Fuel Ghoul

A Whale of a Cover Up: Pacific Oil Spills

Listen up. There has been another oil spill in BC. Have you heard this in the news? Probably not... For two months there has been a potentially very hazardous oil spill near the north shores of Vancouver Island. On August 20th, 2007, a barge carrying logging equipment and a fuel truck with 10,000 litres of diesel fuel spilled its cargo into the pristine waters of Michael Bigg Ecological Reserve off the northeast coast of Vancouver Island. The Reserve is a sanctuary to one of the largest resident Orca populations in the world.

Imagine highly trained people in wet suits swimming around a big dirty fuel truck trying to get a sling under its belly before it spills more of its deadly poison into the water... well you can imagine it all you want because it hasn't happened yet.

 

I read a nice piece on the history recent oil spills in Puget Sound in Washington State.

 
Then I started to wonder about how many oil spills occur off US waters every year. Remarkably I found this fascinating account labeled Oil Spills in US Waters - Calendar Year 2004

 
Fuel Ghoul wonders if the Orca will survive? Up until this summer they had a pristine habitat north east of Vancouver Island. After the spill of August 2007, Greenpeace, the Living Oceans Society, and local whale watching companies called on the Federal and Provincial Governments to conduct an underwater investigation to determine the state of the wreckage and whether there is potential for further leakage from the fuel truck, which may still contain up to 9000 litres of diesel.  Click here now to help Greenpeace work to stop further damage to the Orcas and their habitat!

Due to changing weather conditions, an investigation needs to be done immediately !

Greenpeace plans to locate the wreckage using sonar technology. Then they will perform a visual investigation using a Remote Operated Vehicle and turn all data over to the Ministries of Environment and the Coast Guard. This is the only way to determine if the fuel truck is a ticking time bomb…

 
What would 9,000 litres of diesel fuel seeping into a marine ecological reserve do to the resident pods of Orca whales?  Sadly, we are going to find out.

 

Future in a Fuel Cell

In the age of climate change, everyone is keen to help promote an alternative future for automotive transportation.  The Oil Age may soon be over, and the time of cheap oil has definitely come to a close. Innovation demands a new source of power for humanity’s cars and trucks. Biodiesel, ethanol, solar electric, compressed air and even steam powered systems are being rushed into development as the world consumes 85 million barrels of crude oil everyday.

 
Fuel Ghoul believes that mankind’s next energy source will be wonderfully simple and infinitely practical, totally green and one hundred percent renewable. Hydrogen fuel cells might form half of the solution – extracting the hydrogen (to power the fuel cells) is the other half of the equation.

 
When Fuel Ghoul asks scientists 'What is the perfect automotive energy source?’ they inevitably answer, ‘hydrogen’. And when Fuel Ghoul asks them how they would turn that element into energy they simply reply ‘fuel cells’, even though the science isn’t one hundred percent obvious yet, and the process of securing the hydrogen has yet to become cost effective.

 
Today, fuel cells are often mentioned in the news. Some say hydrogen fuel cells will be the most widely used. Others say methanol or ethanol would be more appropriate for the transportation sector. And there are even some visionaries who believe mankind will be refining gasoline for a long time yet, and that fossil fuels will only be eclipsed by the dawn of fusion power.

 
With an eye on the future, Fuel Ghoul took the time to read up on fuel cells. These handy devices are designed similar to batteries except they don’t store energy – they convert the chemical energy of the input material directly into electricity. The principle of the fuel cell was developed by William Grove in 1839.  

What is a hydrogen fuel cell?

 
A fuel cell is an electrochemical device that combines hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity, with water and heat as its by-product.  As long as fuel is supplied, the fuel cell will continue to generate power. Various types of fuel cells exist, but the one automakers are primarily focusing on for fuel cell cars is one that relies on a proton-exchange membrane, or PEM.

 
A simple hydrogen fuel cell consists of two conductors (an anode and a cathode) separated by an ionic conductor – an electrolyte (eg, a salt solution). Hydrogen is pumped to the anode, and oxygen to the cathode. Hydrogen reacts with charged particles (ions) in the electrolyte, producing water and electrons. The electrons leave the fuel cell along wires; this is the DC electricity generated by the cell.

 
The electrons return to the fuel cell cathode where they combine with oxygen and water to form ions which replace those consumed at the anode. And so the cycle continues, with hydrogen and oxygen being turned into water while generating electricity.

 
Fuel cells in space

One hydrogen fuel cell can generate up to 1.2 volts of DC electricity. Individual cells can be wired together to produce greater voltages or higher current. The space shuttle has 96 individual cells arranged in three stacks. When hydrogen and oxygen are pumped into the shuttle's fuel cells, they generate 28 volts of direct current as well as heat and water. The heat is put to good use, vaporizing the liquid fuels before they reach the fuel cells. Water flows into storage containers for drinking and other uses.
 

Fuel Cells: Chapter Two

 
Today, hydrogen and oxygen are commonly used as the fuel and oxidant. The electrodes are made of porous carbon plates which are laced with a catalyst (a substance that accelerates chemical reactions). The electrolyte is usually potassium hydroxide. At the anode, the hydrogen gas combines with hydroxide ions to produce water vapor. This reaction results in some left over electrons. These excess electrons are forced out of the anode and produce DC electric current. At the cathode, oxygen and water plus returning electrons from the circuit form hydroxide ions which are again recycled back to the anode. The basic core of the fuel cell consisting of the manifolds, anode, cathode and electrolyte is generally called the stack.

 
There are three types of fuel cells that appear to be the most promising. The Solid Oxide Fuel Cell or SOFC is the most likely contender for both large and small electric power plants. The Direct Alcohol Fuel Cell or DAFC appears to be the most promising as a battery replacement for portable applications such as cellular phones and laptop computers. The Alkaline Fuel Cell AFC has been used in space applications where hydrogen and oxygen are available.

 
Its easy to see why scientists love fuel cells – they have a lot of obvious advantages. Firstly, fuel cells produce almost no emissions at the tailpipe (securing the hydrogen could be messy though) and secondly the technology is safe and reliable, modular, lightweight and quiet. Fuel Cells really are tomorrow’s perfect power plants.

What’s the Future of Toronto’s Trash?

Toronto is a big city that makes a lot of garbage. According to this municipal website, Toronto sent approximately 750,100 tonnes of waste to a Michigan landfill site in 2005.

In 2005, an average of 86 truck loads of Toronto’s garbage was transported 500 plus miles (round trip) into Michigan everyday – the only good news is that this amount was down from an all time high of 142 trucks a day in 2003.

TRASH COLLECTION DAY IN TORONTO

Fuel Ghoul can see the bins at the base of the apartment buildings along Jameson Ave. and below the towers on Trethway and at Jane and Eglington Avenue – these giant black industrial bins are usually overflowing with garbage by the weekend, and are heaped high by the time they are collected midweek. The low income residents of these low rent apartment buildings do not recycle their trash – and they eat a lot of fast food in Styrofoam containers and drink water out of small plastic bottle and then dispose of everything in their household garbage. They indiscriminately dispose of all plastics, newspapers and aluminum cans without giving any thought to recycling the goods as that would mean carrying the items downstairs and sorting them into the appropriate bins.

ALUMINUM CANS are the most profitable component of any modern recycling program- they simply must be recycled. Did you know that 95% less energy is used to make new aluminum cans out of old recycled cans? Throwing away a single aluminum can is like pouring out six ounces of gasoline.

Today, sending more of Toronto's trash to Michigan is not an option. Two US Senators recently brokered a deal to plug the hole and stop the flow.

The deal calls for waste shipments to be reduced by 20 per cent by the end of 2007, by 40 per cent by the end of 2008 and then fully eliminated by the end of 2010. Earlier this year, the government streamlined the environmental approval processes to allow dumps to be built faster.

Toronto and neighboring municipalities have developed a plan.

Toronto has an effective garbage plan designed to punish big polluters in the pocketbook. At the June 20, 2007 City Council meeting, Councilors approved a new plan to achieve 70% diversion from landfill by 2010. The plan includes a new funding system to pay for the additional programs and services.

