Yamaha Motor Test-Drives Golf Cart Fuelled by Cow Dung

Nice. Yamaha invents a golf-cart that runs on biofuel from cow poop, then they test it in a town in Japan that actually promotes the use of biofuels at every turn. Now I'm not sure of the value a golf cart that runs on methane has. Is the carbon footprint of a methane gas golf cart smaller than that of charging a battery with a coal fired electricity plant? Or what about charging the batteries using a solar array or wind power? Or a small turbine that is powered by methane gas from cow poop? I'm not sure. Perhaps it is just the imagination that kicked in and Yamaha wanted to see if it was scalable. But I would rather see them put some brain power behind a hydrogen fuel cell that burns clean.

San Francisco Turns Potty Power Green

Just when I start to teter on the brink of despair with respect to the state of renewable energy (note self: stop listening to the naysayers), a company's ingenuity surfaces once again and makes me sigh a bit of relief. In this article, San Fran is going to capture all of the grease that is poured down the sewer drains and convert it to biofuels. Nice.

U.S. Forest Service Turns to Cow Power

Kudos to the U.S. Forest Service for finding alternative methods of creating electricity. Now, methane is still a fossil fuel, but this cow power plant is capturing the methane from cow manure and other agricultural waste to burn it in order to generate electricity. If the methane wasn't captured it would just waft into the air and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions (the article says that methane is 20 times more harmful than CO2 in trapping heat in the Earth's atmosphere). So I can't complain too much. I betcha we could capture a lot of that there methane up in Greeley, Colorado.

Lab Makes Renewable Diesel Fuel from E. Coli Poop

I just had to post this because I love the headline. I can't remember a time when a headline had the word, "poop" in it. Kidding aside this is an interesting development by LS9, Inc. They have been feeding sugar to genetically altered bacteria and these bacteria have been pooping diesel fuel. Cool eh?