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.

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.