The good news about fighting the global climate crisis is that there are ancillary benefits from the methods, techniques and technologies which we must adopt in order to reduce our carbon footprint. At the top of the list of those benefits is air pollution. Exacerbating a whole host of maladies including asthma and emphysema, air pollution is as dirty as its name sounds.

Proposals to dispense with fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas and petroleum in our electrical power plants receive a great deal of attention and rightly so. However, urban haze and smog are a growing problem, too, and point to air pollution statistics which may shock you. My favorite dates back to the summer of 1996.

As you will recall, Atlanta, capital city of the State of Georgia, often called the New York of the South, hosted the Olympic Games. Living in the South, I can tell you that it was a big deal for Florida, even though we were hundreds of miles away from most of the action.

Emissions of carbon monoxide, sulfur and volatile organic compounds from lawn care equipment such as mowers and trimmers are a big problem. In some ways, they are a greater problem than automobiles. It’s true!

Until I sat down and thought about it some 15 years ago, I had not realized that this makes sense. Tailpipe emissions from cars have been regulated in one form or another for decades. Not so with lawn care equipment. In fact, until just a few years ago, the patchwork of small engine pollution regulations which has sprung up around the United States did not exist.

Is it really that bad, you might ask? The answer is yes. We need new air pollution solutions.

The Environmental Protection Agency tells us that 5% of our nation’s pollution comes from lawn care equipment and this dirty air comprises a larger portion of smog in urban areas than the national average. For example, in Los Angeles, California, air pollution from edgers, mowers and trimmers exceeds the total emissions from all planes in the city’s airspace.

With such air pollution facts in mind, then, dear reader, you may come to share my urgency for finding meaningful and practical air pollution solutions. They exist and a friend of mine by the name of JP Patten of HUGR Systems in Orlando, FL has invented one of them.

It turns out that operating lawn mowers on larger platforms with diesel engines can quintuple fuel economy and reduce airborne contaminants by large percentages. The news gets better. Modern diesel engines require no modifications whatsoever in order to operate on BioDiesel. What’s more, because fuel for lawn care involves a mere fraction of what we in the United States burn for transportation, we can obtain the liquid gold in small quantities from organic sources.

In the third post in this series, I will explain how BioDiesel is a wonderful fit for the lawn care industry, including individual homeowners who cut their own lawns.

Sustainable Justice For All!

Corbett Kroehler
 

JP Patten is a BioDiesel expert and a friend of mine. If you would like to be put in touch with him, just send me an email through the Contact Corbett link in the left navigation bar of this blog and I will relay your message gladly.

Well, when I first learned of JP and his amazing technology, I immediately wondered about the economic viability of fueling a community’s landscaping activities with BioDiesel. JP had the answer and it is quite compelling. Broad BioDiesel expansion can be quick and profitable.

Average population centers (Orlando, FL fits the mold) have more than enough restaurants in clusters for practical collection and processing of kitchen waste, such as fryer grease, to sell it at around the same price per gallon as petroleum diesel. Better yet, it is recycled fuel, which is very important, is domestically produced, even more important, and enhances engine operating temperature plus fuel economy! In fact, JP’s model uses roughly one-fifth the fuel per cutting as a conventional gasoline mower and has more torque. Wow!

When was the last time you refilled the fuel tank on your lawn mower? Did you spill?

I used to have a terrible problem spilling gasoline when refilling my mower. That’s one of the reasons I switched to an electric unit years ago.

Electric landscaping equipment truly is the best choice because exhaust from small gasoline engines is very dirty. In fact, small engine smoke is a major cause of lung cancer. However, for many Americans, mowing while tethered to a wall socket is impractical.

Enter BioDiesel.

As the world embraces biofuels with growing vigor, it seems an appropriate moment for me to lay out their role in a clean energy future. For the sake of simplicity, let’s group these fuels into a pair of types, BioDiesel (designed for modern diesel engines) and ethanol (formerly known as Gasohol and designed for modified gasoline engines).

Are these fuels practical? Can they help wean the world off fossil fuels? Are they a boon to agriculture? Are there significant pitfalls?

The answer to each of the questions above is yes. The follow-up which my mind begs to have answered, then, is “Should we embrace them?” The answer also is yes but our byword must be “sustainably.”

A key argument against BioDiesel as a replacement for petroleum diesel is that the organic version costs too much, sometimes twice the price. If one includes the billions of dollars which the governments of the world spend defending oil production fields and subsidizing retail prices, the price per gallon is about even. However, that argument is beyond the scope of this column.

If we perform an apples-to-apples comparison between the two fuels, we find that BioDiesel expansion is aided by economies of scale. It works like this: the mechanism for extracting petroleum from the earth, shipping it, refining it, shipping it again and delivering it has existed for decades. Most of the kinks in the supply chain not only have been resolved but function smoothly.

Such is not the case with BioDiesel.

The supply chain for BioDiesel which can bring us retail prices to rival those of petroleum diesel only needs to differ from the conventional model in two ways:

1) The source is used kitchen grease and other such cooking waste rather than a viscous goo from the ground; and

2) The entire process can be contained within a single community.

