Biofuels

• Renewable energy historians take note - Italian archaeologists have discovered evidence that ancient Cypriots used olive oil to fuel copper smelting furnaces, the earliest known use of vegetable oil as a fuel.

• The Watt notes that Philips is planning a pilot commercial launch of its new, highly-efficient wood stove in India this summer. The design utilizes a thermoelectric fan to burn at higher temperatures, increasing fuel efficiency by 80% and reducing hydrocarbon emissions by up to 99% compared to traditional three stone fires.

• Plans are underway to build the world's largest biodiesel plant in Claypool, Indiana. The biodiesel plant will be fully integrated with a soybean processing plant and will produce 80 million gallons of biodiesel a year - more than the 75 million gallons produced throughout the US in 2005.

• New ethanol projects are similarly growing larger and, increasingly, are funded by corporate investors, not local farmers, if these anecdotes coming from Minnesota are indicative. Rising oil prices and strong government support for ethanol production have made plants relatively solid investments for Wall Street, and the focus of the industry may be shifting away from the small farmer-owned facilities that were once at its center.

• More distressingly for environmentalists, Futurepundit notes that new ethanol plants in the US are beginning to be fueled by coal instead of natural gas due to high gas prices.

• The Pacific Northwest's Burgerville chain of fast food restaurants has announced plans for a new program that would recycle all the 39-location chain's restaurants' used cooking oil into biodiesel.

• Engineers at Virginia Tech have developed a pretreatment process for corn stover - the most abundant agricultural residue in the US - that could significantly reduce costs of cellulosic ethanol production (via Green Car Congress).

Fossil Fuels

• Honda and Climate Energy's home cogeneration system is currently undergoing its first US residential test in Massachussetts. The compact unit, is combined with a furnace or boiler system to simultaneously produce about 1 kW of electricity along with 3 kW of heat, increasing overall efficiency to nearly 85% as well as providing a source of distributed electricity that be used at home or sold back to the grid. See this post from the Engineer-Poet on the considerable potential benefits from residential cogeneration.

• Meanwhile, Honda is working with Plug Power to develop an innovative hydrogen-era home cogeneration system that would produce electricity, heat, and hydrogen fuel from natural gas.

• Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory are attempting to develop low-cost, high-volume, renewable feedstocks for carbon fiber composites for use as a lightweight replacement for steel in automobiles. Carbon fiber is just as strong as steel but only one-fifth the weight, offering the potential of cars 60 percent lighter and 30 percent more fuel efficient. Green Car Congress has more details, and a good discussion in the comments.

• A quarter-inch corrosion hole in a pipeline at Alaska's Prudhoe Bay oil field resulted in the spillage of an estimated 201,000 gallons of crude oil over 1.9 acres of tundra over the several days it went undetected - the largest oil spill in the history of Alaska's North Slope. US DOT personnel are in the process of investigating the pipelines, and have found that the pipeline was dangerously close to springing other holes, and that (pipeline operator) BP's leak-detection system had not been sufficiently rigorous. The pipeline will remain closed while cleanup is in progress, reducing North Slope oil production by nearly 100,000 barrels a day, or 12 percent of normal output.

• Chevron, who already owns 20% of the Athabasca oil sands project in Alberta, has acquired an additional 75,000 acres of land nearby which are expected to hold 7.5 billion barrels of heavy oil. The DOE's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy newsletter adds links on environmental concerns attending the development of Canada's oil sands, plus a Google Maps link to satellite photos of existing oil sands projects.

• A new report by US DOE claims that state of the art enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques could add 89 billion barrels or more to US reserves, and a potential 430 billion barrels in the long run with advances in technology and increased sequestration of carbon dioxide from industrial processes. Green Car Congress provides an in-depth summary here, and Econbrowser's James Hamilton takes a skeptical look.

• Shell and Norway's Statoil are developing the world's largest offshore EOR project at an 860 MW gas-fueled power plant and methanol production facility. Approximately 2-2.5 million tonnes of CO2 emissions from the plant will be captured every year and reinjected into the same offshore gas and oil fields that supply its fuel, increasing production from the field while reducing the greenhouse impact of the facility to near zero.

