Americans often speak of the $100 hamburger, the food of choice at some airport café a Cessna hour away from one’s home base. The trip to eat and return often accounts for that sum, with avgas stretching toward $6.00 per gallon. Imagine, then, making a coast-to-coast trip across one’s native land, surveying a dazzling array of scenic delights and partaking of French cuisine along the way – all for not quite that amount. Europe abounds in small, turbocharged Diesel automobiles, sometimes zippy little things that exhibit excellent fuel economy. Many of these cars strive for the “3-liter” designation – the ability to drive 100 kilometers (62 miles) on three liters of fuel (78.4 miles per gallon) and the European Union is pushing toward 95 grams of CO2 emissions per kilometer by 2020. Serge Pennec has built several airplanes using these torquey engines, creating a means of traversing distances cheaply and as greenly as possible. Diesels consume their heavier fuel more frugally than …
Genomics and Sunlight Equal Fuel
AvWeb.com has turned a moderately skeptical eye on a new energy development that would sound too good to be true if it weren’t for the prominent names involved. John Podesta, former White House Chief of Staff, is on the Board of Directors – and even more convincing, George Church, sequencer of the human genome, is a founder of and science advisor to the firm, Joule Unlimited, Inc. Their web site has more registered trademarks than Burger King*, including Liquid Fuel from the Sun™, Helioculture™, SolarConverter™, and direct-to-end-product™. Joule’s technology promises Diesel or ethanol liquid fuels in huge amounts, using “proprietary organisms” to directly convert CO2 struck by sunlight into replacements for existing fossil fuels. According to Joule, “Our technology has already been proven with the direct conversion of CO2 to liquid hydrocarbons and ethanol, avoiding the economic and environmental burden of multi-step, petroleum- or biomass-dependent methods.” Claiming “commercial-ready” status, Joule says its interconnected components are “scalable and customizable to any desired …