Hydrogen can be produced in a way that is carbon neutral by adding bacteria to forestry or household waste in a similar way to that used for biogas production. However, this process does not produce much hydrogen gas for the amount of biomass needed.

Now, researchers at Lund University in Sweden have found that a bacterium called Caldicellulosiruptor saccharolyticus, which was isolated in a hot spring in New Zealand, .produces twice as much hydrogen gas as the bacteria currently used. The discovery increase the possibilities of competitive biological production of hydrogen gas.

According to Karin Willquist, who is presenting a doctoral thesis on the research, "If hydrogen gas is produced from biomass, there is no addition of carbon dioxide because the carbon dioxide formed in the production is the same that is absorbed from the atmosphere by the plants being used. Bio-hydrogen gas will probably complement biogas in the future. A first step towards a hydrogen gas society could be to mix hydrogen gas with methane gas and use the existing methane gas infrastructure. Buses in Malmö, for example, drive on a mixture of hydrogen gas and methane gas."

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A sewage plant near Berlin has found that playing Mozart to its biomass-eating microbes makes them work harder. They expect that it will save the facility as much as €1,000 a month.

The waste-treatment facility in the town of Treuenbrietzen southwest of Berlin has been testing a special stereo system over the past two months after an Austrian waste treatment plant said that Mozart made their sewage-eating micro-organisms perform better, helping to cut costs.

The process was developed by Mundus, a small German firm in Wiesenburg in northeastern Germany.

According to Anton Stucki, a founder and managing partner of the firm, the sonic waves of Mozart’s compositions spur micro-organisms to a higher performance in breaking down biosolids. As a result, wastewater facilities can save energy costs and decrease the amount of residual sludge, which is expensive to dispose of.

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A Philippino engineer, Alexis Belonio, and a US physicist, Steve Garrett, have developed a stove which they believe could improve the health of poor people, combat a major global waste problem and develop a fast-track technology to counter global warming.

Scientists believe that “black carbon”, the soot from billions of domestic fires across the poorer regions of the world, contributes up to half the global warming potential of CO2.

Alexix Belonio is the inventor of the world’s most efficient gas cooker fuelled by waste rice husks. Steve Garrett invented the world’s first truly clean refrigerator, which is cooled using sound waves.

Belonio’s stove, which costs less than $US20, is fuelled by the waste husks discarded in rice-growing. It can save a poor family up to one-tenth of their income every year, as they no longer need to buy gas or kerosene for cooking. Because it burns cleanly, the stove is much healthier to use than a kerosene or wood stove.
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A research team from the Joint BioEnergy Institute and biotech firm LS9 have modified E. coli bacteria to produce biodiesel from plant sugars. The biodiesel can be transported in diesel pipelines and burned in standard diesel engines. It releases far fewer greenhouse gases than conventional fossil diesel.

E. coli was previously known to synthesize fatty acids, key ingredients in forming biofuels efficiently. But the bacterium normally manufactures only as many fatty acids as it needs to survive. The research team was able to manipulate an E. coli strain to create more fatty acids than the bacterium itself would need. When the E. coli interacted with sugar cane, it fermented the plant’s sugars and generated a surplus of fatty acids - producing biofuel straight from the biomass.

The project’s next step will be adapting the process for fibres other than sugar cane, expanding its potential feedstocks to grass or crop waste.

While other mathods of producing biodiesel require expensive chemical processes to convert biomass into fuel, the researchers believe that the use of bacteria has the potential to produce biodiesel at competitive prices within two years.

Another team of researchers, from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, have developed a different way of tusing bacteria to make biofuel in a reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight.

The team has genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the isobutanol. Isobutanol holds great potential as a gasoline alternative.

The researchers genetically engineered a strain cyanobacterium (blue-green algae) that intakes carbon dioxide and sunlight and produces isobutyraldehyde gas. The low boiling point and high vapor pressure of the gas allows it to easily be stripped from the system. Inexpensive chemical catalysis are used to convert isobutyraldehyde gas to liqisobutanol,

Ideally, the new system would be installed next to an existing fossil fuel burning power plant. It would potentially consume the greenhouse gases emitted from the power plants and recycled them as liquid fuel.

(Based on sources including the journal Nature)

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American garbage-disposal giant, Waste Management, has partnered with InEnTec, an Oregon-based company, to begin commercializing
a plasma-gasification process which converts garbage into energy.

Plasma gasification technology has been in development and pilot testing for decades. Major pilot plants, capable of processing 1,000 tonnes or more of garbage daily, are under development in Florida, Louisiana and California.