New Garbage Cans and Custom

IN 2007 city council will be distributing new garbage cans while promoting a new waste disposal system.
The new plan is simply that every household will buy a new trash bin. The smallest size (about one and a half garbage bags every two weeks) is free. Larger bins are more expensive. Any solid waste that can't be fit into the containers will cost residents approximately $2.00 per bag extra upon collection.

Here's how it breaks down,

75-litre (one bag) - less than $209
(no charge on bill)

120-litre (1.5 bags) - approximately $250
($250 minus $209 = $41 on bill)

240-litre (3 bags) - approximately $310
($310 minus $209 = $101 on bill)

360-litre (4.5 bags) - approximately $360
($360 minus $209 = $151 on bill)

 

Fuel Ghoul believes the City of Toronto will be sending each resident four free passes in the mail.  READ MORE  Fuel Ghoul loves the idea and supports the new Toronto trash plan!

RECYCLING WORKS

75% less energy and 50% less water is used to make paper from recycled paper versus raw wood fiber. Recycling one tonne of old newspapers saves 19 trees. Toronto typically recycles 100,000 tonnes of newspapers annually; the city's recycling program saves more than two million trees annually.

30% less energy is used to make glass from recycled crushed glass cullet versus new resources.

74% energy reduction is achieved by reusing steel cans and every tonne of recycled steel cans saves 1.36 tonnes of iron ore.

 
A 33% energy reduction is seen when new products are made from recyclable plastics.

In 2007 polluters should be more aware of the trash they create and the trek that trash makes everyday - the transport of trash is tragedy.

Fuel Ghoul still says : Reduce Reuse and Recycle

 

 

What's the frequency Kanzius?

When Fuel Ghoul heard about the Pennsylvania man that managed to set fire to a vial of salt water with a homemade radio frequency generator, he went online to find the answer to one simple question - what‘s the frequency?

 
But the media bytes for this story are all the same. The same video is embedded in every blog   and the same data has been recycled all over the internet. Nobody knows the frequency… and nobody seems to care.

The First Law of Thermodynamics states that the increase in the internal energy of a thermodynamic system is equal to the amount of heat energy added to the system minus the work done by the system on the surroundings.

 
No law abiding scientist would ever think that perhaps radio frequencies could create a shortcut around the age old ‘conservation of energy’ fundamentals. But yet that’s what the ultra positive newspaper reporters and bloggers want you to believe is the truth.

 
Perhaps I should explain the whole situation. When John Kanzius tried to desalinate seawater with a device he had created to (supposedly) treat cancer, he found he could keep the water burning like a candle as long as it was exposed to the proper frequencies.

 
Not surprisingly, most of the scientific community initially dismissed Kanzius' claim as a hoax. However, when Rustum Roy (a chemistry professor at Penn State University) took John up on the challenge, and attempted to recreate the experiment, he was amazed to see that it actually worked.

 
Of course the salt water itself isn't actually on fire. No, what’s happening is that the radio frequency’s resonance weakens the water molecule and its constituents separate into oxygen and hydrogen. Bombarded by intense radio waves, the salt water comes to a boil producing a spray of salt water, which then provides a conductive path for RF arcing, similar to arcing from a tesla coil.

Yes, it still obeys the laws of thermodynamics because the energy input via RF waves is greater than the energy released in the form of heat and light.

 
There’ll be more data on this story in the mainstream media next week, after Rustum Roy meets with officials from the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense to try to obtain research funding.

 
The scientists want to find out whether the energy output from the burning hydrogen  (which reached a heat of more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit) would be enough to power a car or other heavy machinery.

 
Fuel Ghoul  just wants to know the frequency.

APEC has no effect on Climate Change

On Sept 7-10th 2007, leaders of 21 nations, including the USA, China, Japan and Canada met at the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit in Sydney, Australia. This gathering could have helped environmentalists set binding global targets to avert catastrophic climate change… but it didn’t. The Americans and coal rich Australia instead pushed voluntary "aspirational goals" which you and I both know will amount to nothing more than CO2 rich hot air.