In October of 2007, I wrote about the importance of sustainability in our determination of the best biofuels to replace fossil fuels. The transportation fuels industry has heard me and the rest of the environmental community because they already have moved into second generation biofuels, with a plant called jatropha leading the pack.

Biodiesel for bus and truck fleets continues to make sense for several reasons, with the fact that it includes a significant element of recycling at the top of the list. However, even if we omit buses and trucks from the dozens of engine types in use today, there are a great many which need to be weaned off fossil fuels.

Terrestrial transportation is the easiest of the paradigms to address in this regard because in large geographical areas, the fuels safely can be limited to a temperature range of well under 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The same cannot be said of aviation fuels. Moreover, aviation fuels carry much higher performance standards than gasoline and, of course, geography becomes an enemy when attempting to move the world’s commercial aviation fleet to biofuels all at once.

It is for these reasons that I ardently embrace offsets for air travelers. Moreover, I endorse the offsets from CarbonFund.org because they have the option of radiative forcing. However, offsets are not a solution. They merely are a part of the interim steps which everyone must take in order to begin to reverse the damage of climate change. Ultimately, we need to move fully to hydrogen for all of our energy needs and biofuels can be a vital step in that direction.

Next time, I will tell you how jatropha oil is being used in aviation.

Source: www.jatropha.org Author: Photo by R. K. Henning

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

In addition to abundance and global standardization, the main reason that kerosene is the only aviation fuel which the major airlines use is that it performs well in very harsh conditions. Think about it: during long, high-altitude flights, the temperature in and around the wing of an aircraft can drop nearly to 100 degrees below zero! However, even in such circumstances, the fuel must ignite and combust in much the same way and at the same high temperature as when the plane is on the ground.

That is no easy feat and certainly is out of the question for petroleum diesel fuel.

Needless to say then, as the aviation industry has received greater and greater demands to lower its carbon footprint and escape the monopolistic tyranny of OPEC as its fuel supplier, the pace at which it experiments with biofuels has grown. It now appears that jatropha oil may be the answer.

As applied to biofuels, the triple bottom line of sustainability demands that the source materials not just be organic but that their use not damage the environment or the prosperity of agricultural workers. Corn-based and sugar-based ethanol often fail that test because they are nearly impossible to grow under those restrictions. Moreover, corn-based and sugar-based ethanol assist with weaning us off fossil fuels but really don’t reduce carbon loading over gasoline on a gallon-by-gallon basis.

Jatropha is quite different. Here are the key distinctions:

1) In most places, it is considered a weed, meaning that it can be grown alongside existing crops rather than in place of them.

2) Its seed is inedible. Hence, growers never face that quandary of growing it as a feed stock rather than for fuel.

3) It grows very effectively on land which is unsuitable for feed crops, opening up billions of acres of land to agriculture which currently do not fit the definition of arable.

4) In many places, jatropha can be harvested at any time, leaving peak times free for farmers to continue bringing in their feed crops.

5) The carbon loading of jatropha is roughly half that of corn or sugar, making it a true improvement over gasoline.

6) The oxygen density of processed jatropha oil can be minimized, making the fuel suitable for high-altitude jet engines, which neither ethanol nor petroleum-based gasoline ever will achieve.

7) Hence, it can be used in jet aircraft with no mechanical modifications.

I trust, then, that you grasp why I am so enthusiastic about jatropha oil, especially its potential role in commercial aviation as a replacement for kerosene. In the third installment of this series, I will tell you about Air New Zealand’s impressive and historic first flight with sustainable jatropha which took place last month.

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

In my last thread, when I heralded the arrival of the film FUEL, I mentioned the important role of biofuels as a key interim technology. Automobiles must be consumers of biofuels in order to fight global warming on our path to the eventual adoption of hydrogen as the only automotive fuel. BioDiesel is a vital type of biofuel.

When people contemplate burning BioDiesel in their car rather than gasoline, a common question is whether special engine modifications are necessary. In modern cars, the answer is no. In fact, BioDiesel has been such a success, as exemplified by the 2009 Green Car of the Year, the Volkwagen Jetta, that some racing teams use it.

As author of this blog, I have told you about high fuel efficiency available in European models of cars sold in North America today. I also told you about the VW Forest in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley. I mention both not as an endorsement of a particular company or product but of good corporate stewardship.

With its 2009 Jetta TDI, Volkswagen has done it again, receiving the 2009 Green Car of the Year Award from Green Car Journal and Drivers’ Choice Best of the Year from MotorWeek. Those plaudits have as much to do with the high fuel efficiency and low emissions of the model as they do with how well the car drives.

That is my point here. One day, all of us will use hydrogen for our exclusive automotive fuel. Until then, though, models such as the 2009 Jetta TDI can help us embrace BioDiesel and fuel efficiency happily. If you are in the market for a new car, I recommend that you consider this course. Thousands of magazine readers in North America have heard a similar endorsement from publications they trust.

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler