Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have discovered how to help E. coli bacteria squirt out advanced biofuels, and the key is held by a pair of genes found in a soil-dwelling bacterium from a rainforest in Puerto Rico. The finding could enable the lab to shoot through a bottleneck … [continued]
The Bear Republic Brewing Company in Cloverdale, California is the first brewery to sign onto a new brewery waste-to-biogas system that has some A-list credentials to its credit. The system, called EcoVolt, is the creation of Cambrian Innovation, an MIT spinoff created in 2006 to commercialize a new class of … [continued]
Not too long ago, cities could be labeled strictly as takers: taking in food, water, energy and other resources, while dumping out mountains of garbage and oceans of polluted wastewater. But take a look at the gigantic egg-shaped structures that dominate New York City’s Newtown Creek wastewater treatment plant, and … [continued]
When a major defense contractor like Lockheed Martin lays down some heavy stakes in the green energy field, you know it’s only a matter of time before fossil fuels lose their headlock on the global energy market. Lockheed recently teamed up with the green energy innovator Concord Blue Energy to … [continued]
File this one under “I” for It takes a thief to catch a thief. A research team at the University of Illinois at Chicago is on track to developing a low-cost method for reducing carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide, which puts it one step away from creating synfuels including synthetic … [continued]
Since we’ve been on something of a wastewater tear this week, let’s keep the ball rolling with a look at another form of new technology for harvesting renewable energy from the stuff. This one is from a company called Pilus Energy. The company has tweaked bacteria to come up with … [continued]
We just finished getting all excited about a new Department of Energy project for teasing renewable hydrogen fuel out of municipal wastewater, when along comes Stanford University with a neat little wastewater trick of its own. The Stanford project involves harnessing a curiously evolved trait of exoelectrogenic microbes. These naturally … [continued]
The more you poke at the Navy biofuel initiatives, the more you just seem to rile them up. Earlier this spring, for example, the Navy went ahead and announced a new round of $18 million in matching funds for four new biofuel pilot projects shortly after certain members of Congress … [continued]
The Navy got its first ever solar powered electric vehicle charging station last week, and though it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the Navy’s overall fuel consumption it is yet another demonstration of a slow but steady transition out of petroleum dependency by the US military. The news … [continued]
Microscopic organisms are emerging as the sustainability workhorses of the 21st century, having graduated from their traditional composting chores into biofuel production, microbial fuel cells and even self-replicating growable ink. They could do so much more in terms of bio-electronics, but the cell membrane forms a “greasy barrier” that blocks … [continued]
