When society jumps on a bandwagon, even for a good cause, there may be unintended consequences. The unintended consequence of crop-based biofuels may be the loss of wildlife habitat, particularly that of the birds who call this country’s grasslands home, say researchers from Michigan Technological University and The Nature Conservancy.
In a paper published in the latest issue of the journal BioScience, David Flaspohler, Joseph Fargione and colleagues analyze the impacts on wildlife of the burgeoning conversion of grasslands to corn for ethanol production is posing a very real threat to the wildlife whose habitat is being transformed. One potential solution: Use diverse native prairie plants to produce bioenergy instead of a single agricultural crop like …

“Salt-loving algae could be the key to the successful development of biofuels as well as being an efficient means of recycling atmospheric carbon dioxide”, Professor John Cushman of the University of Nevada told the Society for General Microbiology meeting at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.
The current major limitation of biofuel production is the lack of adequate feedstocks, soybeans and corn, for biodiesel and ethanol production, respectively. Halophytic (salt-loving) micro-algae can be grown on marginal lands with brackish or salt water unsuitable for traditional agriculture.
Their growth is non-seasonal, making them 10-30 times more productive than terrestrial crops. They can be grown on municipal wastewater and have widespread potential for recycling carbon dioxide from biomass-, coal-, and gas-fired power …

Remember when gas prices rose past $3 a gallon in many cities across the United States? Drivers clamored for alternative fuels so that the country wouldn’t be so reliant on foreign sources of oil. As gas prices have gone back down, the shouts for alternative fuels have quieted.
But that hardly means that the United States doesn’t need to invest its resources into developing green gas alternatives that can not only power our cars and trucks, but the machinery in our factories, too.
Fortunately, there are plenty of researchers and scientists today developing alternative fuels. There’s hope that that one day the United States will no longer have to rely on unstable outside governments to provide as …

Using electrolyzed water rather than harsh chemicals could be a more effective and environmentally friendly method in the pretreatment of ethanol waste products to produce an acetone-butanol-ethanol fuel mix, according to research conducted at the University of Illinois.
When ethanol is produced, distiller’s dried grain with solubles (DDGS) is a waste product. The DDGS is primarily used as animal feed, but researchers are searching for ways to extract the sugar and ferment it to produce an acetone-butanol-ethanol fuel mix. One obstacle has been in the production phase called pretreatment.
“For any biofuel production you need to have simple sugars such as glucose,” said U of I researcher Hao Feng. The glucose in DDGS is stuck together, forming …

Scientists in Nevada are reporting development of a new and environmentally friendly process for producing biodiesel fuel from “chicken feather meal,” made from the 11 billion pounds of poultry industry waste that accumulate annually in the United States alone. Their study is scheduled for the July 22 issue of ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a bi-weekly publication.
In the study Mano Misra, Susanta Mohapatra, Narasimharao Kondamudi, and Jason Strull note that chicken feather meal consists of processed chicken feathers, blood, and innards that have been processed at high temperatures with steam.
Currently feather meal is used as animal feed and fertilizer because of its high protein and nitrogen content. With as much as 12 percent …