You gotta hand it to those people who are creating real-world solutions to real-world problems. Giant solar-collecting space lasers are pretty cool...but Sintex is for real. The Indian plastics company has created a very simple "digester" that takes something we have too much of (poop) and turns it into something we don't have enough of (energy).

The digester can actually take any organic material, including agricultural waste, kitchen scraps, or cow dung, and convert it to methane. This happens naturally, of course, and is happening in your septic tank (or at your sewage treatment plant) right now. The difference is that Sintex's biogas reactor has a little tube that moves the methane into a storage container. From there, the methane can be used for any natural gas application. Cooking, drying clothes, heating the home, boiling water, etc.

A "primed" digester (primed with cow dung, for a source of good bacteria) can digest all the waste of a four-person household and produce enough energy for that household to cook all of its meals! The device costs $425 and will pay for itself in less than two years. The Indian government has agreed to subsidize 1/3 of the cost of the units. In theory, that will actually save the government money, as they won't have to deal with the waste in other ways.

Sintex has only installed about 100 of the devices...but just wait. When real-world problems get real-world solutions, it's hard to hold them back from success.

Via Forbes

In a 747 containing a stunning 5% biofuel, Virgin Atlantic proved that you can indeed fly a plane on bio-diesel.

There was actually some question as to whether it would be possible actually, because jet fuel has to stay liquid and non-viscous at extremely low temperatures. Most bio-diesel at those temperatures would become too thick to feed into the engines. However, a young biofuel startup in Seattle, Imperium, created a mixture that when mixed in ratios up to 40:60 with jet fuel, stayed usable.

The Virgin flight ran one of the four engines on a 20:80 mix of the Imperium fuel, for an overall replacement of 1/20th of the fuel used on the flight. Of course, with recent fears over the sustainability of bio-fuels due to replacement of food crops and deforestation, it's unclear whether bio-diesel is going to escape from this battle in tact. Only if large-scale production of bio-diesel from algae hits the mainstream will we see this technology taking off.

Ethanol has more of a future, as it's easier to produce it in mass quantities from waste products. However, ethanol contains less energy than bio-diesel per gram, which is a trade-off the airline industry is unlikely to make, even if they can get it to run in jet engines.

Via the Wall Street Journal