a miracle solution?

Surprisingly, it took researchers from the University of Sydney (you know, in Australia) working with researchers from Oxford University (that little school thing over in the UK) to come up with an idea that should have come from across the pond / from the other side of the planet. Their brilliant solution? Their miracle plant? Agave!

Sometimes it takes an Aussie to see what should have been right under our noses. (If someone else had the idea, I’ve somehow missed it, and would dearly appreciate a link. The first I’ve heard of this however comes from a British source about research being done on agave in Australia, of all places.)

And it is brilliantly simple and perfectly suited to Australia, as well as, potentially, many other places in the world which have stretches of barely usable land. Making it a perfect fit for biofuel production that does not interfere with global food production.

Yes, I’m taking about tequila. No, I mean mescal. Well … no, but close. I’m talking about alcohol made from AGAVE.

Yeah, that sweetener that I’ve only just started using in my tea recently, agave nectar*. It’s sweeter than honey, and less viscous (syrupy) so it dissolves better. Mexicans have been turning the starches stored in this succulent, agave, for a looooooooooong time. So just why exactly it took an Aussie to suggest making the world greener with a Tequila Sunrise is the question of the century.

But it’s a brilliant solution. Because as it turns out, agave is a charming plant. As a succulent nature made it to thrive in crappy arid conditions. It needs very little water to live. It stores lots and lots of energy to survive. In fact, “You get up to five times more energy out of the plant than you put in,” claims Daniel Tan, a senior lecturer in agronomy at the University of Sydney. Dr. Tan further expounds, “In terms of producing ethanol, agave is about the same as sugar cane.”

And as world biofuel experts are often keen to point out, ethanol from sugar is more efficient than ethanol from corn. Which means that agave could revolutionize the biofuel industry! It’s a top-notch source of ethanol and it grows in deserts where it won’t compete with food production!

So it should be very interesting to see where this research goes, and how the world adapts to it. The United States has already placed a tariff on imported ethanol to protect US corn farmers from cheaper sugar-based ethanol from the likes of Brazil. But if every country out there with a lot of sand started growing agave and turning it into ethanol, the world could literally be flooded with cheap biofuel the likes of which the US could never stand up to with corn. (Of course the US has its own large stretches of agave-friendly land to join in with.) It could also, potentially, create an exportable politically correct good for some countries in dire need of them.

Continue reading ‘Down Under Tequila Is The New Green (Or Is That Blue?)’ »

So you’re a scientist at NASA, and you want to, say, send a probe into the outer reaches of space. Because that’s just how the scientists at NASA roll. But you’ve got a problem. You, and your project, are out of gas.

Or, well, more accurately, Plutonium.  You see now that the cold war is basically just history, and for the most part the world has disarmed its nuclear arsenal, NASA has a problem.  A lot of their space exploration designs are centered around nuclear-powered craft, but we no longer produce Plutonium-238, the isotope used for space fuel.

Estimates had said that this resource crunch wouldn’t actually be felt until 2020 or so.  But it’s only 2010 and scientists are already grumbling.

The problem is, everyone just kind of expected NASA to switch over to solar power, so the Plutonium Pinch wouldn’t really be a big deal.  Except that not everything in space can be powered by a star.  There are places in darkness that we also need to explore.  The moon.  Mars.  Everything has a dark side.  And the further you get from the sun, the less energy you can get from the sun.  It’s a rather obvious relational equation, one would think.  But one that missed its mark during the weapons-grade nuclear downsizing.

It’s a strange world when one considers that NASA may just have to shop around Russia for some nuclear materials to alleviate their shortage.  But rumor has it, that’s exactly what is may just be happening to keep projects on schedule.  It’s an eerie kind of beautiful.  Now if we could just hold hands and sing Kumbaya…

So the 2010 Toyota Prius wasn’t the only hybrid shown off at the Detroit Auto Show.  (Otherwise known as the 2009 North American International Auto Show).  Honda also unveiled its new design of the Honda Insight.

