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Terrabon LLC, a Houston company that’s been investigating making fuel from waste for more than a decade, announced this week that waste collection giant Waste Management of Houston will become an investment partner.
WM, along with existing investment partner Valero Energy Corporation, hopes to make Terrabon’s vision of producing gasoline from waste a viable green alternative fuel within about two years.
Terrabon, unlike ethanol producers, will make its fuel, called MixAlco, from sewage, human solid waste and organic food garbage, not food stock. And it’s output will be a virtual chemical match (but at a higher octane) for the stuff that’s already powering your car or truck, not a gasoline additive. This key difference means that the Terrabon fuel can be added directly to the existing gasoline fuel stream, a convenience that the company is promoting as an easy, green way to reduce US reliance on foreign oil.
Restaurants looking to green their operations by generating some of their own electrical power are finding it easier as vendor companies try to fill in the gaps.
Owl Power Company, for instance, has developed a way for restaurants to more conveniently use vegetable oil as fuel. Owl’s Vegawatt is a combined heating and power system that runs on vegetable oil and can be connected to existing heating and power systems to be used as supplemental green energy.
Everyone knows that cooking oil can be used as a source of fuel, but most folks think of that as something only done by hardcore do-it-yourselfers willing to tinker forever in the garage. If Owl Power Company has its way, that image is going to change, starting in commercial kitchens across America.
An expectation met is rare enough. An expectation surpassed is a culturally appropriate winter solstice celebration miracle.
So imagine my surprise and delight when reading the miles per gallon readout on the trip computer of the 2009 Jetta TDI during a recent holiday drive over the river and through the woods. The display reads: 43.7 mpg. That’s significantly above the Environmental Protection Agency estimate of 40 mpg in highway driving.
And we weren’t doing any of that 55 mph, coast-down-hills, hyper-miler sort of driving. We were zipping along at 70 mph or so, singing loudly along with the Christmas tunes provided by the satellite radio.
That sort of fuel economy apparently isn’t a fluke. Volkswagen hired a third party, automotive evaluation company AMCI, to test the real-world fuel economy of the Jetta TDI and found it performed 24 percent better than EPA estimates, getting 38 mpg in the city and 44 mpg on the highway.
Biomass technology promises what few other alternative fuel schemes can: energy from waste. Given the controversial use of corn (and other food crops) for biofuel, which is turning out to be less of a greenhouse gas saver than once thought, waste is looking pretty attractive.
A new plant in Central Texas, dedicated last week, promises to take sewage waste, organic garbage, grass clippings and manure, and convert them into gasoline.
Initially the plant, designed as a large-scale demonstration project, will use forage sorghum as its base material. Forage sorghum, unlike other varieties grown to produce sorghum seed for food products, does not steal directly from the human food chain. It is used as feed for cattle, but even so, it’s more renewable than corn because about twice as much (5-7 tons) can be grown per acre.
While biofuel proponents struggle with concerns that some of their favored technologies — like those turning corn into car fuel — literally take food out of the mouths of the poor in pursuit of fossil-fuel independence, scientists are pursuing alternatives that not only won’t interfere with the global food supply, but actually clean up after it.
By Nima Kapadia
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Swedish Energy Agency (SEA) have extended their partnership with Volvo another three years to develop commercial trucks with greater fuel efficiency. The partnership is an extension of a one-year agreement signed by the three groups in June 2007, with the overall objective of creating [...]
Terrabon, unlike ethanol producers, will make its fuel, called MixAlco, from sewage, human solid waste and organic food garbage, not food stock. And it’s output will be a virtual chemical match (but at a higher octane) for the stuff that’s already powering your car or truck, not a gasoline additive. This key difference means that the Terrabon fuel can be added directly to the existing gasoline fuel stream, a convenience that the company is promoting as an easy, green way to reduce US reliance on foreign oil.
