How Deep-Fried Food Can Reduce Our Fossil Fuel Addiction

You’d expect that oils from McDonald’s deep-fryer traps, fat from slaughtered pigs and cattle and the grease caught in city sewer traps would be pretty much useless, right? But two researchers are investigating how to recycle all those leftover oils and fats into biodiesel motor fuel, an alternative that can reduce our dependence on oil.
After a decade in the lab, two Minnesota chemical engineers are designing a plant that will convert yellow and brown grease into fuel. With so many experiments, they’ve found a way that’s cheaper and more energy-efficient than the alternatives, like soybean-based biodiesel. Kirk Cobb and Joe Valdespino, the brains behind Superior Process Technologies, a little-known chemical company in Minneapolis, will soon have their ideas put into practice at a full-scale refinery near downtown Los Angeles that can churn out 20 million gallons of biodiesel annually.
“Our process is superior to the traditional method,” Valdespino tells the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “It saves energy. It increases yield. It enables you to use cheaper feedstocks,” he says, referring to the raw material inputted to machines.
Biodiesel took off after major environmental legislation in 2005 and 2007 and a farm bill in 2008 that contained several incentives. At the last count by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the country has roughly 100 producers, with most output clustered in the Midwestern states of Texas, Iowa, Missouri and Illinois. Most of them rely on soybean, canola and corn oils for their raw material — about 2.2 billion pounds worth just in the first half of this year. Animal fats (403 million pounds) and other recycled grease (535 million pounds), on the other hand, lag behind in the industry.
Cobb and Valdespino are hoping greater efficiency will change that. The pair became friends fifteen years ago while working for a paper company in Savannah, Ga., where they converted resin from the pulp of pine trees into profitable adhesives, plastics and inks. After 24 years on the job, Cobb left to work on biodiesel at Superior Process Technologies in 2004 and hired Valdespino in 2007.
Since then, they’ve been laying the groundwork for a tactic that diverges from the rest of the field. Other refiners add sulfuric acid to remove fat, but that reaction creates water which contaminates other key compounds like methanol and must be removed — a “really messy” and “very limited” business, Valdespino says. Their company adds glycerol at around 450 degrees, enough heat to evaporate the water and skip the extra step of eliminating impurities.
“People misconstrue higher temperatures with higher energy use,” says Cobb. “That is not the case.” Cobb says the plant will be able to do the job better — using six times less energy than the standard method — and provide diesel to large customers like airliners and the Navy at lower prices.
Almost all the industry’s innovation had been fueled by hefty support from the federal government, but most of those tax credits, loans and grants recently expired. Cobb and Valdespino are hoping the incentives return, so that for once, greasy fat can actually do something good for America.

The Significance of a Classic Toy Severing Ties with Big Oil

From a Star Wars Death Star to Cinderella’s castle and every wonderful creation in between, LEGO’s colorful blocks offer endless possibilities. Brick by brick, these tiny toys inspire the imaginations of future architects, engineers, scientists and other problem solvers who want to build and shape the world for the better.
That’s why it’s so important that the beloved toymaker has recently decided to end its 50-year-long partnership with Shell following a viral Greenpeace campaign that targeted the oil company’s plan to drill the Arctic coast of Alaska.
Earlier this summer, the international environmental organization released an emotional video where our favorite plastic bricks and little yellow faces drown in slick black crude as a gut-wrenching rendition of “The LEGO Movie” theme song “Everything is Awesome” plays in the background. The message is this: “Shell is polluting our kids’ imaginations. Tell LEGO to end its partnership with Shell.”
Since its release, the video has chalked up nearly 6 million views, sparking protests around the world and garnering nearly 1 million petition signatures to stop LEGO from associating with a company that’s planning to exploit the polar region for more oil.
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Remarkably, Greenpeace’s campaign succeeded. Following public pressure, LEGO will no longer have Shell’s logo on its toys, and the toy company will stop distributing free sets at Shell’s gas stations around the world, according to Salon.
LEGO’s departure really matters, as James Turner, the Head of Arctic Communications for Greenpeace writes, “By placing its logo in thousands of playrooms around the world, Shell tried to insulate itself against anyone who claims that oil companies have no long term place in our society. Children who grow up with Shell toys are less likely to criticize the brand in later life, and are more inclined to believe the company when it claims that spills, fires and accidents are just the cost of doing business.”
Turner points out that while LEGO’s bricks are made from oil, the Danish company is currently searching for “alternative, non fossil based materials for its bricks in the coming years” and pledges “to use only renewable energy across all of its factories and offices.”
LEGO President and CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp says in a statement following his company’s breakup with Shell, “We are determined to leave a positive impact on society and the planet that children will inherit. Our unique contribution is through inspiring and developing children by delivering creative play experiences all over the world.”
Meanwhile, Shell is still gearing up to drill the Arctic (so maybe everything isn’t awesome quite yet). However, more and more companies are distancing themselves from Big Oil, as Salon notes. LEGO is following in a wider trend of large companies such as Google, Facebook and the Rockerfeller family in cutting ties with corporations that exploit fossil fuels or worsen climate change. This kind of corporate responsibility is absolutely tantamount to protecting our fragile environment, as well as a safer world for future generations.
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From a Tomato to a Taurus: Ford and Heinz’s New Partnership