• The USGS has just completed the first in-depth survey of Afghanistan's petroleum resources, and discovered 18 times the oil and 3 times the gas resources previously estimated. The mean estimate of oil reserves has risen to 1.6 billion barrels, and the mean estimate of gas reserves to 16 TCF.

• A team of researchers at the University of Nottingham are attempting to reduce the costs of coal gasification plants by reducing the wear and tear on turbines caused by corrosive minerals in the coal. Their work, which could help make coal gasification plants a commercially viable technology, is focused on developing a low-cost, environmentally benign process using (and reusing) hydrofluoric acid to leach the minerals from the coal before gasification.

• By suspending nanoparticles in water and other liquids, researchers at the University of Leeds have developed 'nanofluids' that transfer heat 400% faster than their conventional counterparts. Among the doubtlessly numerous applications of this technology would be much more efficient home heating.

Geothermal

• The Geothermal Energy Association claims that several new projects are set to increase US geothermal capacity by up to 75 percent, adding 1.8-2.1 GW capacity to the 2.8 GW already online. The group credits this 'renaissance' in US geothermal power to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which extended the full production tax credit from just wind to include geothermal energy and gave the Bureau of Land Management more authority and more resources to grant geothermal leases and permits.

• Meanwhile, a group of energy companies are collaborating on the Iceland Deep Drilling Project, which plans to drill holes more than 4-5 km deep in hopes of dramatically increasing the amount of energy harvested by geothermal projects (current boreholes are typically 600 to 1000 m deep). Their engineers estimate that the energy extracted from each hole could increase from 5 MW to 50 MW if the temperature of the borehole can be increased by 200 degrees and the pressure increased by 200 Bar, which could translate into an enormous energy boon for the already geothermally-endowed country (via Muck and Mystery).

Hydrogen

• GE has figured out how to dramatically reduce the capital costs of manufacturing hydrogen via electrolysis - make electrolyzers out of plastic. A prototype design could lead to a commercial machine able to produce hydrogen for about $3 per kilogram, less than half of current costs of $8/kg (via AltEng).

• Eco-tech business developers GreenShift have formed a new company, General Ultrasonics, to develop technologies that use high intensity ultrasonic energies to catalyze chemical reactions, including the synthesis of hydrogen fuel. Current prototypes of the technology have used used ultrasonics to produce hydrogen via steam reformation at 25% lower temperatures than had previously been possible (via Green Car Congress).

Nuclear

• A powerful-but-tiny new gamma ray detector designed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is 10 times more precise than the conventional sensors currently used to examine nuclear materials. While the detector is currently only a prototype, it could significantly aid non-proliferation efforts by providing more detailed information about the composition and age of radioactive materials than is currently possible.

• Sandia National Labs's Z Machine - a key research facility in US nuclear fusion research - has successfully and unexpectedly produced plasmas reaching 2 billion degrees Kelvin - hotter than the inside of a star, and an amount of energy equivalent to as much as four times the energy invested in the process . No one's exactly sure why this happened, of course, but the results have held up over 14 months of additional testing, and understanding the phenomenon could help pave the way for smaller fusion reactors than originally envisioned. Via Peak Oil Rob, who also notes a skeptical assessment of the prospects for fusion research by the late William Parkins, a physicist who worked on the original Manhattan Project.

• Rob also looks into an investigation of Purdue scientist Rusi Taleyarkhan's apparently bogus research into sonofusion, the creation of fusion energy using sonic 'bubbles'. As Rob notes, Taleyarkhan seems to have been 'willfully deceitful' about the results of his work - 'his career is over,' and serious research into 'bubble fusion' probably is as well.

Solar

• I generally don't link to product press releases, but this is too cool and too closely related to last month's post on the link between renewable energy and physical security - check out the new MobileMaxPure system, a towable photovoltaic array that combines electricity generation and storage with water purification and emergency communications systems in one unit. An earlier version of the product (lacking the communications systems) has already been used to provide drinking water in post-Katrina Mississippi.

Wind

• US DOE has announced a partnership with GE to develop a 5-7 MW capacity 'next-generation' offshore wind turbine over the next 3-4 years. These turbines would be significantly larger than today's models (ranging from 2 to 5 MW for the largest) and reduce costs from an average of around 9.5 cents/kWh today to 5 cents/kWh.