biofuel

Aquaflow’s Aussie adventure

by Bryan Walker August 14, 2009

Blenheim company Aquaflow, appropriately, is not standing still. BusinessGreen reports it has embarked on a fund-raising programme in Australia to attract financing for the first of up to 16 pilot plants to demonstrate its algae fuel technology. For those who aren’t familiar with the enterprise, it extracts wild algae at the point of discharge from [...]

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South Island partnership in renewable biofuel

by Bryan Walker July 28, 2009

An interesting item of news concerning Aquaflow, the Blenheim algae farming company written about previously on Hot Topic here and here. They are combining efforts with another South Island company Solray Energy on the conversion of the harvested algae into fuel. The Aquaflow operation in the Marlborough sewage ponds does two things – produces wild [...]

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Go with the flow: NZ algae pioneers spark US interest

by Bryan Walker July 5, 2009

New Zealand company Aquaflow, which I wrote about in this post, has received praise in an article in Yale Environment 360 describing a project to use the city of Minneapolis’s sewage as a feedstock for algae from which biofuel can be derived.  A University of Minnesota professor, Roger Ruan, is engaged in the research and [...]

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Shaking the money tree

by Gareth April 15, 2009

NZ Incorporated has moved from a Kyoto deficit to a surplus, according to the 2009 Net Position Report [PDF] released today. A reduction in agricultural emissions due to the 2007/8 drought, and an upwards revision in forest carbon have produced an expected surplus of 9.6 million tonnes of carbon over the first Kyoto commitment period: [...]

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The other side of the world

by Gareth April 8, 2009

Imagine this: the country’s leading business organisation — noted for its robust espousal of free markets and business freedom — takes the government to task for not doing enough, fast enough to get emissions on a downward path. So it releases four roadmaps, for the power, industrial, energy and transport sectors designed to deliver emissions [...]

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Games without frontiers

by Gareth January 12, 2009

Jeux sans frontières realised in Clim’ City, an interesting learning game with obvious antecedents from Bordeaux’s Cap Sciences centre: reorganise the energy sources and economy of this French city and its surroundings – from ski field to beach resort – to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without crippling the economy. According to the Technology Review story, [...]

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Coppiced willow farming here

by Bryan Walker January 4, 2009

This column appeared in the Waikato Times in August 2008.  I have altered some of the wording to update it for this Hot Topic post. The change to renewable energy sources can seem daunting. Those with stakes in fossil fuels are often negative, claiming change will be too expensive, too difficult, or not yet necessary. [...]

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Swell maps, and other stories

by Gareth May 20, 2008

Time for another round up of climate-related news. Hot on the web today (for cartophiles, at least) is that Google Earth has gained a swag of new climate change related information, the result of collaboration between Google, the UK Government, the Met Office Hadley Centre and the British Antarctic Survey. The Climate Change in Our [...]

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Another Hot Topic, skiing’s future, batteries, kites, u.s.w.

by Gareth January 22, 2008

There’s another Hot Topic on the bookshelves – not in NZ, but in the UK. Sir David King, the sometimes controversial scientific adviser to Tony Blair has (with Gabrielle Walker) penned The Hot Topic: How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights On. Reviews in The Times and The Guardian. It will no [...]

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Blues from an airplane

by Gareth January 4, 2008

Two Otago University physicists, Inga Smith and Craig Rodger, have calculated the CO2 equivalent emissions generated by international tourist visits to NZ, and find that in 2005 the return flights accounted for almost 8 million tonnes of CO2e – about the same as emissions by the country’s entire power sector – around 10 percent of [...]

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