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It fuels your party, your buzz and your hangover the next day, but believe it or not tequila may soon be fueling your car. That’s because the agave plant extract used to make liquor can also be used to make an ethanol like alcohol which can serve as vehicle fuel, won’t interfere with food crops, and can even be grown in the desert. Someday, our cars may hit the bottle more often than we do, but at least it won’t be hitting our wallets very hard.
Link Image via Wikimedia Commons
Cornier Than Ethanol – $14.95 | Design by Chris Murphy, modeled by Ana Lilia
Here’s the perfect T-shirt for those who love corny jokes like:
Q: Why did Beethoven get rid of his chickens?
A: Because they kept on saying "Bach, Bach, Bach"
From the NeatoShop: Link | More Funny T-Shirts, Science T-Shirts
Duckweed spreads like wildfire to cover ponds. Jay Cheng, a biological engineer at North Carolina State University says this tiny aquatic plant could be a way to clean up industrial farm waste AND provide fuel for our vehicles!
More than a decade ago, Cheng and fellow NC State forestry professor Anne-Marie Stomp wondered whether fast-growing duckweed, commonly seen in shallow ponds, might remediate animal waste. Excrement from the billions of animals raised every year in America’s factory farms has fouled watersheds, especially in the South, and fed oxygen-gobbling algae blooms responsible for rapidly-spreading coastal dead zones.
Duckweed, they discovered, has an appetite for animal waste, quickly converting it to leafy starch that can then be converted into ethanol. The current source for most U.S. ethanol is industrial-scale corn farming, which requires large amounts of toxic pesticides and dead zone-feeding, fuel-intensive fertilizers. When the costs are added up, corn-based ethanol may prove little cleaner than gasoline.