The 2010 Honda Insight! (No, it's not a Prius...)

I’m sure many of you had to do a double-take when you first saw it.  Remind you of anything?  Hmm … a Toyota Prius maybe?  I’m not sure what Honda and Toyota are pulling right now.  The new 2010 Toyota Prius looks more like something from Honda, and the new 2010 Honda Insight looks more like a Toyota.  Is that right?  No, really!  I mean here, just look at the last styling of the Honda Insight:

The last Honda Insight

Does the new Insight look anything like this?  Or does it look an awful lot more like this:

The new 2010 Toyota Prius (Not to be mistaken for a Honda Insight?)

Yeah.  I know.  It’s just not right, I say.  But here are the two new 2010 hybrid darlings side-by-side, just beacuse it’s that freaking … weird.

Again, the 2010 Honda Insight ... versus the 2010 Toyota Prius.

Freaking weird!

And for those of you who don’t know what a Toyota Prius looked like before, here’s an older model to compare the styling to.  Note that Toyota really is keeping to their theme pretty well.  While Honda … well, just what is Honda up to here, hmm?

Here's last year's Gen2 Toyota Prius

Okay, so enough visual freak out.  Honda, obviously, is desperate to take some of Toyota’s sales thunder.  Have they got what it takes to do it?  Let’s look at some numbers:

So, um, that would be a “no”.  Less power and worse fuel economy from the Honda Insight.  Toyota clearly has the better design.  But, rumor is, the Honda Insight will sell for cheaper.  Cheaper by a couple of grand.  Will that help them steal some of the Prius sales away from Toyota?

I don’t know.  I doubt it though.  It’s hard to beat a winner.  And that’s clearly what Honda is struggling with.  How do they beat a winner?  By trying to copy them, obviously.  Not by trying to actually be better.  Still, it’s a start.  The 2010 Honda Insight actually does compare fairly well with an older Toyota Prius.  The Gen 2 Prius had a combined 110 HP and had a combined fuel economy of 46 MPG, which is really not that far from this new Honda Insight.

So I guess what you could say, that with the styling change and all, what Honda has really done is cloned the old 2nd Generation Toyota Prius.  The Honda Insight is just a generation behind.

Yes, it’s Earth Day again. Time to celebrate all things making our world a better place, for us and our kids and our grandkids and so on. And what better way to make the world a better place than to reduce our dependency on dirty nasty oil consumption by using biofuels.

Maybe.

It sounds good on paper. Grow some corn. Make some moonshine hootch ethanol fuel. Mix it in with your gasoline. Now you’re less dependent on oil and saving the planet from evil CO2 emissions.

Well, that’s at least half right. You are using less oil. But while the emissions from your exhaust pipe may be a bit cleaner, and the corn grown may have absorbed all sorts of nasty carbon from the air as it grew, it may not be quite that simple. You see, the process of producing the ethanol also releases CO2 back into the air. It doesn’t make itself. So there’s that amount that has to be counted too. And on top of that, some farmers use artificial fertilizers that are full of carbon, which muck up the Earth-friendly theme just a tad more. And then there’s transporting the ethanol, and so on. The closer you look, the less clean ethanol really is.

But ethanol also has another down side: It’s food! If we had a great surplus of food in the world and no one ever went hungry, then there’d be no arguments. Unfortunately we do not live in such a utopia. And in fact the concern over how biofuel effects food prices is so great that the European Union may even postpone or drop their plans for biosource quotas in motor fuel.

All is not so bleak however. Right now ethanol is produced mostly from corn and sugar. But it need not be so. Algae may provide another, more efficient, means of producing any number of biofuels, ethanol included. Also, while ethanol might be the most thought of and talked about biofuel, we do have others. Biodiesel for example is basically just vegetable oil. It’s much easier to produce and thus better for our environment. And then there’s methanol, or wood grain alcohol, which isn’t made with food crops.

We need to stop overlooking these other alternative fuels and start putting as much research and support into their production as we do into ethanol. Because we really can make the world a better place. If we try.