Fossil Beds National Monument Oregon wallpaper
GORP has a good list of the landscape highlights and hiking opportunities of Fossil Beds here.
Money Doesn’t Grow on Trees, But Gasoline Might
Components for green gasoline can be sythesized in a laboratory from agricultural waste. New processes are breaking the barriers to producing green gasoline on the large scale needed for industrial produciton.
Researchers make breakthrough in creating gasoline from plant matter, with almost no carbon footprintResearchers have made a breakthrough in the development of “green gasoline,” a liquid identical to standard gasoline yet created from sustainable biomass sources like switchgrass and poplar trees.
I’m not being cynical when I say that maybe I’m missing something. As a biochemistry break through this is all very laudable, but an answer to replacing fossil fuels that run our cars, I have doubts. If you have to grow the source of your energy, converting the biomass is only one part of the energy equation. You need land, water, drainage, nitrogen and phosphate to grow the poplars and switchgrass that you’re going to process into fuel. Water, land, and fertilizer are all resources that have to come from somewhere or be manufactured. Fertilizer, like the stuff we use to grow crops in mass quantities is synthesized in factories which in turn need energy to run. Once you have the chemicals you need water and need to have a way to deal with run off and any excessive leakage into aquifers. Maybe they have an answer for all of these surrounding issues, but I didn’t see where they deal with them in the article.
Horizon Reflections wallpaper. One side is a reflection of the other
tangledwing 