Bio Fuel. What’s New.

So, we may now have another contender in the biofuel market. Though contender is probably the wrong description, because if biofuels ever become the norm, and I think that in South America biofuel is an everyday fuel, then it will be produced from several different sources.

I have come across two related articles on the possible use of waste Water Melons as a source of biofuel, which makes sense, because valuable land is not taken over specifically for growing biofuel crops. I would think that most waste fruit could be used to produce oceans of biofuel, because the amount of fruit wasted every year must be phenomenal. You can click through to the second article here; convert rejected fruits into biofuel.

Now we have a number of renewable fuels vying for the title of the ultimate fuel to power our industries, and our domestic lifestyles. Personally, on the domestic front, I think, and favour myself, that the power of the future will be good old electricity. Certainly electrical power makes sense for our domestic vehicles, because that power can be acquired cheaply and easily. Also for our household use, electricity is to be had in abundance, and can also be acquired very cheaply and easily.

HHO is gaining ground, but I don’t se it as a long term option. In fact HHO and biofuels may be just a stop gap, and they do have one big drawback, they need to use combustion to convert their power into motion, which is really a very inefficient medium.

Actually my money is on electrical power, as the power that will ultimately take us into the future. As long as our Sun shines, we shall have an abundance of power, more than enough to power our planet for as long as we can see into the future. By the time our Sun finally expires, in about a billion years, and if we survive that long, and don’t kill our planet without outside influence, then the chances are that we will have moved on by then, though whether to a state of utopia is debatable. I have to admit, that looking at the state of mankind at the moment, utopia isn’t going to be any time soon, so it’s just as well we have a billion years to get it together. Does our planet have a billion years? With us at the helm!? Well, I do have my doubts.

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Are Rejected Melons the Next Form of Renewable Energy?

Thu, 08/27/2009 – 2:00pm by YumSugar
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A colossal food fight is one way to use up the season’s supply of subpar produce. But scientists have discovered another: convert rejected fruits into biofuel. The study, conducted by USDA researchers and published in the journal Biotechnology For Biofuels, found that the 360,000 tons of fruit rejected by US retailers each year could be converted into roughly two million gallons of biofuel.

Research team leader Wayne Fish said that 50 percent of the fruit, which is typically left in the fields and not sold due to cosmetic imperfections, is fermentable into ethanol, which can be used as fuel, “We’ve shown that the juice of these melons is a source of readily fermentable sugars, representing a heretofore untapped feedstock for ethanol biofuel production.” I’d never considered that fruit could be a viable source of renewable energy — but I find it refreshing (although perhaps not as refreshing as, say, an In-Sandíary).

Are you surprised to hear that watermelon could have potential past the typical Summer barbecue?
Source: Getty