Biogas Fuel Cell

The Olivera Egg Ranch has a lot of chicken poop to deal with and they use a lot of electricity. Could a biogas fuel cell kill two birds with one stone?

If you’re familiar with the term “Fuel Cell” you’ve probably only ever seen it preceded by the word “Hydrogen” and that’s a shame. One of the greatest advantages of fuel cells are their flexibility. Biogas, like that from poultry feces, is just fine for an electricity producing fuel cell. It’s a shame that the industry rarely promotes it.

Solving common agricultural waste issues while providing renewable power

The 1.4 megawatt fuel cell power plant to operate on site at the chicken ranch should alleviate three serious issues for the egg producing operation and the surrounding community.

Waste: Currently the chicken poop is collected in a solid lagoon and later transported away by truck. However, a little searching around turns up plenty of local residents claiming their sewage runs untreated through drainage ditches and eventually into the San Joaquin River. The biogas production process would consume much of that waste to produce the ranch’s electricity, which brings us to the egg farm’s second issue.

Electricity: The amount of chicken turds produced by the current amount of chickens on site should produce enough power to keep the ranch off the grid. That means no long distance transmission loss and no greenhouse gas emissions from distant power plants required for the farm.

Heat: The microorganisms that consume the chicken waste and produce methane gas (biogas) as a by product do their job much better when they’re nice and warm. The fuel cell is designed to transfer the heat it creates using methane to produce electricity to the anaerobic digester that houses the solid waste and microorganisms.

The system should be up and running by the middle of 2011. With a bit of success it could serve as a model of how a little innovation and investment can reduce pollution and fossil fuel usage while saving money. We’ll be keeping an eye on this project. If you know of others like it, please comment.

More from the Fuel Cell Energy press release, here.

What an ethanol blender pump for flex fuel vehicles looks like.

Every time I see the opening of a new E85 station I imagine Henry Ford flipping the bird to Standard Oil in the afterlife. The Model T was originally built to run on ethanol but prohibition made it impossible to continue to manufacture cars for anything but gasoline and diesel. Sadly, there are still entire states without any access to gasoline blended with more than 10-15% ethanol.

Here we are nearly 90 years later. The cost of adding the mechanism that allows a modern engine to sense the amount of fuel in the line and adjust the fuel/air ratio accordingly costs less than $50. Nearly all cars sold today are able to run on significantly cheaper E85 as an option to gasoline and lower ethanol blends.

Thanks to the efforts of Growth Energy and Gulf Oil,, residents of Long Island will get a chance to save some cash at the pump and help make Henry Ford’s vision of an America running entirely on domestic fuel a reality. Together with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and the Department of Energy, they have installed 4 new blender pumps at stations in Long Island that will save consumers a significant amount of money every time they fill up.

If you’re from Long Island, or just passing through, check out the list of four new E85 blender pump sites in the Growth Energy Press Release or have a look at the more complete list of E85 refueling stations across the country.

Cellulosic Ethanol Plants Will Be Able To Use These Corn Cobs As Feedstock Not Only The Kernel

America’s first commercial cellulosic ethanol plant will begin prodiction soon.  The Abengoa Bioenergy Plant in Hugoton, Kan.; POET Energy’s Project Liberty Plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa; and Great River Energy’s plant, Dakota Spirit Ag Energy, in Spiritwood, N.D. all reported at the Biomass ‘10 conference in Grand Forks North Dakota. Although the plants are in various stages of development they are all expected to begin producing cellulosic ethanol in 2013-14. The race is on to see which one will be first.

Those of you unfamiliar with ethanol might be wondering why this is such a big deal. Most ethanol in the United States is produced from corn. Unfortunately, corn is a horribly inefficient way to produce ethanol. Per acre there simply isn’t enough sugar from corn kernels to ferment. Cellulosic ethanol refers to the use of enzymes similar to those in a cow’s stomach to break down the cellulose into simpler sugars, which makes it available for yeast to ferment.This makes nearly all of the corn cobs, leaves, and stalks of the corn plant feedstock for fuel production, not just the tiny fraction of easily digestible sugar in the kernels.

Two of the upcoming cellulosic ethanol plants will use wheat straw and the other will use corn cobs as a main feedstock in its operation, and each will use some form of the crop residue feedstock to help fire up the plant, thus reducing its dependence on natural gas. An outline of the three upcoming plants can be found in this press release.

What makes this particular station so special? It will provide E85 to the largest fleet of Flex Fuel Vehicles (FFV) in the United States. This publicly accessible station will be just one of over 2,300 gas stations across the nation that offer domestically produced E85, but fueling the 2,585 flex-fuel vehicles at the Norfolk Naval Base will probably will probably make it the busiest!

E85 Station In Norfolk Virginia naval Base - Take it easy. That price was just a promotion, but it's still cheaper than refined petroleum!

“Protec Fuel is proud to be partnered with NEXCOM and The US Navy by building and opening this new E85 station,” said Todd Garner, Managing Partner of Protec Fuel. “The Norfolk Naval E85 station, serving the largest Naval base in the world, will effectively serve the general public and the large flex-fuel fleet vehicles simultaneously. Economic and environmental benefits aside, this station and E85 will help get our troops home and strengthen our national security through domestically produced fuels.”