This summer, millions of Americans will eat ketchup on hot dogs and hamburgers, and soon enough they’ll also travel in it. Sounds impossible, right? Maybe even a little gross?
Not to the people at Heinz and Ford.
Heinz uses over two million tons of tomatoes annually, according to CNET, leaving behind stems, seeds, and skin. To find a way to use this byproduct, the food company and the automaker have partnered to find ways to turn it into material used for wiring brackets, interior compartments, and other car parts.
Part of a larger effort to make an entirely plant-based plastic, the tomato car parts are just part of a much larger research project between Ford and Coca-Cola, Nike, and Proctor and Gamble, according to Fox Business. Through it, Ford hopes to be able to cut down on petrochemical use, instead using more renewable sources for vehicle components. The automaker already uses recycled cotton for seat cushioning, as well as rice hulls to make internal pieces, says PSFK. Cup holders constructed of tomato parts would just continue the America auto company’s strong sustainability efforts.
Now don’t go thinking that cars made with tomatoes are going to smell like marinara sauce. Because Heinz’s leftovers will be transformed into a plastic-like material, you luckily won’t have to see, smell, or feel that you’re riding in a car constructed of tomato parts.
The two companies have even come up with a new, clever catchphrase for this innovation: “You Say Tomato; We Say Tom-Auto.”

Is Crowdfunding the New Way to Pay for Important Scientific Studies?

Even if you don’t know much about fracking (the process through which oil and gas companies pump water, sand, and chemicals into the ground to release oil or natural gas), you probably know that, politically-speaking, it’s a controversial topic.
Many people who live close to fracking operations fear that the process or its byproducts could harm them or the environment. But because of its polarizing nature, it’s difficult to land funding for non-biased scientific research on fracking.
Studies funded by industry groups have (of course) found no potential harm to humans from the practice. Citizens of several Colorado towns are skeptical, however, and have passed bans on fracking within their communities’ borders that may or may not hold up in court.
Nelson Harvey writes for High Country News that “the government’s own research on fracking is coming under fire from both sides of the political spectrum,” with the EPA recently responding to criticism by backing away from results of a 2011 study that found fracking to be the cause of the pollution of an aquifer in Wyoming. The state of Wyoming will continue the study, but it will now be funded by EnCana, the oil company responsible for fracking in the area.
Outside of industry-sponsored research, there’s little funding available to study fracking as federal grants for such studies have been slashed. So this year, at least four scientists have turned to crowdfunding to finance their research.
Dr. Susan Nagel of the University of Missouri is currently seeking to raise $25,000 through Experiment.com for her study: “Does fracking contaminate water with hormone disrupting chemicals?” She’s already gained $19,000 in backing, so apparently many people have the same question.
Harvey notes that, so far this year, University of Washington researchers successfully raised $12,000 through Experiment.com to study fracking’s effects on air pollution in Utah and scientists from Juniata College collected $10,000 through crowdfunding to research fracking’s impacts on streams in Pennsylvania. However, one fracking study proposed by a University of Colorado biologist failed to garner the necessary backers.
When a combination of budget cuts and political pressure makes it hard to study a certain topic, perhaps seeking donations from the questioning public is the best way to find answers to some of science’s most pressing questions.
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North Dakota on Fire: One Man’s Quest to Turn Wasted Gas Into Power

