Green gasoline: oxymoron or the future?

Gasoline is everyone's idea of the anti-biofuel—the stuff we're trying to get away from. Is it even conceivable to think of gas as green?

Well, sure, if it doesn't come from oil or coal, and particularly if it comes from a renewable source.

(Image: University of Wisconsin student Edward Kunkes in the lab used to convert sugars into liquid fuels. Credit: Jim Dumesic, University of Wisconsin.)

What if you make it out of sugar cane? Better yet, what if you can make it out of non-edible sugars in agricultural waste and non-food plants?

Everybody knows you can efficiently make alcohol out of sugar, and create either rum or a fuel that can run an engine. Not everybody likes using ethanol fuel, and it does have its unique set of issues. Now new research has developed a way to make gasoline out of sugars.

Two independent groups using different approaches came up with the discovery.

“Sugars and carbohydrates can be processed like petroleum into the full suite of products that drive the fuel, pharmaceutical and chemical industries,” says the National Science Foundation press release on the work.

The independent teams, both working in Madison, Wisconsin, were Randy Cortright and associates at Virent Energy Systems, and James Dumesic at the University of Wisconsin. Madison isn't that big a city, and these guys obviously know each other. Cortright used to be a student of Dumesic.

The techniques have been discussed since as early as 2006. They call the system aqueous phase reforming.

“In passing a watery slurry of plant-derived sugar and carbohydrates over a series of catalysts—materials that speed up reactions without sacrificing themselves in the process—carbon-rich organic molecules split apart into component elements that recombine to form many of the chemicals that are extracted from non-renewable petroleum,” the release says.

The process yields an oil that can readily be converted into gasoline. Being able to buy gasoline made from sugars from this process is still a few years off, but the scientific teams are sure they can get there.

Said Cortright: "Our scientists now have years of expertise with our BioForming process and are rapidly moving the technology to commercial scale. We are quickly working to put our renewable, green gasoline and other hydrocarbon biofuels in fuel tanks all over the world."

But isn't gasoline a fuel source of the past?

"Even when solar and wind, in addition to clean coal and nuclear, become highly developed, and cars become electric or plug-in hybrid, we will still need high energy-density gasoline, diesel and jet fuel for planes, trains, trucks, and boats," said John Regalbuto, director of the Catalysis and Biocatalysis Program at the National Science Foundation.

One of the interesting things about gasoline, Virent says, is that it spontaneously separates from water. Ethanol, by contrast, must be distilled to separate it from water, and that's an energy-intensive process.

Green gasoline is not by any means the only big advance going on in fuel science. Here's just one other.

Researchers at Penn State have found they can produce hydrogen through electrolysis using cheap stainless steel cathodes instead of ones made of expensive platinum. They get similar yields, and although it takes a little more steel than platinum, it's so much cheaper that it saves bundles.

"Stainless steel brush cathodes can produce hydrogen at rates and efficiencies similar to those we have achieved with platinum-catalyzed carbon cloth," says Bruce E. Logan, Kappe professor of environmental engineering.

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate

Does Ni'ihau fish kill cause still lurk?

Nearly two months after they were found, the thousands of dead fish on Ni'ihau's coast are still a mystery.

Fish have stopped dying, and health officials have told residents they can resume eating their nearshore marine life.

(Image: One of the species killed in the January 2009 Ni'ihau fish kill was the humuhumu 'ele'ele. This 1903 image from NOAA's historic fisheries collection is originally from "The Shore Fishes of the Hawaiian Islands, with a General Account of the Fish Fauna", by David Starr Jordan and Barton Warren Evermann. Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission)

But what killed the fish? Can it happen again? Is there some lurking threat? And what about the initial suspect, the use of rat poison on the neighboring islet of Lehua. Was that the culprit?

The answer to the last question, in short, is no. Something killed lots of fish near Ni'ihau, but it's extremely unlikely it was diphacinone, the rat bait that was aerially distributed on nearby Lehua Islet. More on this farther down.

Ni'ihau residents grew understandably concerned when thousands of dead fish washed ashore in January, and they made the logical connection to an aerial application of the rat poison diphacinone on nearby Lehua Islet a couple of weeks earlier.

After weeks of research, the Ni'ihau fish kill continues to baffle. But the research is continuing.

The first suspect was diphacinone, so here's the case on that. It was used nearby—Ni'ihau and Lehua are only half a mile apart—and the time of application, early January, was reasonably close to when large numbers of dead fish were seen, which was in the third week of January. But all the evidence thus far appears to show that diphacinone could not have been the culprit.

A key piece of evidence is a research project done just a year earlier on another steep-sided Hawaiian island, about the same size as Lehua, where precisely the same rat poison was distributed in the same way. The report by Robert W. Gale, Michael Tanner, and Carl E. Orazio is “Determination of Diphacinone in Sea Water, Vertebrates, Invertebrates, and Bait Pellet Formulations Following Aerial Broadcast on Mokapu Island, Molokai, Hawai’i.”

