Talk about going full circle. A garbage truck running on methane picks up the trash out in front of your home and deposits it in a landfill. Over the next few years, that garbage begins to deteriorate, releasing methane gas in the process. That methane waste gas is captured and re-used by the same garbage trucks to pick up your trash. While we aren't necessarily proponents for landfills, at least some good can come out of their creation. Methane gas is a pretty horrible greenhouse gas, so it's much better to capture it in some way than to let it out into our atmosphere. When burned, however, methane (natural gas) releases more energy and less carbon back into the atmosphere that other, more traditional hydrocarbons ... like petroleum-based gasoline. T. Boone Picken's company Clean Energy Fuels has recently made an acquisition for this purpose in Texas.

Another use for the waste-methane emitted from toxic dumps is for electricity generation. Many landfills pipe their natural gas to power-generating facilities where huge turbines could potentially create the power for your next electric car.

[Source: Automotive News - sub. req'd]

Until more eco-friendly alternatives become available, most of us are stuck burning fossil-fuels for our power, whether we're driving or just powering the lights in our homes. With that in mind, researchers from the Middle East are working on new ways to reduce the emissions from methane-gas burning turbines for power generation. Using very high heat and very low oxygen levels, Mohamed Sassi of The Petroleum Institute in Abu Dabi, along with Mohamed Hamdi and Hamaid Bentîcha from the National School of Engineers of Monastir in Tunisia, have modeled what is known as flameless combustion, or flameless oxidation (FLOX). This new process could drastically reduce the harmful NOX emissions associated with gas-burning turbines while also being more efficient.

We have hopes that the widespread generation of power could be taken care of with alternatives such as wind, solar and wave power, but since even landfills give off methane gas, technology such as this could prove very useful in the future.

[Source: Science Daily]

The merits of ethanol can be debated all day, with opposing viewpoints ranging from "at least it's better than dino-juice" to "it's barely better than hydrogen" to "it's our only viable option". While the truth probably lies somewhere in between the extremes, most agree that corn is not the best source for a starting biomass. But, if corn is not good enough for ethanol, how about we save the corncobs for "sponges" that can store 180 times their own volume of natural gas or methane gas and at one seventh the pressure of conventional natural gas tanks?

One exciting prospect of this technology is that the tanks made from corncobs bricks could be shaped into a flat "gas tank" style, eliminating the bulky storage tanks currently in use for natural gas storage. The current testbed is a pickup used by the Kansas City Office of Environmental Quality. This holds hope for a biomethane powered automobile. Will we ever be running our cars on cow manure?

[Source: The Sietch Blog via Hugg]