At the risk of changing the focus of this blog entirely to energy/alternative fuel source news, I will be pushing out a few links in that direction. Not only will this give me an opportunity to keep up on news in this area, but I feel it's important because I'm really concerned about peak oil and the energy crunch. I think there's still a window to do something about it, but North America needs a comprehensive alternative/renewable fuel program today. Everything from food production to the strength of the economy to personal freedoms are threatened by massive oil shortages, and it's questionable if we'll have the 10-15 year window we need to implement the sweeping changes necessary to prevent a sweeping society collapse.

Anyway. Onward and upward. EcoGeek has a couple of interesting posts about potential biofuels that aren't soy and corn. One plant, Jatropha (wikipedia), is being farmed heavily in India, producing nearly 10 times the biodiesel of corn and growing in areas that were previously unusable for farmland.

The other post was about camelina sativa (wikipedia), also known as false flax. While the article says there hasn't been a lot of long-term study surrounding this plant, over 40,000 acres have been planted in Montana, and the company Great Plains has been working with it for over a decade. Like jatropha, camelina has an oil content of approximately 40%, and can produce up to 100 gallons of oil per acre. It's also a good rotational crop for wheat, and can be grown in fields that would typically be left to fallow.

The bad news: it looks like climate change will have its most pronounced effect this year, as the North Pole becomes free of ice for the first time in human history.

The good news: Russia and Canada get to fight over the oil below it, estimated to be almost 18% of the world's reserves.

A cool new skyscraper in -- where else -- Dubai, will have 80 independent rotating floors. But check out this green hotness:

The slender building would be energy self-sufficient as the turbines would produce enough electricity to power the entire building and even feed extra power back into the grid, said the Italian architect at the unveiling of the project in New York. (Via BBC News)

The Huffington Post has a video and some more conceptual drawings, while the Wall Street Journal does its bit by covering the whole hard-on for skyscrapers Dubai seems to have these days.

EcoGeek raves about Nanosolar, a new startup developing the so-called "Third Wave" of solar technology. Founded by two Stanford Ph.D. candidates, Nanosolar offered to bring the cost of solar energy down cheaper than coal. And now, after raising $150 million in capital and building a factory in Germany, they're talking $2/Watt -- squeeking just below coal's $2.1/Watt.

This is big news. And important news. The real alternatives to fossil fuels rely on renewable energy sources. And the real answer to re-greening the planet comes from developing countries switching from coal-fired plants to something sustainable. If the cost of solar power drops below that of coal, we'll see countries like China and India moving away from fossil fuels, and this is where the huge environmental gains are going to be made.

You can read more about Nanosolar in this New York Times article, this National Post article, and on the company's website.

I blogged about this before, over two years ago. But I recently read a frightening article in Maclean's called After Cheap Oil that brought this back to my attention. Some of the gems:

• High oil prices are causing a downturn in the auto industry, forcing Ford to cut jobs
• Rising prices will turn suburbs into ghost towns and drive Wal-Mart out of business
• At $200/barrel, someone making $12/hour would work roughly a day and a half to fill their tank (my own car would cost about $100 to fill at this price)
• Increasing fuel prices puts more emphasis on alternative fuels like ethanol, which in turn strains the global food supply
• The airline industry will fall apart, resulting in a 90% reduction in the number of airports by 2025

Unfortunately, it's all doom and gloom. Life After the Oil Crash lists the facts point after meticulous point, including the research, economics, and alternatives. And he doesn't end with anything positive.

"What can I do to prepare?"

Attempting to prepare for a catastrophe of this magnitude is daunting to say the least. What you can or will do to prepare for this situation will depend on your age, health, marital status, geographic location, financial situation and other factors too numerous to mention. About the best I can do is point you to some articles and resources you might to be profitable reading in terms of generating your own options and plans. I maintain a continually updated repository of such articles at the LATOC Prepare page.

Best of luck,

Mattthew David Savinar, Esq.

But there may be a slim upside. Savinar writes that some combination of alternative fuel sources could be used to delay the inevitable, but it's not some kind of magic bullet. And Curtis Rist wrote in Discover that natural gas can be turned into fuel, and estimates suggest that could provide up to 60 years of fuel. There have also been a couple of recent discoveries I've blogged about which will have some impact.

But the most important thing is acting now. We have to lobby our governments to support energy reduction and research into alternative energy sources.

That is, if there's any window at all to be acting in.

Science fiction once again becomes science fact as LS9, a research company in Silicon Valley, genetically engineers a strain of E. coli to eat biomatter and excrete crude oil. Honest to God crude oil. And the reaction is carbon negative, so more carbon will be taken out of the atmosphere by creating the fuel than will be put in by burning it.

This is amazing news, and definitely an interesting development in meeting rising energy demands, even if its current spacial needs are a little taxing:

The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.

However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.

The Toronto Star reports on a Canadian and Japanese team that has successfully removed gas from methane hydrate. This by itself isn't news -- the gas releases itself at room temperature. What is news is how the team has managed to get a sustained flow of gas from the material, making it usable.

Heat or unsqueeze the hydrate and gas is released. Hold a core sample to your ear and it hisses.

More significant is the fact that gas hydrates concentrate 164 times the energy of the same amount of natural gas.

And gas hydrate fields are found in abundance under the coastal waters of every continent. Calculations suggest there's more energy in gas hydrates than in coal, oil and conventional gas combined.

I'm reminded of Curtis Rist's Discover article in 1999 about how we'll never run out of oil. Hilariously, oil is now more than $100 a barrel.