Warning! This post has a great "yuck" factor. You've been warned.

Imida, an institute in the region of Murcia in SE Spain is currently investigating making biogas from carcasses of and other animal parts discarded from slaughterhouses. Murcia is the right place to do this, as the region produces more than 1,600 tons of unused pork meat and bones waste per month.

Imida liquefies the discarded parts using bacteria present in the meat itself. This meat "juice" then is fermented in tanks and produces about 30 to 40 m³ of biogas per 40,000 liters. If you do the math for the aforementioned 1,600 tons of pork, that's 48,000 to 64,000 m³ of biogas on a monthly basis. Cool and gross.

[Source: Europa Press via Econoticias]

While was researching the article about DuPont that will be available tomorrow on our site, I ran across these videos on Pioneer's site. Pioneer is a subsidiary of DuPont, and is involved heavily with agriculture and ethanol production. I am sure that there are other processes for creating ethanol, and this one is based solely on what DuPont and Pioneer are doing, but it may be of interest anyway.

Tour an Ethanol Plant by clicking on the links below. Each of these videos will open in a separate window, and they are all in .wmv format.

• 1. Dry Milling
• 2. Liquefaction
• 3. Saccharification
• 4. Fermentation
• 5. Batch Fermentation
• 6. Distillation
• 7. Molecular Sieve
• 8. Distillers Grain

Remember, these videos are by DuPont. If you would like to visit their site, click here. Hope you enjoy the videos!

[Source: Pioneer]

The DOE is partnering with the Washington University in St. Louis to sequence the DNA of six photosynthetic bacteria. Funding of $1.6 million is being devoted to the project based on the potential for these bacteria to be a great source of biofuel in the future. The potential exists for microscopic cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) to capture sunlight and then produce clean ethanol via a biochemical process.

The six strains that have been identified are related but come from different environments including Taiwan, India and deep ocean. It is felt that by combining different characteristics from these strains, a more efficient form of metabolised bioenergy can be derived. Cyanobacteria utilise carbon dioxide as their primary cellular carbon source and ferment without the need for added yeast to produce ethanol as is required with regular biomass.

Related:

• Using micro algae for jet fuel
• See a free algae biodiesel presentation in San Fran on the 9th
• Solix and Colorado State University team to commercialize algae to biodiesel process

[Source: Oilgae]