Wood pulp is an obvious ingredient for the paper industry, but the renewable product has untapped potential in other uses like a car fender.

The business world today revolves around increased productivity in people and in equipment, but how much more productive can a tree be? Quite a bit more, said a University of Maine professor. Wood pulp is an obvious ingredient for the paper industry, but the renewable product has untapped potential in other uses like a car fender.
With a three-year $1 million grant from the US Department of Energy and a contract with International Paper, Adriaan van Heiningen, who works in the University of Maine department of chemical and biological engineering, is focusing on a portion of pulp known as hemicelluloses. In a pulp mill, most of the hemicelluloses end up in the spent pulping liquor and burns off.
However, hemicelluloses contain a considerable amount of oxygen and do not generate much heat when burned in industry boilers. Therefore, van Heiningen wants to increase the value of hemicelluloses for the paper industry by using it for new value-added products ranging from ethanol to car fenders and table tops, isa.org reported.
"The paper industry in the United States needs new sources of revenue to compete internationally, and the US needs alternative fuels to reduce its dependence on fossil fuel," van Heiningen said. "The process that I am working on could use more of the biomass (in trees) and produce more products at competitive prices."
van Heiningen has more than twenty years of experience in pulp and paper research. His team is working on new uses of hemicelluloses extracted from wood chips before users convert the chips into pulp. In laboratories, the wood chips undergo chemical extraction at varying temperatures and pressures.
Hemicellulose-based polymers will go to the Advanced Engineered Wood Composite Center to make new composite products such as table tops and car fenders. The trick, van Heiningen said, is to extract hemicelluloses in a way that preserves the quality of chips used in the standard Kraft chemical pulp process. After extracting hemicelluloses, the researchers run chips through that process to produce wood pulp.
The extracted hemicelluloses then ferments into fuel ethanol and/or further converts into other chemicals to form industrial polymers. van Heiningen's group is also looking into ways to add the hemicelluloses back into Kraft wood pulp to increase paper production.
A future manufacturing plant that would use these technologies is an "integrated forest products biorefinery," said van Heiningen. Just as in a petrochemical refinery, the amount of the different product streams produced by such a biorefinery would depend on the prices for pulp, ethanol, electricity, and other products, van Heiningen said.
"The basic concept is not new," van Heiningen said, "but we are developing new technologies that will make it economical and keep our pulp and paper industry competitive."

Researchers at Denver, Colorado-based Luca Technologies have made a discovery regarding natural gas production in Wyoming's Powder River Basin that could lead to a long-term source of renewable energy.
The company announced that laboratory evidence shows that the Powder River Basin (PRB) coals are generating natural gas in real time through the ongoing activity of anaerobic microbes (bacteria that live in the absence of oxygen) resident in those coal fields. The company has termed sites where this microbial conversion of hydrocarbon deposits (coals, organic shales, or oil) to methane occurs "Geobioreactors," and believes the careful management of such sites may offer a new long-term solution to US energy needs.
Robert Pfeiffer, LUCA Technologies president and chief executive officer commented, "Our research on native coal, water and microbial samples from the PRB has determined that PRB coals can produce natural gas in real time. This finding suggests that the gas in the PRB need not be an ancient remnant of microbial activity, as generally believed, but instead is being actively created today, e4engineering.com reported.
"Moreover, we can increase or decrease methane production by PRB microbes by altering their access to water or nutrients, or halt gas production entirely by exposing the organisms to oxygen or heat sterilization. This finding holds the potential of turning what is today thought to be a finite energy resource into a renewable source of natural gas that could potentially go on for hundreds of years."
LUCA believes that in order to attempt to maximise the ultimate recovery of methane from this potentially enormous natural energy resource it will be necessary to amend certain current operating practices as well as review current legal and regulatory underpinnings of energy development. The company is currently discussing its findings with Wyoming and US national agencies, as well as with major energy companies working in the PRB region.

