By Paul | September 9, 2008
For many years now, Brazil has been using blocks of discarded coffee beans as fuel in locomotives and as heating in factories. Apparently the country had such a surplus of coffee beans in the 1930s that they were throwing away bags of the beans into the sea until someone came up with the idea of forming the beans into bricks to burn as heat.
Today, Jarden Home Brands in the US distributes Java-Log “the funky new fireplace item that has quickly become the people’s choice firelog … It offers a wonderful solution to the much detested chemical smell associated with other firelogs”. In addition to the soothing sweet smell, the logs produce fewer emissions than wood, are considered environmentally friendly as they are made from waste coffee beans, and they sound like a real wood fire.
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By Paul | September 3, 2008
Mesquite, a deciduous tree from Mexico and the US can be converted into ethanol, a grain based alcohol used in bio fuels. Today most cars and equipment using regular gasoline can actually run just as efficiently on a mix of gas and ethanol. In fact, the mix probably runs as high as ten percent ethanol without special engineering modifications. The Texas Agricultural Experiment Station in Texas, USA, unveiled a mesquite harvesting machine at the 2006 Range and Wildlife Field Day.
Although mesquite will probably not be used in a broad sense such as fueling everyday trucks and cars, it can be used to power farm equipment and private fleets. The actual downside to a larger scale use of mesquite fuel is the cost to transport it. And some are not sure that mesquite poses the same problem as chopping down other trees. Once those forests are destroyed, what happens?
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By Paul | August 31, 2008
The world is using too much fossil fuels. We all know it, and we all realize peakoil is just around the corner. The way forward is not using our cars less, or not heating our homes — it’s alternative fuels and finding better ways to use these fuels…
The Alternative Fuels Blog will be talking about these alternative fuels, and we’ll hopefully be able to start in a couple days once we settle in…
Again — welcome!
