The difference between natural gas and other traditional fossil fuel automotives is that it takes on a gaseous form that is 90% (methane CH₄), while what we tend to call gasoline is a part of the fossil decay that takes on a liquid form.

While some of the practical engine systems, fuel storage and exhaust are modified; natural gas also has a higher octane rating than other forms of fuel.

The environmentalist in everyone, likes and needs a cleaner burning fuel, and this is the type of fuel that natural gas provides.

For as little as five hundred to fifteen hundred dollars, the car owner can buy a gauge to hook up to their own natural gas service at home.

A Compressed Natural Gas Car Video – Why not do it yourself?

This can result in less need to go to the gas station, and eliminate little bills or searching your car for change to fill the tank, or in other cases, just cut down on the hassle of running a credit card or debit card every time a fill up is necessary. And at the gas station pump it costs less than regular gasoline.

In California NGV drivers can get a pass to drive in the car pool (High Occupancy Vehicle-HOV) lane while driving alone. The U.S. Department of Energy has stated that less than 20% of all natural gas is imported. That department also states that most of those imports comes from Canada.

The antithesis is that natural gas vehicles do emit 30% more green house gases than their hybrid counter parts, in a comparison between Honda Civics, one that is a hybrid while the other is one of the few, if not the only new vehicle purchase option.

In the united states there are one hundred thirty thousand natural gas vehicles at present and most of these are fleet government vehicles, not commuter vehicles. Other countries such as Argentina and Brazil each have about a million natural gas vehicles on the road as of 2008.

Integrated Storage Systems contain compressed natural gas. The compressed natural gas (CNG) helps for more compact storage. The storage systems are cylinders that are reinforced.

This reinforcement is in the event that a crash may occur. The cylinders have an outer foam shell for this purpose as well. The compression of methane in these tanks is near to three thousand three hundred pounds per square inch.

The engine has a gauge that reduces pressure as the methane comes through and at the end of the process, the catalytic converter is designed to handle specifically methane.

There is more natural gas fossil fuel readily available than other liquid fossil fuels. This cuts down on oil dependence and the need for less environmentally friendly liquid fuel sources.

If you are looking for a natural gas vehicle, one of the places to start is www.economy.gov and to rent fleets of NGVs, one resource is Southern California Gas Company’s Natural Gas Vehicle Group at (213) 244-5681.

Most States have programs for natural gas vehicle drivers that allows them to use carpool lanes. One that is particularly promoted well on the Internet is for the state of California.

For more information about the state of California’s NGV solo driver High Occupancy Vehicle program, contact the California Natural Gas Vehicle Coalition Web page. These resources can also be found on SoCal Gas Companies web site http://www.socalgas.com/business/ngv/

By the process of fermentation and distillation of the sugars and starches that come from sugar cane, fruits,sorghum, corn stalks as well as ear tips, willow trees, myscanthus, canary grass, cord grasses, Jerusalem artichoke, wheat, and other less noted vegetable wastes, all produce ethanol.

Because the use of plant sugar fermentation is so sustainable, the demand for ethanol is expected to expand.

According to Freedonia (a research firm), the demand for biofuel will increase approximately twenty percent in the next four years, and the biggest part of this increase, will come from bio-ethanol.

Ethanol provides high octane (C₈H₁₈). It takes the place of lead as an octane stimulate. Its common names are ethyl alcohol, grain alcohol, hydroxy ethane, ethyl hydrate, or drinking alcohol, EtOH, (C₂ H₅), (C₂ H₅ OH), and Et.

Ethonal is found in alcohol beverages and thermometers, it is easily renewable and is colorless.

Bioethanol is the main fuel used instead of standard gasoline used in driving cars and the demand is so high that there are plans for using municipal waste systems as a methanol resource.

Ethanol’s oxygen content is high and reduces carbon monoxide more than any oxygenate: by twenty five to thirty percent according to the US EPA.

“Estimating the Net Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol”, by Hosein Shapouri et al., US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Office of Energy and New Uses, Agricultural Economic Report No. 721, July 1995

“Studies conducted since the late 1970s have estimated the net energy value of corn ethanol. However, variations in data and assumptions used among the studies have resulted in a wide range of estimates. This study identifies the factors causing this wide variation and develops a more consistent estimate… We show that corn ethanol is energy efficient as indicated by an energy ratio of 1.24.”

Corn Ethanol is estimated to be fifty-five thousand BTUs above the nearest hot burning ethanol according to the same research.

States: IL, IA, IN, NE, MN, OH, MI, WI, and SD (Ali and McBride). Are the 9 states that produce eighty-two to ninety-three percent of U.S. corn ethanol production.