Microbial Methane Production From Coal
It has long been known that certain ancient microorganisms are "methanogens", which are microbes that generate methane by metabolizing other hydrocarbon sources. While it has also been generally accepted that much of the methane resident in coal fields was produced by such organisms, most of this production was thought to have occurred millions of years ago, when the hydrocarbon deposits were less mature and closer to the surface of the earth. More recently, however, research has suggested that living methanogenic organisms may be present and actively forming methane within some major coalfields.
LUCA scientists, employing the tools of modern biotechnology and genomics, have confirmed the presence of such microbes within anaerobic core samples from the PRB. In addition to demonstrating that methane production by these microbes can be stimulated by the introduction of additional nutrient compounds, or suppressed by heat sterilization or the introduction of oxygen, LUCA has shown that radio-labeled CO2 (carbon dioxide) introduced to these PWB core samples is converted to radio-labeled methane. This demonstrates that the methane formation is the result of a biological process occurring today.

Experts still see a spike in prices to $70 a barrel as very possible.

The oil market appears to have peaked for now. But a sudden spike upwards remains very likely, due to one of numerous supply-side factors. And a return to low oil prices looks very unlikely indeed.
Oil price observers have been caught a little off-guard over the past week or so with the price of crude suddenly dipping to around $45 a barrel rather than maintaining $55 and pushing towards $60 a barrel. What has happened? Has the situation changed?
To answer the last question first: Not much. A slowdown in Chinese growth and a further up-tick in US interest rates are lowering demand estimates for next year, though not by a huge margin. The eurozone is showing weakness in the face of a falling US dollar, which keeps oil prices down but is bad for exports. And there is a lot of crude oil at sea for delivery soon.
Meanwhile, the voracious energy demand from China--which has helped boost world oil consumption by four million barrels per day over the past two years--is still in place. A country where the car population has doubled in the past five years can not suddenly reign in demand unless in an economic crisis, which it is not, ameinfo.com reported`.
Experts still see a spike in prices to $70 a barrel as very possible. The list of possible supply-side disruptions is almost too long to be worth spelling out, and ranges from labor problems in Nigeria and Norway to terrorist attacks in the Middle East and elsewhere.
What is needed, argue the analysts, is a long enough-period of sustained high oil prices to convince the oil majors that they need to invest more in production. Then the actual supply of oil would begin to grow to meet the upturn in demand, and this would check prices and eventually send them into reverse.
The important point is that this sort of investment is not yet in sight. And when it does happen, and market prices will force it to happen, it will still take three to four years for new capacity to come on stream and dampen prices. Abu Dhabi is currently the only place in the world investing significantly in new capacity. Just how long will it take for the rest of the oil producers to catch up?
Well, a big energy shock might be needed to get things moving, say the pessimists. This will shake politicians and business policymakers out of their present languid complacency, and result in an emergency mentality.
It is not that world oil reserves are running out. It is that installed capacity is not sufficient to meet changing demand patterns.
Incidentally, this scenario for oil leaves the oil majors seriously undervalued by global stock markets, and any fall in oil stock prices alongside lower oil prices can be seen as a great buying opportunity. How many other industries can see rising demand and prices for their sector?

In one of Nairobi's poorest neighborhoods, people have started working to make the best of the free energy potential of the sun.
Orders are already beginning to flood into the Kibera Community Youth Project (KCYP) for solar panels built in a small workshop in the heart of one of Africa's biggest slums.
Using skills and equipment passed on to them by a British volunteer, the young people are engaged in the entire line of production, from slicing the silicon sheets, to wiring the connectors, to calculating the correct voltages.
"We've been making solar panels of different sizes--12, nine and six volts," says Mills Shamoli, a regular attendee at the solar energy group.
"We've learnt that they can power different sizes of radio, as well as charging mobiles and rechargeable batteries."

No Batteries
British volunteer John Keane had a hunch the solar panels could be a popular product, after an earlier experience of living in a Tanzanian village with no electricity, bbc.co.uk reported.
"Everyone here seems to have a radio, but many of them don't have the funds to continually buy batteries, as they often don't have a reliable source of income," he says.
Many of the young people working on the solar project have never had a job, or seen anyone in their families have a job.
The average wage in Kibera is $1 a day but a small solar panel which takes just a matter of minutes to put together can sell for around $5.

Investment Needed
Just a few months after the group completed their first prototype radio solar panel, they are already drawing up a business plan to turn the project into a self-sustaining enterprise.
If they are successful in attracting investment, they would like to expand their sales to rural parts of western Kenya, where the electricity supply is often sporadic.
Fred Ouko is the coordinator of KCYP and he says the young people are really starting to gain in confidence.
"What I want to see is real empowerment, real benefit trickling down to individual persons," he says.
"They're actually making something up to a full product and then selling it, and they know now they can do this for themselves."

Despite one of the most strained cross-strait relations for more than half a century, China and Taiwan have been increasingly trading in refined petroleum products recently. Competing against Japanese and Western oil traders, China's two largest state-owned oil companies and one trading house have been buying up oil products from Taiwan's two major oil refiners. The trading solves two problems at once: a refining capacity shortage in China and excess capacity in Taiwan.
The issue of growing cross-strait economic and trade relations is not new, especially after both China and Taiwan were approved to join the World Trade Organization in December 2001. China became Taiwan's largest trading partner in 2003, followed by Japan and the United States. Taiwan was the sixth-largest trading partner of China that same year, after Japan, the US, the European Union, Hong Kong and South Korea. Unlike other commodities, however, oil has been viewed as one intimately intertwined with national strategies. This is why the active fuel trade between the two estranged nations comes across as a bit surprising, atimes.com reported.
Oil traders in China and Taiwan, however, don't care much about national strategies or hardball politics; all they are interested in are profits. "Business is business," an official at Chinese Petroleum Corp (CPC), Taiwan's largest national oil company, told Asia Times Online on condition of anonymity.
Among active market players from the Chinese side are state-owned oil giants China Petroleum & Chemical Co (Sinopec), PetroChina, and China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC). Besides this trio, Sinopec's Singapore subsidiary China International United Petroleum & Chemical Co (Unipec) and Chinese trading house Sinoying Singapore are also active participants. On the Taiwanese side, CPC and Taiwan's second-largest private oil company Formosa Petrochemical Corp (FPC) are the flag-bearers of the burgeoning oil trade.
China and Taiwan started to nurture and promote ties between their oil companies in January 2003, when the two governments agreed to allow CNOOC and CPC jointly to search for oil reserves in the Tainan Basin, which spans Taiwanese and Chinese waters, in an effort to curb mounting oil-import bills. Though China has been the world's second-largest crude importer after the US since last year, it has always lacked the necessary refining capacity to produce oil products. This is what drove China to turn to Taiwan, which lapped up the opportunity to sell its excess energy to such a large market.
Most recently, Taiwan's CPC awarded its gasoline sale tender for November loading to Sinopec, while FPC sold a medium-range cargo, about 30,000 tons, of fuel oil to Sinoying for loading in November. CPC sold one medium-range cargo of 0.2%-sulfur gas oil to PetroChina for loading in mid-December. Also this month, FPC signed gas-oil supply contracts for the next year with Unipec for the first time.
The political standoff between the two countries entails that cargoes originating in Taiwan cannot go to any Chinese port directly. So whenever a China-bound cargo is loaded in Taiwan, that vessel must stop at Hong Kong or Japan's Ishigaki Island. There, the ship-owner has to document the change of loading-port name from Taiwanese ports to Hong Kong or Ishigaki. According to oil traders, this is not a change of ship ownership, just a change of port of origin. Traders say it takes just one to two hours for this re-documentation, but the unnecessary paperwork is still economically inefficient.
In China, demand for oil continues to grow rapidly. In the first nine months of this year, imports hit 22.65 million tons, a whopping 23% rise over the same period a year ago. This is just shy of the record 23.79 million tons the country imported for all of 2003. If China's demand continues to grow the way it has been, there is every possibility that even the re-documentation system will be dumped for more direct, efficient trading.