Concern over the economics of accessing fossil fuel reserves, and widespread acceptance of the anthropogenic origin of rising CO2 emissions and associated climate change from combusting such carbon sources, is driving academic and commercial research into new routes to sustainable fuels to meet the demands of a rapidly rising global population. Here we discuss catalytic esterification and trans...

Historically, gasoline and diesel fuels have been used for transportation, but the possible decline of oil supplies in the future is forcing nations to consider alternative fuels. Most technically and economically feasible alternative fuels have a lower energy density than gasoline, which results in a shorter range for these vehicles. This necessitates a greater need for convenient access to re...

The core objective of this paper is to document criteria for successful case studies of pilot projects implemented in urban areas and to derive lessons learned which can be transferred to other cities or regions. The successful case studies are analyzed from economic, energetic and ecological point of view, taking into account three success criteria: low costs, CO2-reduction and multiplicity (e...

Modern agriculture is an extremely energy intensive process. However high agricultural productivities and subsequently the growth of green revolution has been made possible only by large amount of energy inputs, especially those from fossil fuels. With recent price rise and scarcity of these fuels there has been a trend towards use of alternative energy sources like solar, wind, geothermal etc....

What are the fuels of the future? Seven representative carbon- and nitrogen-based fuels are evaluated on an energy basis in a power-to-fuel-to-power analysis as possible future chemical hydrogen-storage media. It is intriguing to consider that a nitrogen economy, where hydrogen obtained from water splitting is chemically stored on abundant nitrogen in the form of a nontoxic and safe nitrogen-ba...

DOE technology assessments evaluate use of ethanol as a vehicle fuel Alternative fuels offer the advantages of reduced emissions and petroleum use, but how do you choose among the different fuels? DOE’s David Rodgers finds full-energy-cycle assessments useful. A recent study showed that using ethanol made from corn reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 16-28% and petroleum use by 73-75% as compar...

In recent years, biodiesel has been considered as a good alternative of diesel fuels. Density and viscosity are two important properties of these fuels. In this study, density and kinematic viscosity of biodiesel-diesel blends were estimated by using artificial neural network (ANN). A three-layer feed forward neural network with Levenberg-Marquard (LM) algorithm was used for learning empirical ...

Complementarity of vehicles and fuels has posed significant barrier for increasing the use of alternative fuels in place of traditional ones. An initial positive number of either alternative fuel vehicle (AFV) users or alternative fueling stations are needed for the diffusion of both. This research examines the incentive of the automotive industry, in particular automobile companies focusing on...

Volatile energy costs and environmental concerns have spurred interest in the development of alternative, renewable, sustainable, and cost-effective energy resources. Environment-friendly processes involving microbes can be used to synthesize advanced biofuels. These fuels have the potential to replace fossil fuels in supporting high-power demanding machinery such as aircrafts and trucks. From ...

Based on an analysis of several case studies of alternative fuel introductions [ethanol, biodiesel, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), compressed natural gas (CNG)], requirements for alternative fuels, vehicles, and the fueling infrastructure are postulated that are necessary for successful market implementation. Affordable vehicle technology and costcompetitive fuel were identified as the most cri...