Within days after the broadcast of diphacinone at Mokapu, the researchers tested the water, they tested the fish, they tested the 'opihi clinging to the rocks on the side of the island. They also checked the water at Kalaupapa, which is downwind from Mokapu, as Niihau is (during tradewind weather) downwind from Lehua. Their result: “No detectable concentrations of diphacinone were found in the fish, limpets, or sea-water samples from Mokapu Island or from the reference sites.”

Diphacinone is a powerful anticoagulant. In big enough doses, it inhibits blood clotting, causing internal bleeding and death in target species. It is primarily used to control rodents, like rats, mice and voles, and can harm bats as well. These species are very susceptible to it in quite small doses. It is listed as slightly to moderately toxic in fish, although only freshwater fishes were tested.

We checked diphacinone at Extoxnet, a chemical toxicity site operated by a number of universities in the United States, and at NOAA's toxic chemical site, as well as a label for one of the diphacinone baits. Make no mistake, diphacinone in high enough concentrations is extremely toxic to humans. In its pure form, a teaspoon full is probably enough to kill a human.

Here are some pieces of the puzzle:

The baits are extremely dilute mixtures, with a fraction of a percent diphacinone in the bait pellets.

Diphacinone doesn't survive long in the marine environment. It decomposes quickly in water and sunlight.

The necropsies done on the Ni'ihau fish showed they had no detectable diphacinone.

There were no heavy rains during the period between the distribution of rat bait and the fish kill that would have caused rat bait to wash into the ocean.

And, for the entire period in question, winds and currents in the Lehua were flowing away from Niihau not toward it.

The dominant fish involved in the kill were two species of triggerfish, the humuhumu 'ele'ele and the humuhumu hi'ukole. Also located were a few gray chub, or nenue, and a blue-stripe snapper, ta'ape.

They were of different ages and sizes, and the deterioration suggested they had died at different times.

Some appeared to have distended swim bladders, and many had inflamed gills. Gill inflammation can come from parasites, viruses, use of toxic chemicals for fishing, bacteria and other things. It's not known from diphacinone.

Inflamed gills are a fairly common symptom in fish kills across the oceans, and their cause often remains mysterious—as in this case, where no cause could be readily identified.

State aquatic biologist Don Heacock, who collected dead fish samples on Ni'ihau, said the options are endless. It could be a natural event, a man-made event at sea, a man-made event on land that affected the marine coast.

The questions are endless, too. Why did it affect only a few species, not all of them related to each other? Why both young and old, large and small specimens? Why did it continue to kill over time rather than all at once? Why only Ni'ihau and not other islands? Why were most of the dead fish found at the uninhabited southern end of Ni'ihau? What factor links inflamed gills and distended swim bladders?

It's a classic mystery. Heacock said state and federal officials continue to work on it. They're looking desperately for the clue, the link, the thing that brings the evidence into focus.

“What is it we're not seeing here?” Heacock said.

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate

Hokule'a dreaming

Hokule'a is a quarter of the way to Palmyra, more or less, as this is written.

How many of the hundreds of former crew members went out to look at the stars since the departure and imagined what the crew was experiencing?

I did. Faced hema, found steering stars and put myself on board.

In the quiet night, riding the sweep, holding a star at a point in the rigging.

Keeping a backup steering star on the other side of the canoe, for when clouds obscured the first.

Feeling the wind.

Hearing whispered conversations, water moving against the hull, wind in the shrouds.

Bodies moving on deck in the moonlight, then disappearing into the lua, into their bunks, onto the aft trampolines.

Squalls rolling through, wet and cold.

But nobody on board would be anywhere else.

Nowhere else on Earth.

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate

Energy suckers abound, in both senses of the term

There's a sucker born every minute*, and when it comes to energy, it seems the sucker is us.

Society has breathed a collective sigh of relief and stopped worrying too much about the likelihood of high oil prices returning.

We've forgotten that the disruptive oil price peak most associate with the gas lines of the 1970s, actually lasted for a decade, from the mid-70s to the mid-80s.

And we've forgotten that while the most recent peak occurred last summer, the steady ramp-up of oil prices to nearly $150 a barrel went on for half a decade. Some folks are acting as if they figure prices will stay low.

Hybrid car sales are down by a third or more, according to the site hybridcar.com. Of course, all car sales are down, so that may not be the best measure.

Gasoline sales continue to stay comparatively modest, but nobody thinks that's because we're into conservation for conservation's sake. It's because of the rotten economy, says the Energy Information Administration. The EIA figures energy use will begin its rebound in 2010, and prices will start up before that.

“Our current forecast assumes that a recovery in global economic activity begins sometime in the second half of 2009. If this timing assumption proves to be correct, then world oil prices should begin to rise gradually later this year,” the EIA says in its March 11, 2009, “This Week in Petroleum.”

