Environmental News Roundup, New Year Edition

– British engineers have developed a new kind of cement that is actually carbon-negative:

Making traditional cement results in greenhouse gas emissions from two sources: it requires intense heat, and so a lot of energy to heat up the ovens that cook the raw material, such as limestone. That then releases further CO2 as it burns. But, until now, no one has found a large-scale way to tackle this fundamental problem.

Novacem’s cement, based on magnesium silicates, not only requires much less heating, it also absorbs large amounts of CO2 as it hardens, making it carbon negative. Set up by Vlasopoulos and his colleagues at Imperial College London, Novacem has already attracted the attention of major construction companies such as Rio Tinto Minerals, WSP Group and Laing O’Rourke, and investors including the Carbon Trust.

Now that’s carbon sequestration we can believe in!

– Jatropha oil shows great promise as a jet fuel. As a biodiesel, it delivers four times the fuel of soy, and ten times the fuel of corn ethanol, and it comes very close to being a drop-in replacement for A1 jet fuel; only the lack of aromatic oils that preserve engine parts keeps it from being one, which is why it currently must be mixed with Jet A1 to be safely used in jets. It actually freezes at a lower temperature than Jet A1, whereas most currently-known biofuels freeze at higher temperatures, thus making them unsuitable for high-altitude jet use. Oh, and did I mention that it’s being used as a bioremediation crop to clean up polluted land?

– Speaking of biofuels, your coffee grounds might actually provide biodiesel as well as stove pellets:

According to research from the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Nevada, used coffee grounds could be a near-endless and extremely profitable source of biofuels. Not only do the grounds themselves contain a huge amount of oil, the grounds still have use after the oil has been extracted. The dried grounds can become fuel pellets for stoves, or be used as compost, meaning the process leaves almost no waste behind.

Coffee’s antioxidants also help keep the oil from turning rancid right away. It’s estimated that the annual grounds output from Starbucks alone could produce 2.92 million gallons of biodiesel and 89,000 tons of fuel pellets. Nice!

– Thinking about your own turnkey wind system? An Iowa family ordered one and is looking forward to using it. (Of course, if you’re technically handy and know your way around electricity, you can build a somewhat smaller, and much cheaper, version for things like camping or other off-grid applications.)