Research has shown that corn ethanol has less waste than other sources of larger scale ethanol production.

When co-product energy credits are added to the calculations, the NEV of corn ethanol is positive regardless of the type of milling used. Dry-milling results in the highest NEV, 19,290 Btu, but wet-milling NEV differs by only 4,989 Btu per gallon. The NEV for weighted average case is 16,193 Btu per gallon. According to Shapouri, Duffield, and Graboski.

All types of ethanol benefit everyone. They serve the often out of balance purposes of mankind, and save the environment at the same time.

They create the least amount of low ground ozone. A fact that can be verified by the research of Shapouri, Duffield and Graboski.

The future is when all used car lots are filled with alternate energy vehicles. The idea inspires the imagination. In the minds eye one can see people distilling their own ethanol as easily as they garden. And it could be just another one of the joys of gardening.

Source: World Biofuels (March 2008,
364 pages), The Freedonia Group Inc., 767
Beta Drive, Cleveland, Ohio 44143.
Web site: www.freedoniagroup.com
As cited in the Futurist, Jul/Aug2008, Vol. 42 Issue 4, p2-2, 0p

http://www.ethanol-gec.org/corn_eth.htm

Contributed by David Allison

So far, only scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., have been able to effectively transplant a genome from one species and insert it into another and getting it to reproduce the donor species with desirable surface qualities from the host species from the available proteins of the recipient cell.

And this is in a totally different area from biodiesel production; they were messing around with some nasty critters that make cows and sheep sick. Essentially though, what they have done is make leaps in their field of research, synthetic genomics.

The basic desire for those in the field of synthetic genomics is to produce a modification on pre-existing life forms with the intention of producing either a desired product or behavior in the newly created life form, without being limited to naturally occurring genes, but also being able to custom design their own base pair series.

This experiment is a breakthrough in synthetic genomics because the proteins available from the recipient were enough to feed reproduction; if foreign proteins had been necessary it would have really made a barrier for this field of research.

High productivity and high lipid content are the desirable traits in biodiesel production and efforts in this direction have been analyzed using mutagenesis or genetic engineering by manipulating algal biosynthetic pathways to produce strains with higher lipid levels.

One interesting possibility for higher productivity and higher lipid content would be in the field of genetic modification where key genes are introduced or repressed to regulate lipid synthesis, this had some study done with research that performed a series of experiments that looked to understand what was required to produce mutants in microalgae. Lack of knowledge in microbiology always made it harder to fund those kinds of experiments back in the 1980s and especially the 1990s.

The whole trend into synthetic genomics is that it would make things a lot more energetically efficient; allowing the new organism to just do the job it was designed to do, like acomputer or a synthetic chemical.

In this case, get fat and reproduce heavily on what little sunlight or resources are available, without any competition from other organisms, yes a controlled environment would be best for this new form of supercharged algae for strictly biodiesel production!

In nature, things have occurred over aeons that have naturally selected existing micro-algae to thrive and coexist in this perfect ecosystem that is our planet, and a lot of their genomes are geared just to help them survive out there in the wild, but why would a future biofuel need to survive in the wild?

Too much energy goes into those complicated genomic structures that Mother Nature engineered, and synthetic genomics looks to create new creatures to do a certain, exact and useful job. For example: producing highly productive micro-algae with lipid contents that double artificial yields compared to those available straight out of Natures womb?

That is only wishful thinking, but nowhere near impossible with current technological advances such as genome transplants. What if they used the new field of synthetic genomics to strategically build a genome that was ideal to the production of biofuel and inserted it into an existing ideal microalgal strain?

Well, it might surely take more than 150,000 attempts, but for those who know biodiesel, microalgae seems to already be the most economic way to produce biodiesel from what Mother Nature put here on Earth, something like 60% oil in some cases, what if they made one that was 90% oil and twice as productive?

Well, that is enough speculation for today, but has the discovery of the genome transplant furthered scientific inquiry? Absolutely yes! Now, could we turn this into something useful with micro-algae strictly for biofuel production? Only proper funding and interdisciplinary dialogue between these two distinct types of engineers will harness an experiment in that direction.

News:
Bacteria genome switch-a-roo
DNA Synthesis Method Yields 15-kb Gene Cluster

Prvious Article:
Biodiesel from Algae

LPP Gas also frees industries from the tie-ups involved in dependency on only one energy source; such as natural gas, which has been getting more and more expensive as demand grows and supply does not.

LPP Gas is a self-contained hardware skid that allows for rapid switching between liquid fuels and natural gas by providing operation on liquid fuels, transforming them into something that any standard, natural gas turbine can use.

This process can be safely located near any existing storage tanks, and the hardware skid itself is a unique fuel vaporizing design developed by LPP Combustion, LCC with conventional compressors, heat exchangers, valves, piping, control hardware, and passive air separation membranes readily available in the market today.

In this way, concerned industries that have already switched to biofuels or even still find themselves facing skyrocketing foreign oil prices, will find LPP Gas will eliminate any significant penalty from the governments overbearing green emissions policies through potent synthetic natural gas that gets the most out of your dollar.

Set industries free of overbearing green emissions policies.

News:
Innovation Opens Up New Markets For Biodiesel – Industry Week Article

Media:
LPP Combustion System – Printable Adobe PDF file

BioFuel and ethanol can be produced right here at home within the continental United States, and if we use our knowledge of current technologies to their limit, we could potentially provide enough energy resources thatan abundance would exist and not just for the US.

The BioFuels Security Act simply motivates automakers to increase their production of flex-fuel vehicles (FFVs) while increasing simultaneously the number of filling stations that offer biofuels such as E85 (increasing the Renewable Fuels Standard to 60 billion gallons of ethanol and biodiesel by 2030) and facilitating laws that stimulate alternative methods of raising fuel crops such as corn, soy and saltwater algae ponds in the desert.

The conventional fuel crops already in production could potentially in the future help nourish the third world or be consumed locally without being endangered from other more sustainablecrops such as algae ponds that could easily take care of our current sewage and wastewater management issues.

If we find ourselves solving biodiesel and ethanol production with saltwater algae ponds that feed off of sewage for example; cleaning steams and lakes of pollution, replenishing the aquifer, and immediately cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions would all be just a few of the beneficial side effects.

We might find ourselves saving the Ozone from extinction, the environment from destruction and maybe even end up saving the planet from the threat of unrepairable ecological footprints.

One thing leads to another, and the moment our society gets a discussion like sustainability into the mainstream and political debate with thirty-second media bites; it becomes a reality for everyone immediately.

Being an eco-warrior has been a romantic concept for decades now, but with the BioFuels Security Act, more and more people may find themselves adhering to the ranks of Mother Gaia in an all out war to save the earth literally.

Systems Theorists might have a lot to say on that, especially after movies like MindWalk (Capra 1990) start being rerun all so coincidentally on late night public TV, some 17 years after its first release.

This might be a brainy subject for some, but it is really simple and easy to grasp, it all boils down to one simple factor; the people of our republic want to be independent as a nation, as an economy and mostly as a culture that does-it-ourselves.

If there is one aspect of our culture that has been clear since the days of our revolution, Americans want the independence of self-reliance, not depend on other countries.

It doesnt matter if its King George with tea or some Arabian nation with oil, our people want these things made in the USA!

And the solutions keep coming up as alternative energy sources that are renewable with sustainable practices that talk of stewardship and sustainability for today.

BioFuels Security Act is just one step in the direction of self-reliance and sustainability, not the whole, but it is a beginning, one that is sure to change the future of our nation for the children of our children.

BioFuels Security Act hints at a tomorrow filled with hope.

This joint venture into the realm of Asian Biofuel is sure to open the already expanding world market of biofuels.

Clean energy for everyone.

“We are very proud to be part of NewGen Technologies. NewGen aims to be the most vertically integrated company in the emerging biofuels industry, and we have the necessary ingredients to support that mission at an upstream level. This venture with NewGen is very strategic in every aspect.”

Patrick Tan (NBAs CEO) 

The NewGen expansion into Asia, will help evolve the world of biofuel on as well as off the continent.

NewGen Biofuel Asia will operate planned biodiesel plants, focus on the development and implementation of shipping, logistics, feedstock strategies for both local and global raw material requirements as well as develop vertical integration strategies.

Research & Development of both by-products and finished products will also be part of their strategy.

Meanwhile, NewGen Biofuel Asia is also looking to conduct various feedstocks, cultivate additional biofuel markets in Asia, identify opportunities for the strategic development of quality networks that support the region in a sustainable way, on a long-term basis.

NewGen Biofuel Asia is beginning the sustainable biodiesel future of one of the wealthiest agricultural regions of the world…NewGen Biofuel is helping China, and in the process, helping our country see that the light of human co-operation; sees no boarders.

NewGen Technologies
6000 Fairview Rd., 12th Floor
12th Floor Charlotte, NC 28210

Kitchen oil and other used items from the city of Pittsboro will go into developing a cheaper and more viable alternative for diesel engines, beginning with Piedmont Biofuels Grand Opening on the 25th of September.

Thursday, production will begin, and state leaders are already beginning to support the efforts through incentives to lower cost and dialogue around biofuel for sustainable practices.

Piedmont Biofuels are going for a sustainable America that no longer depends on foreign oil.