A quick tweet from RFA’s Robert White claims the sailors on the base are as excited about using the domestically produced fuel as Protec is to provide it. The 85 in E85 stands for 85% ethanol. Although there are many ways to produce ethanol, most is currently derived from corn grown in the United States. Using E85 means less dependance on foreign oil sources and lower more stable prices at the pump. We can always grow more corn. As for ethanol’s effect on global warming, growing the corn takes more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than its combustion puts in the air at the exhaust pipe.

The press release here goes on to say there are an astounding 8 million flex-fuel vehicles on the roads today. If you’re driving one and have no idea where to find one have a look at this GPS application from Choose Ethanol that shows the closest E85 station to your present location or destination. No GPS? No problem. The Choose Ethanol site has a list of E85 stations broken down by state. If you’re driving a fles-fuel vehicle it could save you a ton of money, slow the effects of global warming and keep more brave men and women that proudly serve in our armed forces safe at home.

What surprises me isn’t that they have a hydrogen fuel cell bus, but that it’s the first. Singapore is one of the few places that recycles nearly 100% of its water. I would of thought that they would have entire fleets of electric vehicles in their public transport system. If this is the case and MIke at the Green Optomistic made a slight error in this post, please comment.

Turns out they can afford it because an engine converted to run on Compresed Natural Gas (CNG) costs about 1/3 as much to operate as the same car on gasoline. Sitting in the back of Bangkok taxis thinking about how lucky I was to live somewhere that had adequate CNG pumps (and no longer metro Detroit) planted the seed that has become this blog.

Well travelling by taxi just got a whole lot better.

On Sunday, Better Place launched switchable-battery electric taxis onto the streets of Tokyo (see the slideshow at the bottom of this post). Although I think there are only a handful at the moment. The electric vehicles are able to drive into a battery switching station and exchange their empty batteries for ones with a complete charge in less time than it would take to fill up with petrol. They can run all day, cool and emission free.

EVs are cheap to operate and with a lot less moving parts, require far less maintenance. Will they pass that savings along to customers, probably. One thing is certain they’ll be a whole lot quieter.

1. We need to take our country back

2. We need to cut the deficit

Three time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman has an idea that would finally give the tea party protests a direction that addresses both. According to T. Boone Pickens, in January 2010 about $27.5 billion flowed from the US to Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. That’s a lot of our country’s greenbacks that could be taken back. As T. Boone Pickens has so eloquently illustrated in his Pickens Plan, that’s $27.5 billion dollars that could of stayed in the country. We don’t need to buy foreign oil.

To address the deficit Friedman also proposes a “Patriot Tax” on all imported oil with the proceeds used to pay down the hideous national debt. Nothing gets people to use available alternatives to petrol faster than high oil prices, right?

Would Fox promote the Green Tea Party Movement? Probably not, but it would be lots of fun if MSNBC thumbed their noses at them by shamelessly promoting a movement with a much larger support base. If we could combine the number of people that just marched on D.C. in support of Earth Day with existing Tea Party members that have enough sense to realize billions flowing out of the country is a problem, the Green Tea Party would be enormous. Maybe large enough to break the fossil fuel industries stranglehold on Congress.

POET's Cellolosic Ethanol Pilot Plant

Within 10 years of it’s Emmetsburg, Iowa plant’s projected completion date the world’s largest ethanol producer plans to become even larger. In a speech to the National Press Club in Washington D.C. CEO Jeff Broin ”By 2022, POET plans to be responsible for 3.5 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol production by adding the technology to our existing facilities, licensing our technology to other producers and finally, transferring our technology to other forms of biomass such as wheat straw, switchgrass and municipal waste.”

The ethanol giant still has several hurdles to clear to make this happen however, including a loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Since congress has set a target of 16 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol by 2022 it would be hard to imagine POET not receiving the DOE’s support. Their main worries I imagine are possible back lash from taxpayers that are subsidizing US ethanol production.

Read the rest of the press release here along with recorded audio of Jeff Broin’s speech.

Chery Automotive China To Produce Electric Vehicles With Swappable Batteries For Better Place Project

Just exactly what a “memo of understanding,” means is beyond me, but the electric car network program Better Place has apparently signed one with China’s Chery Automotive. The agreement involves developing switchable-battery electric vehicle prototypes to be used in Better Place’s network of electric vehicle battery switching stations.

If you’re not already familiar, Better Place is a business model more than a specific product begun in Isreal by Shai Agassi. The basic concept is a network of battery swapping and charging stations that work with affordable electric vehicles. Instead of pulling into a petrol station and refilling your tank with gasoline, your car’s empty battery would be completely removed and replaced with an identical one with a full charge and you’re good to go another 100 miles.

In other Better Place projects Renault is building cars with quick battery swapping technology, however it seems China wishes to use their own manufacturer, Chery. No surprises there.

Now this isn’t necessarily an example of fossil fuels being replaced with cleaner energy. The electricity used to charge the batteries will most likely be coal fired. However the electricity from any source, like the enormous solar arrays that the Chinese government has contracted from First Solar.