Fuel Ghoul

Big Agriculture versus Big Oil

Newspaper reporters use the term ‘supermajor’ to properly categorize any of the six largest energy companies on planet Earth. Trading under various names all around the world, they are considered to be (in order of magnitude):

ExxonMobil (XOM)

BP (BP)

Royal Dutch Shell (RDS)

Total S.A. (TOT)

Chevron Corporation (CVX)

            ConocoPhillips (COP) 

The supermajors began to appear in the late 1990's as large petroleum companies began to merge, often in an effort to improve economies of scale, hedge against oil price volatility, and reduce large cash reserves through reinvestment. These monsters are driven by profit, and their hunger for a positive return on investment will certainly be the largest contributing factor to the costly development of any future fuels.

Big Agriculture is chipping away at Big Oil's fuel market share by growing a domestic ethanol / biodiesel industry (which is still very much it its infancy). Agriculture commodity companies like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Noble, and Cargill are investing heavily in these new 'green energy' industries, and so too are those companies that specialize in the sugar trade, palm oil, and, to a lesser extent, forestry.

Small family farms hate big agriculture - The growing defiance from small farmers illustrates their increasing frustration with rules that they say penalize them in favor of the industrial producers, who were the source of headline-grabbing disease outbreaks such as the E.coli-infected spinach that killed three people last year and last month's recall of 21.7 million pounds of E.coli-infected ground beef.

"Raising Less Corn, More Hell" is written by George Pyle and dedicated to the memory of his father, who was raised on a Kansas farm.  What the agricultural economy needs, he argues, is a truly free market -- not one kept afloat by federal subsidies and unaccounted environmental damage. The root cause of hunger, he claims, is usually a lack of money. Yet the fear of not having enough food has driven the rise of chemical fertilizers, massive machinery, genetically modified seed, and whatever else will help squeeze greater yields out of every acre.

 
Fuel Ghoul has friends in unusual places, including America’s corn fields. Recently a nice lady from the NCGA (National Corn Growers Association) wrote the Ghoul a friendly personal email wherein she asked him to investigate an interesting domain built to promote the salt of the earth – America’s corn farmers.

Farmer’s Matter is all earth tones, and has lots of pictures of kids in corn fields and it seems to be a friendly green, environmentally safe virtual world… but Fuel Ghoul isn’t fooled.   Big Agriculture is ugly too, and companies like Monsanto, and Archers Daniels Midland and Cargill are just as evil as the oil companies, Exxon Mobile and Royal Dutch Shell. Given the choice, Fuel Ghoul would encourage Big Ag and Big Oil to fight it out for

North America’s energy market - and of course Fuel Ghoul would root for Big Agriculture over Big Oil.

Our nation's corn growers have been hard at work this year. In the USA alone, farmers planted over 93 million acres of corn in 2007, and right now they are busy harvesting the largest corn crop in history.

 

These farmers have stepped up production to help ensure consumers will have enough corn to provide food for their families, feed for their livestock, and fuel for their automobiles. Advances in farming practices have increased the number of people a farmer feeds from just 19 in 1940, to 144 people today. They've been able to accomplish this while lessening their environmental footprint through smart sustainability practices – do they lessen our dependence on foreign petroleum? YES to some extent, through ethanol (corn alcohol) production and biodiesel (corn oil).

Filmmakers – A Thanksgiving Farm Contest

*** A VIDEO PRODUCTION CONTEST ***
Produce a creative video telling the NCGA what ‘are the most significant contributions made by our nation's corn growers? And thank a farmer!’ Submit your videos to www.votigo.com/thankafarmer Videos should be one to two minutes long

 
To find out more about corn growers contributions, and other interesting farming facts, visit the interactive timeline and fun facts section. (This will also give you some good information for your video production).

Fuel Ghoul believes there are a lot of good reasons for Canadians to move to biofuels: We can grow the feedstock locally and process it on site. In Canada, companies such as IOGEN are developing portable systems that can use switch grass, a plant that grows wild on the prairies, or use waste material from the forestry industry. It looks like everyone wins in that scenario, since we have a lot of plant material and new technology for processing it.

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 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.

Biodiesel In Toronto

A Trendy Queen Street Filling Station!

Petro Green is an eco friendly filling station in the fashionable Queen St east area of Toronto. Here, Mohammed Gabr sells Canadian made biodiesel to drivers looking to make a difference and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Biodiesel can be used in place of regular diesel in most cars and trucks. This alternative fuel is a blend of low-sulfur diesel fuel and, most commonly, vegetable oil. Biodiesel can be blended with petroleum diesel in any proportion. B100 refers to 100% biodiesel fuel, while B20 references a more common blend of 20% biodiesel and 80% petroleum diesel - this is what's available at Mohamed Gabr's green energy hotspot on the south west corner of Queen and Pape (1001 Queen St East).