Fuel Ghoul has received a number of email messages asking for more details about Bush's climate plan, the one he is rallying polluters around the world to support. The core of the issue is that George Bush opposes the most critical and effective element of a global treaty: emissions targets that actually count.

 
Perhaps that's why US president George Bush has mounted a push for a process outside of the UN negotiations. In fact, he has just recently invited the world's biggest polluting nations to a summit this September to discuss his toothless approach to climate change.

 Are US politicians now thinking outside the box?

 
George Bush acknowledged the fears of some policy makers that the United States is trying to construct a successor to the Kyoto Protocol outside of international efforts already under way. The Bush administration does not support any agreement that does not included developing nations, like China and India, which are the world’s fastest growing energy consumers.

 "We agree these issues must be addressed in an integrated way," he said. "We take climate change seriously in America." But America is all talk and no action. The United States never ratified Kyoto, which requires 35 nations to cut emissions 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. And some press reports have indicated that the American delegation has no less than twelve SUVs (and those are just the ones on camera) while other visiting nations are content to bring two or three vehicles to the conferences.

 
Now the Bush administration has unveiled plans for global warming talks later this month that will bring together the world's biggest polluters to seek agreement on reducing greenhouse gases. The United States, one of the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases (if not the largest), made no statement at Tuesday's sessions, and has repeatedly rejected firm targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, maintaining this would hurt the US economy. A senior U.S. official has said that the current administration stood by its opposition to mandatory economy-wide caps. Many climate experts say that without binding U.S. emissions targets, the chance for significant progress is limited.  

Washington calls for voluntary rather than mandatory emissions cuts.

As mentioned earlier, both the USA and Australia hope the next climate change treaty will address the growing energy consumption, and resultant pollution of China and India.

China's President Hu Jintao gave only qualified support to Australia's initiative on climate change, while some developing nations criticized Australian and US moves to put their vision of climate change at the top of the agenda at the gathering in Sydney.

 
After meeting Australian Prime Minister John Howard, Mr Jintao said he preferred the UN framework for handling climate change proposals compared with the Sydney Declaration.

He added: "We very much hope that this Sydney Declaration will give full expression to the position that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change would remain the main channel for international efforts to tackle climate change."

 
The declaration should also reflect UN principles of "common but differentiated responsibilities" towards lowering harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

 
Malaysia Trade Minister Rafidah Aziz said the leaders at the APEC should not be dealing with emission targets at all, while ministers from the Philippines and Indonesia also questioned the approach.

 
Climate control was supposed to top the agenda at APEC.

High-level discussions at APEC could have shaped new talks at a U.N. conference in December in Bali, Indonesia. Many pray that future conference will chart a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. The U.S has called for a Sept. 27-28 conference in Washington of the 15 biggest polluters.

 
Stephen Harper hopes we'll all forget his dismal record.

While on the subject of aspiration goals and hot air, Prime Minister Stephen Harper went on record to say that simply getting the world's biggest emitters to start talking about a post-Kyoto climate change plan is a big step forward.  And that's  it.

 
Harper says nations representing two thirds of global emissions essentially "opted out" of the Kyoto protocol. "So we have to do a better job next time," says Harper. But what does that mean?  Fuel Ghoul hopes that Stephen Harper is not involved in the process. Its a well known fact that Canada also opted out of Kyoto’s emission targets when Stephen Harper’s Progressive Conservatives, bent by the resolve of some powerful Canadian corporations, released a Clean Air Act that will actually allow Canada's biggest polluters to increase their emissions !!!

 
Scientists agree, now is humanity's window of opportunity to stop a climate catastrophe.

Over 400,000 people signed Avaaz.org’s APEC petition.   On Saturday, these environmentalists are going to launch a massive 144-square meter floating canvas "target" at Sydney's iconic Bondi Beach where it will be taken out to sea by surfers and then eventually floated over the Great Barrier Reef which many experts believe will be completely destroyed by climate change by the year 2030.