Vada Energy blog

Hydrogen gas is the most clean-burning gas known to man. Yet methane, even if it’s a sibling of petrol, got its way through the alternative fuels industry, and it is more widely used nowadays, as fuel prices oscillate between skyscrapers and small houses. Methane is also one of the cleanest burning fuels, and that makes [...]

The company that produces the energy in Ontario, OPG - Ontario Power Generation started the process of finding providers for biomass fuel, by sending a “call for expression of interest” to those interested to change the coal to biogas for producing the electricity in the region.
The company is looking forward to create the list with [...]

Production of biogas from waste materials has been limited up to now and has been particularly based on food crops such as corn and sugarcane.
Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems IKTS in Dresden have recently developed a biogas plant that utilizes waste materials such as corn stalks and other agricultural waste.

Although production of biodiesel in Europe has more than doubled in the last two years, urgent market measures are required to create a real market for the fuel quantities being produced, according to the European Biodiesel Board (EBB). Absent those measures, the Board says, production may decline.

There are at least three ways to run a diesel engine on biofuel using vegetable oils, animal fats or both. All three are used with both fresh and used oils.

What is biodiesel?
Biodiesel is a fuel derived from vegetable oil or animal fats that can be an additive to or entirely replace conventional petroleum diesel fuel. In the United States, the majority of biodiesel is made from soybean or canola oils, but is also made from waste stream sources such as used cooking oils or [...]

Nobel-prize winning chemist Paul Crutzel, along with a team of scientists have demonstrated that biofuels, once thought to be the saving of traditional fuel industry, pollutes 70% more than the fossil fuels.
They calculated the emissions released by growing the crops such as maize, rapeseed and cane sugar to produce biofuels. The team of American, British [...]

A scientist who mapped his genome and the genetic diversity of the oceans said Thursday he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel.
Craig Venter (in the picture), a famous geneticist, announced his “fourth-generation fuel” project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, California. Between the [...]

George Huber of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMass) and his students Torren Carlson and Tushar Vispute announced the first direct conversion of plant cellulose into gasoline components.
There may be 10 years until this invention is brought to market. Huber said that the consumers won’t even realize the difference between regular fossil gasoline and the green [...]

Baton Rouge, LA (June 27, 2008) – Governor Bobby Jindal has signed into law the Advanced Biofuel Industry Development Initiative, the most comprehensive and far-reaching state legislation in the nation enacted to develop a statewide advanced biofuel industry. Louisiana is the first state to enact alternative transportation fuel legislation that includes a variable blending pump [...]

Although solar powered devices and solar cells emerge like mushrooms, we still need an immediate solution to power our old cars, until old fuels are completely replaced.
Gliocladium Roseum is a fungus from the Patagonian rainforest, that also grows on wine grapes. It cannot be burned directly, but it seems to produce diesel fuel (or at [...]

Biofuels have seen ups and downs in the public’s eyes in recent years. Producing biofuels from eatable plants, such as corn, is a bad idea, while producing it from other fast-growing wild plants is a good idea. Plus, the carbon footprint is almost zero, because the carbon emitted is almost equal to the carbon deposited [...]

Nevada researchers have recently found out that waste coffee grounds can be used to create biodiesel. Mano Misra, Susanta Mohapatra, and Narasimharao Kondamudi discovered that spent coffee grounds contain 11 to 20% oil by weight, as much as traditional biodiesel sources of palm, rapeseed or soybean oil.

Biodiesel has recently become a very controversed biofuel. It can be obtained from vegetable oil, animal fats, used cooking oil, microalgae and is a potential replacement of petroleum-based diesel fuel.

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) scientists, from Germany, have developed a novel technology of transforming plant materials into liquid fuel (biodiesel, methanol, hydrogen). Their method is able to bring the cost of one litre of such fuel down to 0.5 - 0.4 euros. And that’s cheap, according to European oil-based fuel prices.