Drink your way to lower gas prices.

I find it interesting that there was a CNN article about ethanol production just days before the State of the Union in which the President touted ethanol and other alternative energy sources. I’m impressed at the about face on that one, but I’ll leave political commentary for others better suited. I’ll ramble about other things.

I’m intrigued by the creation of ethanol from scrap material. We produce a lot of scrap biological material during food and natural materials processing. Much of it has to be specially disposed of in furnaces. I’m just wondering about the equipment investment required to do this. It takes a while for bacteria to create ethanol, but genetic engineering could greatly improve this for specific substances.

Then you have the possibility for methane production with material that may not lend itself to ethanol. Methane is actually a bad greenhouse gas. It has been targeted because of the massive amounts produced by cows, but it is also the primary gas in natural gas. Here again genetic engineering could produce microbes that could produce the gas much more quickly, but methane usually needs to be produced in an oxygen free environment, increasing the cost. However, this energy could be used to reduce costs of running other systems.

Then there are the CO2 emissions reductions that are being called for. That involves auto efficiencies and power source, exploiting different power sources, reducing power consumption, and fixing carbon from the atmosphere. Automobile efficiencies will probably take care of themselves. New auto power sources are being worked on right now. Different power sources look like they are beginning to gather support finally. Interestingly wind turbines raise the local surface temperature of their location at night, and that actually increases the energy radiated into space. In other words they actually help fight global warming in two ways. New higher efficiency nuclear reactor plans have been on the drawing boards for years. I read something interesting about CO2 emissions from power plants. There is some talk of placing clear water filled columns around fossil fuel power plants. The CO2 emissions would be bubbled through the columns where genetically modified algae or other plants would fix it. The biological material could be periodically harvested and used. Of course this might not work as well in colder climates, but this is exactly the kind of modification that coal gasification is made to implement. I also think efficiency in equipment and home construction should be rewarded. I wonder if we could have tax breaks for the cost of insulating your house. Then there is the possibility of modifying plants to fix large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere. We’ll see what happens with some of this stuff.