Crambe is the next clean green gasoline
By Susan Wilson
Many different plants are being studied as possible sources of not just ethanol to mix with fossil fuels, but as an actual source of gasoline or diesel from green renewable resources. Most of the plants that are being studied are oilseed plants like rapeseed and crambe.
According to the Energy and Environmental Research Center (EERC) at the University of Arizona, the center as begun a 1 million dollar project to study the production of diesel, jet and other fuels from oilseed plants.
Crambe, a plant that is native to the Mediterranean, was brought to the US by the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in the 1940’s. The plant is hardy and survives the extremes of the North Dakota desert.
The oil from the crambe plant has a variety of uses including “industrial lubricant, corrosion inhibitor, and an ingredient in the making of synthetic rubber”. Another plus is that crambe oil “contains 50-60 percent erucic acid” that is used to make “plastic films, plasticizers, nylon, adhesives and electrical insulation”. Most of the erucic acid that has been used to create the afore mentioned products usually comes from imported rapeseed oil. Using locally grown crambe reduces the carbon footprint of the final products because it reduces CO2 emitted during transportation.
The that are being created from crambe fuels are “indistinguishable” from all types of fossil fuels. This means that existing pipelines can be used to transport the oil from place to place. Also, these fuels don’t require any drastic changes to existing automobiles, planes and trucks. Until the growth and processing of crambe can be ramped up dramatically to replace fossil fuel or complement other sources of comparable fuels derived from other oil seeds and genetically altered algae, fuel from the crambe plant can be mixed with regular fuel to reduce the amount of fossil fuel used in the U. S.
The only way to wean the U. S. off of fossil fuels and fuels that create large amounts of pollution is to reduce the number cars driven, the amount of driving, and introduction of green fuels and other alternative energies like solar, and electricity from wind, solar and wave power.
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February 25th, 2009
Good article – a quick proofread would have been nice though. “The that”????