technology, going greenAlmost two years ago from today, I sat in one of the last courses of my college career. It was class on how technology effects society and the speaker of the day came to talk to us about future fuels to expect on the horizon. At that time all the rage was corn based bio-diesel. Manufactures had started producing cars that ran on the stuff, bio-diesel gas stations started popping up and hippies all over the country went from fast food joint to restaurant in search of grease to pour into their homemade bio-diesel Volkswagen engines. This speaker almost immediately, dead faced told us corn created bio-diesel is on the way out. He explained the amount of farming land, water it takes to grow corn and the strain it takes on corn as a source of food was all not worth the fueling benefits. He said technology was leading research to the world of algae.

 

Algae can grow in any environment because it doesn’t take much to create a little shelter to house it during the growth process, it is relatively cheap to cultivate and algae is the first stage of how oil comes to be after being crushed and changed within bed rock. The video above shows how this technology is being used today. These scientists pour liquefied algae oil into a diesel truck tank.  They are on the cutting edge of going green technology. The truck fires right up and burns clean.

I recently saw a GE commercial publicizing the advancements in algae they have been working on. Algae is a somewhat unknown fuel technology to the average person but it is going to catch on. People who are working on this environment friendly tech are no different then those spreading information on solar panels within American National Solar at http://www.americannationalsolar.com/.

Almost every week there seems to be new going green advancements. The video featured above only had 117 views when I found it.  Less then a couple of weeks old, viewers plainly see this diesel Ford truck had no issues running on the new fuel source. Out with the old and in with the new. Advancements in technology are really pushing what starts as a crude idea into a working science experiment faster then ever. This whole facet of the science and technology always fascinates me. These are the people who are going to make the day-to-day lives of billions different decades out from now.