Saturday, July 19, 2008

The Fight Against Oil Gains a New Optimism

It was with some delight that I read the news that Honda had introduced hybrid cars to India, increasingly one of the world's most filthy and polluted nations. Hopefully, this would spur their competition to follow in their footsteps. But then, this has been a week of positive news. This ABC news item http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=5406454&page=1 is very optimistic about using plug-in hybrid cars to make oil irrelevant. I am a great believer in engineers and technology. I do think that this is achievable with the pressures of pulling off major coups in R&D being high on engineers working at developing gas alternatives in transportation, especially with gas prices where they are.

In the short term, a British departmental store has begun offering B 30 biodiesel at its pumps and Peugeot and Citroen have cleared all of their diesel cars for use with this fuel: http://www.autocar.co.uk/News/NewsArticle.aspx?AR=233984 A huge thumbs up to Morrisons and to Peugeot-Citroen! The Brits have always been nonconformists in what they do and sales of home biodiesel systems seem to be doing very well in that country as this article points out: http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/autoexpressnews/225054/doityourself_diesel_on_the_rise.html

There are other countries that could benefit from this ingenuity - a friend who returned from Portugal brought back some pictures of rivers turning green with waste olive oil and some of the raw sludge (or whatever it is called) from the crushing process of olive oil simply poured into that country's water. What a disgrace! And Portugal has beautiful scenery and terrible pollution at the same time! I do wish that some Brit entrepreneur living there would find a way of buying up this gunk from the Portuguese olive oil millers and use it commercially or domestically. It would be fantastic!

The opportunities in South Asia, of course, are immense. With more than one and a half billion people living in the region and with so many of them buying oil for cooking (all South Asian governments import palmolein and palm oil from Malaysia and from West Africa to fry food in) there should be more than a little used oil available for running buses on. Most of it simply goes down the drain in that part of the world.

Among other things, I have found some very interesting new communities that everyone who is interested could check out: http://greenhome.huddler.com/ This is a very interesting new community that I would invite anyone interested in saving money and keeping the planet green to join. There are several product promotions as well as reviews based on real life use and anyone who wishes to could post their reviews after signing up free. Ecogeek http://www.ecogeek.org/ is another interesting website that a friend sent me the URL of today. Some of their material can be found on other blogs but they have some original material and it would be useful to keep an occasional eye on this website if you are interested in the green movement. This is also a very interesting website with information on environment friendly technology: http://www.find-green.info/

I hope to have some more useful information over this weeekend for this blog. Do keep checking in and writing back to me. My special thanks to everyone who has written in with information. I would like to make this an informal, fun to read blog as you guys know, and not an encyclopedic compilation of information. if you find this fun to read, 90% of my efforts would have succeeded. The information in this is meant to be the icing on the cake. As all I do is collect this information and post it here, I am aware that you could find it elsewhere. Hopefully, my posts would make it easier to access and my writing make this a fun blog to read. Cheers!

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