Petro Green is a busy place – biodiesel is a hot commodity.

Mohammed Gabr, the manager of the gas station happily answered all my questions, even though he was working hard pumping fuel and making change - he was busy. There were at least two Alpine Roofing trucks waiting at the pumps, and two Dominon  Foods Stores delivery guys were having a conversation about work at the other side of the island. The price of biodiesel at 3pm in the afternoon of Monday June 11th was $101.9 a liter.

 
I snapped some random photos – including a shot of this rather strange sign: High Quality of Canadian Gasoline. What does that mean? What message is really contained in this sign? Is that a subtle call-to-action? Mohammed doesn’t even sell gasoline – he has been selling only biodiesel since the summer of 2006.

 
The B20 biodiesel that Mohammed Gabr sells at Petro Green on Queen East comes from Canada Clean Fuels in Brampton. CCF is the fastest growing fuel oil delivery service in Ontario. This new Canadian energy company provides virgin soy oil-based biodiesel to a range of clients in the southwestern part of the province, primarily municipalities and transit systems including those in Oshawa, Brampton, Burlington and Richmond Hill. Here's where I found out that Toronto Hydro also uses biodiesel in company vehicles, and the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) has been using B5 wherever possible for years.

An interesting fact - France is currently the world's largest producer of biodiesel. They have a huge industry and make and use biodiesel as heating oil and also in 50 percent blends with petrodiesel for cars and trucks.

Fuel Ghoul found this handy link to Toronto's Gas Prices while confirming the fact the Mohammed Gabr's Petro Green is the only retailer of Canada Clean Fuel's B20 biodiesel in downtown Toronto. Someday B50 and B100 will be sold everywhere in Canada, and pioneers like Mohammed Gabr and his Petro Green on Queen St E will be remembered as visionaries who played a small part in Canada's battle against climate change.

Biodiesel Buses in Italy

  The bus from Venice to Padova runs on biodiesel.

On a recent trip overseas, Fuel Ghoul caught a bus powered by a renewable fuel source. The abundant supply of good domestic bio fuel is one big reason the Europeans are leading the world in the fight against global warming.

Italy’s mass transit system is spotless thanks to it's Green Industry. This nation’s innovative automotive manufacturers and fuel producers are steadily gaining ground selling green options in Europe, and Fuel Ghoul believes that whatever happens there will happen here in North America and in Australia in three years, and in Asia and Africa in ten years.

 
Much like its designer clothing, fine art, and music, Italy also exports fashionable green technology. Their success in using biodiesel evidences an economically responsible approach to protecting the environment. Bottom line - if Italy has buses that run on biodiesel today, Canada will have similar buses tomorrow.

 

On Saturday the 19th of May, 2007 Fuel Ghoul tripped through the Italian countryside from Abano Terme to Padova in a very efficient public transportation system. The bus was on time and the routes are very straightforward - the bus was big and clean. It was also very crowded.  Fuel Ghoul made the trip in under thirty minutes, and for less than two euro. Here is a copy of the ticket – you can see the trip cost e1.90.

Italy is getting serious about climate change. Here's a poster stapled to a building in Venice. It seemed strange... It was the only poster on the wall, and as such it cut through the medieval veneer of every tourist's experience.

Obviously the Venetians are worried about the water rising in the canals; recent reports show the city sinks seven centimetres each century.

Fuel Ghoul found following a very interesting piece online here: ‘At the beginning of 2005, the Italian Government allocated Euro 350 million for public transportation initiatives. These funds are in addition to Euro 110 million already allocated by the Ministry of the Environment. Part of the money is to be used to substitute older polluting buses with new vehicles with lower environmental impact. A potential substitution of almost 1,750 buses was expected. The average age of an Italian bus is 10.25 years, in comparison with a European average of 7 years.’

Italian biodiesel is produced from vegetable oils such as rape seed oil, sunflower seed oil, soybean oil and used frying oils (UFO) or animal fats.

It’s important to note that one of the reasons that the Italians were so quick to adopt biodiesel is the fuel’s ready adaptability - biodiesel doesn’t require any changes in the fuel distribution system of diesel engines. I was told by the bus driver that biodiesel is now even being used as heating oil in Italy's northern provinces. 

The European Biodiesel Board estimates that the use of 1 kg of biodiesel leads to the reduction of some 3 kg of CO2. Hence, the use of biodiesel results in a significant reduction in CO2 emission (65%-90% less than conventional diesel), particulate emissions and other harmful emissions. Biodiesel is extremely low in sulfur, and has a high lubricity and fast biodegradability.

Wired magazine has a recent story about the chief engineer of the Caviro Distillery in Faenza, Italy where they now press their left over grape skins, stems, and seeds into ethyl alcohol for cars instead of grappa for digestive.