In theory, the process is simple. Torches pass an electric current through a gas (often ordinary air) in a chamber to create a superheated plasma with a temperature above 7,000 degrees Celsius. The plasma’s tremendous heat dissociates the molecular bonds of any garbage placed inside the chamber, converting organic compounds into syngas (a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen) and trapping everything else in an inert vitreous solid, called slag. The syngas can be used as fuel in a turbine to generate electricity. It can also be used to create ethanol, methanol and biodiesel. The slag can be processed into materials suitable for use in construction.

In practice, gasification has been unable to compete economically with traditional municipal waste processing. But the cost has been coming down, while energy prices have been going up.

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Two engineers, Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York State, when studying the properties of different cultures of mushrooms, noticed that by manipulating the growth environment, they were able to shape the material’s strength, flexibility and temperature tolerance. This led to the development of a product which they called "Greensulate".

Greensulate is a renewable and biodegradable organic material that can be used for thermal insulation, fire insulation and as a substitute for the polystyrene used in packaging and many other applications. Polystyrene, on the other hand, is made from non-renewable petrochemicals; it is not biodegradable and takes up large amounts of landfill space where it can last for thousands of years.

Greensulate is made of very cheap agricultural by-products of rice, buckwheat and cotton seed. This is used as a base for the growth of a type of mushroom called pleurotus ostreatus. The mushroom’s mycelium (the mass of threadlike filaments from which the fruiting body of the mushroom grows) binds the agricultural by-products together. The whole is put into moulds in a dark environment and left to grow for up to two weeks. When it has filled the mould, its is dried to prevent further growth and avoid moss or fungus allergy due to exposure to the product.

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Biochar Systems, a company in Pennsylvania, has developed a biochar-making machine that can be pulled on a trailer.

The unit, called the Biochar 1000, is designed to convert woody biomass, such as agricultural or forestry waste, into biochar. Biochar is a porous fine-grained charcoal that sequesters carbon in a form that can be used as a fertilizer. See our previous posts on biochar at www.greenbizcafe.com/?p=173 and www.greenbizcafe.com/?p=195.

The Biochar 1000, which is about 3.6 metres long, uses pyrolysis (slowly burning biomass in a low-oxygen chamber) to treat 450 kilograms of biomass per hour, yielding 110 kilograms of biochar. It is intended for landowners or other organizations that generate a lot of "green waste," such as agricultural producers, nurseries, or land managers. The biochar can be used on-site for soil improvement or moved or sold as a fertilizer.

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Researchers at the Lane Ag Center in Oklahoma have published a paper which recommends using waste watermelons as feedstock for biofuels.

About 20% of watermelons are not sent to market because of blemishes or unusual shapes.

The researchers concluded that watermelon juice would have to be concentrated 2.5 to 3 times if it was to be used as the sole biofuel feedstock, but watermelon juice could easily be used to dilute other feedstocks and provide a nitrogen supplement to them.

Watermelons are only one of a range of unusual feedstocks, including various vegetable oils, whey and even beer, now being used to produce bioenergy.

One company using farm waste to produce bioenergy is Gills Onions.

Gills Onions has farms throughout California which send their product to a packaging plant where they are skinned, sliced and diced. About 40% on the onion material is wasted.

Gills Onions is now using this waste product as the feedstock for generating electricity. The company invested $9 million to set up the system based on two fuel cells powered by methane from the onion waste but received more than $3 million in government incentives and is saving $700,000 a year in electricity costs and $400,000 a year in waste disposal costs.

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Researchers writing in the journal Science say that converting biomass to electricity which is used to power electric cars is far more efficient than growing plants to make bioethanol for fuel for cars.

They calculate that, compared to ethanol used for internal combustion engines, bioelectricity used for battery-powered vehicles would deliver an average of 80% more miles of transportation per acre of crops, while also providing double the greenhouse gas offsets to mitigate climate change.

The researchers performed a life-cycle analysis of both bioelectricity and ethanol technologies, taking into account not only the energy produced by each technology but also the energy consumed in producing the vehicles and fuels, Bioelectricity was the clear winner in the transportation-miles-per-acre comparison, regardless of whether the energy was produced from corn or from switchgrass, a cellulose-based energy crop. Click here to read the rest of this entry.

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First beer went green, now it’s scotch whisky’s turn.

Scottish authorities have given planning permission for a consortium of distillers to build a biomass-fueled combined heat and power plant for the whisky industry in Speyside. Helius Energy Plc and the Combination of Rothes Distillers Ltd will build the plant, which will use distillery by-products and wood chips to generate 7.2 megawatts of electricity.

The Combination of Rothes Distillers includes the producers of The Famous Grouse, Cutty Sark, Chivas Regal, Glen Grant, Hankey Bannister, BenRiach and J&B whiskies.

The solid grain waste, called "daff", which is removed from the still prior to fermentation of the liquor, will be used as biomass for producing heat and power. Surplus electricity may be fed into the national grid.

The project will also turn pot ale - the high-protein liquid residue from the still - into concentrated organic fertilizer and animal feed for local farmers.

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