And while President Obama is still talking about energy issues (here and here and here), they are flagging at the Hawai'i State Legislature, according to Blue Planet Foundation's Jeff Mikulina.

“Moving the needle on Hawaii’s oil dependency will not happen this session unless legislators make significant amendments to measures before them. For most lawmakers, ‘supporting clean energy’ is an easy sound bite, but voting for effective policy to get it done is hard,” he said.

Blue Planet's goal is to move the world off its fossil fuel addiction.

Mikulina reports that the Legislature, in the language of bills now moving through the assembly, has weakened its stance on energy independence, energy efficiency and state energy security.

Bills to prohibit new fossil fuel power plants (HB 1464 and SB 1671) have been backed down.
Measures died that would have set Hawai'i's own automobile efficiency standards and to set standards for energy efficiency in homes and offices.

Mikulina said he has hope for bills that would establish higher standards for renewable energy generation. Blue Planet supports an oil surcharge of $5 a barrel (42 gallons in a barrel), with the money to be used for clean energy and efficiency programs.

“Blue Planet believes the low oil price today presents a perfect opportunity to tap the source of our energy problem to fund our solutions—and create good, local, high-paying jobs in the process. The current version of the bill doesn’t specify the amount of the new barrel surcharge,” Blue Planet's statement said.

Blue Planet is pushing for a new version of SB 1173, which it feels should create a system in which you could pay for energy efficiency improvements on your home through your electrric bill.

“By eliminating the up-front cost of energy efficiency investments, on-bill financing is one of the most powerful tools to increase adoption of smart energy technologies (such as solar water heating, photovoltaic, and efficient appliances),” Blue Planet said.

*(The “sucker born every minute” line is often attributed to circus man P.T. Barnum, but apparently was actually the quote of a great hoaxter, David Hannum, who had New York's Cardiff Giant carved, and them claimed it was a petrified human. Barnum, too smooth to publicly use a line that would make his customers seem stupid, out-maneuvered Hannum and cleaned up on the Giant scam.)

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate

Ocean plants stun researchers with alternative body-building technique

You may prefer to have a house built of wood, but if there's no wood around, you can use concrete or steel.

Turns out phytoplankton have similar options available to them.

(Image: Ocean researchers deploy a Conductivity, Temperature, Depth rosette to conduct inquiries into conditions on the ocean. Credit: Lance A. Fujieki.)

In a bit of groundbreaking research, teams of researchers have found that when their favored cellular wall building blocks are unavailable, microscopic ocean plants can build their cell walls out of replacement compounds.

The teams are from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of Southern California, University of Hawai'i, the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, University of Southern Maine, and the Centre d’Océanologie de Marseille.

Cell membranes are generally known to be built of a range of compounds, with a phosphorus-based oil compound known as phospholipid prominent among them. And it has been assumed that except in very rare exceptions, you need phospholipids to make cell membranes.

But what is a bit of phytoplankton to do in ocean areas starved of phosphorus? The Sargasso Sea is such an area, and it turns out that phytoplankton like cyanobacteria grow just fine there.

Their trick? They manufacture their cell membranes out of other compounds, notably sulfur.

It's interesting news in a world of climate change, in part because there is evidence that phosphorus may be disappearing from surface waters in parts of the world—including around Hawai'i—due to reduced mixing of nutrient-rich deep water with nutrient-deprived surface water.

Phytoplankton produce much of the world's oxygen, and need to do that near the surface, where there's sunshine to fuel the production. They do lots of other useful things, including suck carbon dioxide out of the atmposphere, and serve as a basic feature of the oceanic food web—with impacts on fisheries, among other things.

“Phosphorus is still measurable but is disappearing from the surface waters (near Hawai'i) at an alarming rate. One prediction from this initial study is that the phytoplankton in Hawaiian waters are likely to become more like those in the Sargasso Sea over time as phosphorus supplies dwindle further,” the University of Hawai'i said in a news release.

What's not clear is what effects such a change would have on all the ocean processes and species that are associated in some way with phytoplankton.

It's also not clear whether other forms of life have the same flexibility in building their cell membranes that phytoplankton have.

“To date, the ability to synthesize substitute lipids appears to be restricted to the phytoplankton; heterotrophic bacteria and other organisms must have a different strategy for survival, or none at all,” the University of Hawai'i release said.

Two Hawai'i researchers, Michael Rappé and David Karl of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology and UH’s new Center for Microbial Oceanography, are co-authors of the new research, published in the March 5, 2009, issue of the journal Nature.

The paper is “Phytoplankton in the ocean use non-phosphorus lipids in response to phosphorus scarcity,” by Benjamin A. S. Van Mooy, Helen F. Fredricks, Byron E. Pedler, Sonya T. Dyhrman, Karl, Michal Koblíek, Michael W. Lomas, Tracy J. Mincer, Lisa R. Moore, Thierry Moutin, Rappé and Eric A. Webb.

The University of Hawai'i School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology release is here.

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate