A school in the United States recently decided to cut short its power bills and came up with a smart strategy to do the same. The Hotchkiss School replaced its oil-burning boiler with woodchip biomass ones, subsequently reducing its energy bills as well as the carbon footprint. The effort reduced the carbon footprint of the school by a sweet 45%. The building also now sports a green-roof, making it an LEED-certified facility.
Always at the cutting edge of car design, German car manufacturers, Audi, have now announced plans to produce e-gas – a fuel made out of solar power, wind power and captured CO2 (which is carbon free). Audi are currently building a huge synthetic natural gas plant, from where they will conduct research to prove that this will be an efficient, effective and economically viable product. They plan to produce the fuel like this: wind turbines will generate electricity, which will produce hydrogen by electrolysis. This will then be combined with the CO2 captured from the atmosphere – their plant can capture almost 3,000 metric tons every year – to produce methane, or as Audi call it: e-gas. Sounds simple, right? Let’s see if Audi can pull it off!
Power generators have never been powered with urine before. Icky as it may sound, the concept could work as a win-win situation, helping users efficiently put away human waste and generate electricity in a green way. Keeping that in mind, four young whiz-kids, Duro-Aina Adebola, Akindele Abiola, Bello Eniola and Faleke Oluwatoyi, all in their early teens, have come up with a one-of-a-kind power generator that works on urine!
Saudi Arabia, the land of oil, has realized the need for cleaner and greener energy. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has recently announced its intentions of going 100% renewable energy in the foreseeable future. According to an official statement by Prince Turki Al Faisal Al Saud, the Arab state will strive hard to go green as a leaf. Currently, Saudi Arabia relies completely on oil to power up with just one thirds of its energy requirements met with natural gas.
Toilets have never amounted to more than places to answer nature’s beckoning before. However, a bunch of scientists thought differently, and have come up with a super eco-friendly toile t that not only uses 90% less water than the conventional but also generates energy! Developed by the brains at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, the No-Mix Vacuum Toilet separates solid and liquid waste and uses vacuum to flush it all along with 1 or 0.2 liters of water for solid and liquid waste respectively. Once separated and flushed away, the liquid waste can then be used to source ingredients for fertilizers including nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus while the solid waste can be used to harvest methane which in turn can be used to generate power!
The world’s slowly bidding farewell to fossil fuels, in a bid to use cleaner and greener fuels, that don’t punch those devastating holes in our environment. Now, the Department of Biology & Biochemistry study has a new-found interest in algae growing in Roman Baths that can be used to produce biodiesel by extracting oil from algae cells. Growing algae as such could help boost the wide-scale production of biofuels, which could soon turn into the next best way to power up our lives in future.
No-one probably thought of mixing up a bit of water, sunlight and carbon dioxide to make fuel before, until now. Joule Unlimited has come up with concept that has received Patent No. 7,794,969 recently. The firm developed an engineered form of cynobacteria, blue – green algae basically, growing in water that secretes biodiesel fuel, all with the help of waste carbon dioxide and water. According to Joule, this can be done in glass bioreactors, to produce biodiesel directly. Using two enzymes with cyanobacteria, the process creates an organism that can create hydrocarbons or chemicals. The system for now is being tested to create diesel and ethanol.
Drinking and driving certainly isn’t encouraged, though a bit of alcohol in your car’s fuel tank seems just ideal. Well, at least that’s what the guys at Edinburgh Napier University’s Biofuel Research Center think. Researchers have come up with butanol biofuel from whiskey by-products. And if you just love your scotch on the rocks and worry that too much whiskey will be wasted for cars, you really need to think again! The researches haven’t actually been pouring bottles of whiskey into fuel tanks. What they’ve been doing instead, is using by-products of whiskey, including pot ale, a fluid coming from distillery equipment, left over grains, and is made in a process that the World Wars used to make explosives.
Though biofuels are an acceptable alternative to conventional fossil fuels, their production is not commercialized on a large scale due to various problems associated with them such as disposal of the waste generated. Joule Biotechnologies has invented a new concept in making biofuels which provides all the benefits of biofuels without their problems. This method uses “solar walls” which capture photons from the light and provide them to the proprietary micro organisms. These micro organisms are specially modified by the company so that they use the energy available from photosynthesis to make fuels rather than growing themselves. This method uses a technique called ‘helioculture’ which integrates the photons with available CO2 and water. And that’s not all, this technique can even use impure water and it does not generate any waste.
The kitchen is where most household wastes are produced. These need to be disposed smartly and in a proper way. Designers Victor Massip and Laurent Lebot of Faltazi have designed a conceptual system where water is recycled and waste is broken down by worms inside the kitchen itself.