In a quiet corner of North Dakota, farmers Wanda and Frank Leppell gaze out their front window at an oil well that sits 750 feet from their house. Above the hypnotic bobbing of the oil well head, they watch a flare that’s burning off natural gas into the atmosphere. “It sounds like a blowtorch,” says Wanda, who’s been pushing state legislators to set oil wells farther from homes. “When you go to bed tonight, put a blowtorch in your bedroom, crank it up, and see how well you sleep.”
They’re not the only ones up at night. In North Dakota’s oil country, a region that’s seen a 600 percent increase in oil production in the last five years, drivers can see dozens of flares from the highway after dark, some burning 20 feet into the air, releasing excess natural gas from the oil rigs. A satellite image of the United States at night shows rural North Dakota lit up like a city. The state is, quite literally, on fire.
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And the flames won’t go out anytime soon. Ever since oil companies figured out they could tap the 170 billion barrels of crude oil underground with the new technology known as fracking, they’ve been digging wells as fast as they can, producing a modern-day black gold rush. The boom, which began in 2007, has attracted thousands of workers, lured by word that 22-year-olds with no previous job experience to speak of were suddenly raking in $100,000 a year. Temporary camps were hastily assembled to house the newcomers. As the rest of the country wrestled with recession, North Dakota’s unemployment rate dropped to 3 percent—the lowest in the nation. The cost of living shot up. Crime soared. But as long as the ground keeps gushing, there’s no incentive to slow down. Today, there are more than 8,800 active wells in the state, producing 783,000 barrels of oil a day. Local officials estimate they’ll drill 42,000 more wells in coming years, and there could be a roaring natural gas flare on every one.
The problem is, the drilling releases thousands of cubic feet of natural gas. Oil companies burn off one-third of the natural gas they’re extracting, according to a recent study—which in May 2013 amounted to over 266,000 thousand cubic feet spewing into the air every day, a number that has nearly tripled since 2011. (In comparison, Texas flares less than 1 percent of its natural gas.) By failing to capture the gas, companies in North Dakota are essentially burning away more than $100 million every month. The state’s boom has happened so quickly, companies simply haven’t had time to build the pipelines needed to capture the gas. The flares carry toxins; they emit as much carbon dioxide as a million cars do every year. More than 60 types of pollutants have been identified downwind from flaring operations—many of which are known to cause cancer and other diseases with prolonged exposure. The fact that oil’s market value is currently 30 times that of natural gas may have slowed the search for a solution.
But a native son may have found one—and figured out a way to convert the gas waste into power to heat homes and fuel factories.
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Mark Wald, born in Dickinson, N.D., had returned home to visit family at the dawn of the boom when he first began to ponder the problem. “You didn’t have to drive far to see flares everywhere,” he says. “Everybody looks at it and scratches their head, and I thought, there’s got to be a better way. What can we do with it?”
Like a lot of young men of his generation, Wald had left the state after graduating from college (North Dakota University, with degrees in aviation and business); there was little opportunity at the time. He liked to hunt pheasant and fish, but he wanted a career, and he craved the excitement of a big city. He eventually moved to Seattle, and spent 23 years in telecommunications. But the sight of the night flares lured him home.
Amazed at the amount of natural gas being wasted, he began brainstorming with his brother—equally new to the subject, after years in pharmaceutical sales. Nobody seemed to have the answer, so they left their jobs out west and moved back to start Blaise Energy in 2008. They hired an engineer and started talking to everyone they could. Wald applied for grants, and received $375,000 in state research funds in December 2009. An idea emerged: to use a mobile generator at each oil well site that could capture the natural gas, convert it to electricity and sell it back to the power grid. According to their calculations, each well could power about 40 homes this way.
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At a well, the drilling process brings up oil, frack water (the chemical- and sand-infused salt water used in the fracking process) and natural gas from the ground. A treatment device separates each of them, and the oil and water are sent to tanks that are trucked off site, while the gas is flared. Wald figured they could intercept the gas, run it through their customized generator, and deliver the electricity to the grid. To build the generator, they first looked at different types of turbines, but ultimately decided to go with a reciprocating engine piston, similar to a car, which was cheaper and more readily available than the alternatives. Soon he got the attention of the U.S. Department of Energy, and received a $2 million Recovery Act award. “We didn’t invent the engine,” says Wald, “but what didn’t exist was taking natural gas at a flare location and delivering it back to the grid.”
Wald’s next challenge was convincing oil companies to adopt the device. “They’d ask, ‘have you done this before?’ No. ‘Is it proven?’ No. ‘Call us back when you have multiple sites up.’ They didn’t want a science project on their $10 million well site,” says Wald. “It’s dangerous, and gas is explosive. But then we got one, then two, then three, and then it got easier.”
Two years into the project, he almost gave up. The equipment arrived at their first test site in January 2010—in the middle of North Dakota’s brutal winter. “It’s cold as hell, the wind is blowing, and we’re out in freezing North Dakota, and we couldn’t get the generator to run on the gas. We had to pay consultants and vendors to come out, and anyone that goes out in the middle of nowhere North Dakota to troubleshoot a problem is very expensive. We spent weeks in a motel trying to get people on the phone, but we had horrible cell phone coverage. I thought, why am I doing this?”
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Wald succeeded in connecting the generators to power lines and selling electricity back to the grid. But it wasn’t economically feasible. North Dakota has some of the lowest power prices in the country, about one-third of California’s—but they were not low enough to offset the cost of implementing and maintaining the generator. And there are no government subsidies for natural gas to tap into, as there are for other forms of energy, like solar and wind. So he stopped trying to sell to the grid to power homes, and began selling directly to oil companies and the local gas plant.
Currently, most drilling rigs are powered by diesel generators, which burn through about 10 gallons of diesel an hour, adding up to some $20,000 of diesel every month. With Wald’s generators, oil companies can eliminate that bill while reducing the size of the flare. He also figured out a way to separate the heavier natural gas elements like propane and butane from the lighter ones to liquidate the gas and truck it off site to be sold on the market. Wald now has 23 generators and 11 sites, and he’s working with an engineering firm to make a more efficient liquid gas converter.
Brent Brannan, director of the oil and gas research program at the North Dakota Industrial Commission, was involved in the decision to give Blaise Energy their initial $375,000 grant. He supported Wald’s idea because while other proposals were discussing building more pipelines, Wald was looking at capturing natural gas in remote areas where pipelines may never go. “[Wald] is now figuring out ways to be more economically feasible and capture the gas more efficiently. He’s been a good partner to have for the state.” After Wald’s idea was funded, Brannan’s seen applications from a number of companies with their own ideas to solve flaring, and the field has become more competitive—an ideal situation for more innovation to occur.
“Because there is so much flaring, it’s going to take new technology, new ideas and new methods to tackle the issue,” says Wald. “Rather than complain, let’s do something about it.”
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This Bizarre Bacteria Could Clean Up the Oil Business

