Drivers of the much-maligned Reva G Wiz, the all-electric quadricycle, have reason to smile this morning as they pass by filling stations with long queues and rationed supplies. The reason for the mayhem can be traced directly to an upcoming two-day walk out by 1,200 employees at Britain's third largest refinery at Grangemouth. Ineos, the refinery owner, has made changes to its worker's pension arrangement which would appear to be unacceptable to the Unite union and negotiations have failed to halt the shutting down of some of it's production in preparation for the labor action.

The results of the disagreement are more wide-ranging than just two days of reduced supply. It takes time for a facility of that nature to return to its previous capacity so the effects might be felt for up to three weeks. BP's Forties pipeline may also have to be shut down because of the walk-out which could cost the companies and the government each £25 million a day. Although motoring organizations had advised motorist not to "panic-buy", supplies at many Edinburgh gas stations were getting low and one had already gone dry, according to an article in the Guardian.

[Source: Guardian]

Penn State University has really been on a green roll these last few days, getting three stories featured on our site. One had to do with a novel way to extract hydrogen from water using nanotechnology and sunlight and the second had to do with using coal and papermaking waste to make a liquid fuel. This third story again has to do with coal-based liquid fuels. Instead of looking at paper mills as potential sources for products to add to coal, they are looking to existing fuel refineries. They believe that many different fuels, including jet fuel, gasoline substitutes and diesel substitutes, can be made from coal if you add the correct refinery by-products. Penn State researchers have been working on this idea for a while now, first focusing solely on jet fuel. But, they found that while making the jet fuel they also ended up with certain amounts of fuel oil, diesel fuel and gasoline as co-products.

The refinery by-products of coal tar, refinery solvent and decant oil are being mixed with coal in different fractions. Fuel-grade coke, which is a fuel used in the steel industry, has also been used. Penn State should be familiar with the steel industry being that Pennsylvania is known as the steel capital of the U.S. (and hence the Pittsburgh Steelers football team). No mention was made of the emissions of these various fuels, so we are not suggesting that these are green fuels in any way. In fact, they are almost assuredly not green in any way. None of that means that the fuels will not be used, of course. Hopefully, the nation and the world will be on to bigger and better things by then!

[Source: Penn State]

British Petroleum (now known as simply BP) has found a way to dodge around a Great Lakes anti-pollution law. The law, written in 1970, set a limit on the amount of waste sludge and ammonia that could be dumped into Lake Michigan, as the level of pollution in the lake was getting way out of hand. A clause in the law stated that if a company was dumping at an amount under the limit, they could not increase their pollution, even if it was still under the primary limit.

Well, due to the extra-crude oil from Canada, BP is now processing at its Whiting, Indiana refinery, they don't know what to do with all the extra sludge (concentrated heavy metals) and ammonia (which causes algae blooms that kill fish). They therefore managed to get a water permit to pump 35 percent more sludge and 54 percent more ammonia into the lake, right up to the limit set by the '70s pollution law.

The refinery in question has had a large expansion added to handle the new process and needed capacity, though the original refinery - much of which is still in operation - was built in 1889 by the big man John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Co. Nifty as that is, the fact of the matter is that just three miles southeast of the Illinois/Indiana border, BP has a pipeline from the refinery to the lake 200 feet off shore, with an agitator at the bottom to mix the daily 1,584 pounds of ammonia and 4,925 pounds of sludge with the water. Is that worth the supposed 80 jobs this new permit has enabled BP to create, which supposedly is what justified the exemption? Sounds [dead] fishy to me.

[Source: Chicago Tribune]

One of the anti-ethanol arguments running around is that it takes as much energy to produce ethanol as it does gasoline. Thanks to Macon Municipal Utilities and Adkins Energy LLC, another step towards proving that wrong has been made.

With the installation of Combined Heat and Power generation systems, Macon is powering their 45 million gallon per year ethanol refinery in Missouri using a natural gas-fueled turbine, producing an estimated 25 percent less emissions in doing so. The magic number is 28,000 - the number of tons of CO2 no longer vomited into our atmosphere. Neat.

Atkins Adkins Energy has gone on a similar diet, using the same type of generator for their 40 million gallon per year plant. Somehow, they're only saving 8,700 tons of CO2, but that's still 1,400 cars worth. See the rest of the EPA Award winners here. Kudos to those two already inherently green companies going even greener.


[Source: EPA via The Auto Channel]