Fuel Ghoul would also like to highlight a funny little site entitled Slow Travel Italy which details the different types of buses in and around Rome.

If, as sometimes happens, the bus driver forgets to stop, even though you rang the buzzer, just call out "non si ferma?" or "c' la fermata". They also sometimes forget to open the doors for you to get off. In this case call out "pu aprire?" If you are at the back (or front) doors and need to get off but can't get to the central doors, call out "pu aprire dietro?" (or davanti?). They may or may not open these doors.

If the bus is crowded and you are trying to get to the doors, say "permesso" to get by. There are some stops where virtually everyone gets off, such as near metro stations. In this case a line (crowd) forms in front of the door. To make sure the person in front of you is getting off, say "Scende alla prossima?"

Roberrific

 

Is ethanol a fuel fad?

Let me tell you a little something about ethyl alcohol…

Ojibwa hunters in Northern Ontario tell funny stories about a drunken moose named Ayaabekwébii that waits a week after the first autumn frost to eat the mountain ash berries in the forest. The freezing loosens the fruit’s natural sugars and fermentation occurs in the warm autumn sun. According to the Ojibwa, the mischievous moose actually dislikes the taste of the berries, but enjoys how they make him feel. As you might imagine, an intoxicated moose is a hazard to unprepared hikers and motorists that happen to cross its path. Unlike drunken humans, this animal weighs eight hundred pounds and has an arsenal of hammers and knives on its head. After listening to the Ojibwa’s cautionary tale, and being assured by outdoorsmen that the drunken moose phenomenon actually exists, I can more easily imagine early man stumbling through a primeval bush eating overripe grapes.

According to Princeton's Samuel Wise, man’s first ‘home brew’ was probably date wine. Egyptian hieroglyphs show kegs of beer and date wine being included among the Pharaoh’s provisions for the afterlife. Wise believes that ethyl alcohol was made from dates, grapes and other fruit more than 8,500 years ago. This substance is intimately connected with mysticism, shamanism and alchemy - it predates all religion and laws prohibiting public drunkenness are included in Hammurabi’s Code in 1750 BC.

So where and when did man first use ethyl alcohol as fuel? Although the claim is widely disputed, a cleric and alchemist (and the inventor of the first French perfumes) Raymond Lully (1235 - 1308) was the first to prepare pure ethanol by distilling fermentation alcohol three times from quicklime, CaO. Normal fractional distillation can only produce a 95% pure ethanol (95% C2H5OH - 5% H2O) because ethanol and water mixed in this composition form an azeotrope. (An azeotrope is a mixture with a fixed boiling point that cannot be further separated by fractional distillation.) The quicklime must be added to remove the water from this azeotrope by chemical reaction: CaO + H2O --> Ca(OH)2. It seems reasonable to me that in demonstrating the new substance’s combustible nature Raymond may have tried burning it in a terra-cotta lamp with a wick. That would make him the first to ethanol as fuel.

In early modern Europe, glass chimney oil lamps were status symbols and their fuels included all kinds of vegetable oils (castor, rapeseed, peanut), animal oils (especially whale oil and tallow from beef or pork,) and refined turpentine from pine trees; and alcohol. Three hundred years later, the most popular lamp fuel in the United States (before petroleum) was a blend of alcohol and turpentine called "camphene".

By 1838, pure ethyl alcohol replaced the more expensive whale oil in most North American lamps. It easily took the lead because it was such an improvement over all other oils in use at that time. By 1860, thousands of distilleries churned out eighty million gallons of the pure spirit every year. All of which lit houses after the sun went down. In the 1850s, camphene (which sold for fifty cents a gallon) was cheaper than whale oil ($1.30 to $2.50 per gallon) and lard oil (90 cents per gallon). It was about the same price as coal oil, which was the product first marketed as "kerosene" (literally "sun fuel").

What happened next is subject to intense speculation – The first captains of industry worked hard to make cheap fossil fuels the number one choice for the 'horseless carriages'. Rockefellers and the Rothschild’s established institutions and colluded with automakers to make gasoline the transportation industry’s number one fuel choice for the next hundred years... but those days are over now and energy consumers are getting smarter everyday.

NEWSFLASH – pure ethyl alcohol C2H5OH is called ethanol, and there’s nothing new about it. It’s older than petroleum, and way more environmentally friendly. In fact, the more I investigate this biological fuel the more I’ve come to understand that ethanol is this planet’s most logical fuel choice, and gasoline seems like a fad to me.

Reading about Greenfield Ethanol’s forward looking operations in Canada helps, http://www.greenfieldethanol.com/index.php?v=1&p=2&i=23&t=Template7Paragraphs

Introducing his 1982 book Critical Path, Buckminster Fuller writes , ‘humanity's present rate of total energy consumption amounts to only one four-millionth of one percent of the rate of its energy income. ...Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to make it economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do.”