What if some of the biggest problems in the oil industry could be solved by a tiny, nearly undetectable bacteria? That’s what University of Illinois scientists have suggested after discovering microbes called Halomonas that have been chowing down on their fuel-rich surroundings a mile underneath Illinois. The big issue with oil extraction is its major disturbance to the environment. Crude oil from the Illinois Basin’s porous sandstone is currently siphoned with steam or chemicals, a process that’s been harsh to the surroundings, UI researchers said.
But as the News-Gazette reports, this microbe can naturally break down oil without leaving any chemical byproducts, which would allow oil companies to easily scoop up sludge that’s normally too heavy to extract. “There’s great interest now in being able to harness the power of microbes to find oil and gas, to break down oil and gas in the subsurface and actually being able to refine it, and to be able to use the microbes that live down there to help us extract it,” said Bruce Fouke, UI professor of geology and microbiology and principal investigator on the study.
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The researchers have also found that this amazing bacteria — which thrives in complete darkness, extreme pressures and temperatures up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit — can turn toxic oil byproducts into less harmful substances. Varieties of Halomonas have even helped eat up the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and possibly the 2010 BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. (Fun fact: its fittingly named cousin, Halomonas titanicae, is currently gobbling up the Titanic.) Now that’s a bacteria we — and the oil industry — can get behind.

The Cars of the Future Might Be Powered By… Algae

Oil is going green — literally. Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have discovered a way to simplify the process of turning algae and water into crude oil. The process, called hydrothermal liquefaction, has long been touted as a viable way to produce more energy. In fact, most of the oil that’s drilled from the ground was formed by algae, compacted and heated over the course of millions of years until it transformed into petroleum. But now scientists have figured out how to quickly reproduce the process in the lab, converting algae into oil in less than an hour.
“It’s a way of mimicking what happens naturally over an unfathomable length of time,” says lead investigator Douglas C. Elliott. “We’re just doing it much, much faster.”
So how does it work? PNNL researchers mix 20% algae with 80% water, and send the mixture down a tube at 660 degrees Fahrenheit and 3,000 psi for 30 minutes. The pressure cooker breaks down the algae and converts it into oil. An added bonus is that the process yields byproducts, such as carbon dioxide, hydrogen and oxygen, which can be reused to generate more heat or fertilize the algae.
The same hydrothermal liquefaction process can also be used on other organic wastes, such as manure, sewage or compost, which could have big implications for recycling waste into energy all across the country. Researchers’ next challenge is figuring out how to make the process cheap. Algae-powered cars aren’t here yet, but they’re a bit closer thanks to this new innovation.
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San Francisco’s Aggressive Plan Could Abolish Carbon Emissions

The Bay Area recently passed a climate protection resolution that will slash carbon emissions in the region 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. If successful, the policy could dramatically change the city’s transportation landscape. According to Quartz, “The Bay Area has California’s most extensive public transportation system and its tech-savvy drivers have been earlier adopters of electric cars… But [in order to make this work] the [air district board] will also need to convert more of the region’s bus and truck fleet to carbon-free fuels and electrify diesel-powered ports.” Beyond getting more people in battery-powered cars and electric buses, the agency acts as an incubator for new technologies. “For instance, it’s helping to fund a pilot project to create an electric taxi service to link regional airports in San Francisco to the region’s cities,” according to Forbes. If these progressive measures to slash carbon emissions work in a car-centric city like San Francisco, the policy could serve as a model for the rest of the country.