Aerosol emissions from biofuel combustion impact both health and climate; however, while reducing emissions through improvements to combustion technologies will improve health, the net effect on climate is largely unconstrained. In this study, we examine sensitivities in global aerosol concentration, direct radiative climate effect, and cloud-albedo aerosol indirect climate effect to uncertaint...

BACKGROUND Development of biofuels is considered as one of the important ways to replace conventional fossil energy and mitigate climate change. However, rapid increase of biofuel production could cause other environmental concerns in China such as water stress. This study is intended to evaluate the life-cycle water footprints (WF) of biofuels derived from several potential non-edible feedstoc...

provides in-depth information on various strategies and large-scale cultivation of algal biomass with updated state-of-art information and knowledge by the internationally recognized experts and subject peers in various areas of algal biofuels. Algae biofuel (Chisti, 2007) has been currently recognized as the alternative and clean energy source that attracted the interests of many researchers a...

California Policy Should Distinguish Biofuels by Differential Global Warming Effects Richard J. Plevin Energy and Resources University of California, Berkeley Biofuels such as ethanol offer potential greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions compared to petroleum-based liquid fuels. However, while the combustion of biomass is considered carbon neutral, the production of biofuels can result in considerabl...

A year ago, biofuel was a buzzword, a reasonable technical solution to many of our environmental problems. Politicians across the European Union and in North America were busy setting targets, deciding what percentage of transport fuels should be replaced by biofuels by what time. The corn-ethanol industry in the US went into overdrive, and many governments in the developing world set up fuel c...

This paper discusses the fundamentals and developments of miniaturized fuel cells, both biological and electrochemical. An overview of microfluidic fuel cells, miniaturized microbial fuel cells, enzymatic biofuel cells, and implanted biofuel cells in an attempt to provide green energy and to power implanted microdevices is provided. Also, the challenges and applications of each type of fuel cel...

Fossil fuel depletion and attempts of global warming mitigation have motivated the development of biofuels. Several feedstock and transformation pathways into biofuel have been proposed as an alternative to usual fuels. Recently, microalgae have attracted a lot of attention because of the promise of reduced competition with food crop and lowered environmental impacts. Over the last years, sever...

This paper presents a thermodynamic analysis of a high-yield biochemical process for biofuel production from lignocelluosic biomass based on a previously proposed process. Unlike the standard biochemical process, which ferments sugar intermediates to ethanol, the process under consideration converts sugars to acetic acid which is esterified and hydrogenated to produce ethanol. This process has ...

To mitigate some of the potentially deleterious environmental and agricultural consequences associated with current land-based-biofuel feedstocks, we propose the use of biofuels derived from aquatic microbial oxygenic photoautotrophs (AMOPs), more commonly known as cyanobacteria, algae, and diatoms. Herein we review their demonstrated productivity in mass culturing and aspects of their physiolo...

Highly efficient supported catalyst layers based on metallic/bimetallic (Pt, Au-Pt) nanoparticles decorated-single walled carbon nanotubes (SWNT) on Buckypaper (BP) for direct glucose fuel cell are presented here. The electrodes have been tested in mixed-reactant biofuel cell. High glucose-tolerance, stability and catalytic activity are observed for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) that resu...