Perhaps many readers have become aware of the looming worldwide food shortage, there was a story on NPR’s The World just Monday night (March 31) about rising tensions in the bread lines of Egypt. London’s Guardian reported this past November that the crisis can be attributed to climate change (crop failures and ag diversion of rice and wheat crops) and fuel shortages – both the increasing price of petroleum fuels for transportation and agriculture as well as the diversion of staple food crops like soybeans and corn toward biofuels production.

Soaring grain prices are now exploding into full-fledged food riots in many corners of the planet, while Americans are stunned by rising prices every time they go to the grocery store. As of December, 2007 the UN Food and Agricultural Organization reported that 37 countries face immediate food crises, and 20 nations had imposed some form of food-price controls. Reuters lays additional blame on panicked speculators trading on global futures markets in the wake of recession fears fueled by the increasing defaults among Wall Street’s investment banks and stock market gamblers.

But there is hope on the horizon, particularly for those of us who were smart enough to purchase diesel powered vehicles, despite the ruinous and increasing costs of gasoline. That hope is a new source for producing biodiesel (which can run the entirety of our transportation system, including passenger cars if GM can be persuaded to come off their new diesel they’ve been sitting on in joint patent with the EPA).

Ride Lust reports that a new process to produce biodiesel from algae – thus leaving staple food crops for people who eat staple foods – may be ready to hit the market. Green Fuel Technologies has begun construction on a “Closed Water Algae” bioreactor facility that will feed from the smoke stacks of a local power plant. PetroSun has also announced that their many acres of algae ponds will be going commercial today – April 1st!

The Closed Water System technology uses energy from the sun and carbon dioxide from industrial smoke stacks to feed the algae growth, thereby ‘closing’ the carbon dioxide loop from fuel use to fuel production. This is an exciting development. Biodiesel is readily available in my locale because the nearest city requires all its mass transit and truck fleets to run on biodiesel, thus it’s available from several area stations. The problem is that it’s still more expensive than regular diesel, and goes up at the same rate as petro-diesel. That is mostly due to greed, of course, since I’m not dumb enough to believe any producers or dealers are actually pouring the excess profits into greater R&D or production. But one day soon regulators will step in, producers will recognize the gold mine doesn’t need seeding, and distributors will remember that they’ve plenty of underground tanks at truck stops that could fuel the shipping fleets. And the price will go down.

If biodiesel development can be made to go with switchgrass, algae and agricultural green-waste instead of actual food humans need to survive, basic staple food prices should go down too. Even if the financial sector goes into deep depression, you can’t have bread lines when there’s no bread. And nobody can make a market killing if nobody’s got any money to spend. So in addition to growing your Victory Garden this year to supplement your own family’s food supply, we should all be cheering these alternative biodiesel sources and technologies, helping to support production and getting in line for demand. Governments aren’t going to fix our problems. We’ll have to do it!

Ford Prodigy, cutaway view of a ‘concept’ car we could someday be able to buy… maybe. Or not.

The 100 miles per gallon car. One that carries four adults, has all the safety features that protect in accidents but weigh a lot. Peter Diamandis’ X Prize Foundation has turned their focus from space travel to automobiles. The automotive X Prize went live in April of 2007 at the New York Auto Show with a $10 million award to the winning designers of a production-ready vehicle capable of exceeding 100 mpg.

It’s not that hard to get 100 miles per gallon if you don’t mind a seriously “minimalist” vehicle. Heck, if you make it lighter than a motorbike and gin it up with solar cells, it’s not that hard to get 1,000 miles per gallon (downhill, with a tailwind, driver lying flat). But the solar cell idea isn’t that bad, now that we hear there are new plastic coatings that will generate even in low-light situations. And what about a hood scoop to use the wind of forward motion to help charge those batteries too?

Here’s hoping that a 100 mpg production vehicle that meets all safety and practical criteria does get invented. That of course won’t necessarily convince Detroit to actually make any of them, and it’s a sure bet that any designers who use the $10 million to gear up their own factory will be held to a strict quota on how few of the vehicles they’ll actually be able to produce per year (corporate welfare to Detroit). Heck, GM is still sitting on their new diesel engine (joint patent with EPA) developed years ago, that can get 60+ mpg on biodiesel. They’ll never deploy it until America demands it.

Meanwhile, Toyota’s selling more hybrids than Detroit is selling anything, though the tax incentives have sunset and the import lid is still screwed on tight. What does it take to convince these old robber barons that we need the technology they’ve been sitting on just so nobody can have it? When do we get our 100 mpg hybrids? At what point do we taxpayers quit bailing them out of their stupid decisions and let them die the death they’ve so richly deserved since the 1970s?

Other sources tell us 100 mpg hybrids already exist – but you have to build them yourself. Guess I need to get me and my ‘vintage’ diesel Mercedes into an auto shop class down at the local community college, see if I can’t convert it into an SVO-Electric hybrid using that hood scoop idea and some nice new solar cells the college can probably order at cost… we could all learn the mechanics and details, open a conversion shop, and have about half the locals in 100 mpg’s before 2010!

Links:

Progressive Automotive X PRIZE
Popular Mechanics: 100 mpg Available Now!
Edmunds: Automotive X Prize Seeks 100-mpg Car
MSN Money: 100 mpg Car is Coming

I’ve added a new blog to my blogroll, Save Fuel – Save Money today. I don’t know about your locality, but gas is pushing $4 a gallon right here in my neck of the woods right now, and will probably go to $5 a gallon before summer tourist season hits. Or, more likely, doesn’t hit this year due to the prohibitive cost of gasoline. Which as of this morning, March 11, 2008, is trading on the futures market for $109 a barrel. It probably won’t be coming down.

Sure, Europe has had $5 gasoline for years now, but Europe’s not all that big. One can drive from one end of a country to the other in a few hours, and most European countries have reliable and comfortable mass transit systems. Things we don’t have in the U.S. if you don’t happen to live on either the right or left coasts. Worse, it takes me as many hours to drive to my own state’s coast as it takes me to drive to Florida and visit relatives! It takes two long driving days to visit Mom in Oklahoma, and I’ve friends in Arizona and California I haven’t seen in years because it’s just too far away.

I bought a well-kept almost-vintage Mercedes sedan a couple of years ago for less than $2,000. It needs some rear end work, and we’ve had to replace engine parts here and there, but its biggest asset (to me) is that it’s a diesel. I can buy biodiesel in my nearest city because they run all their city buses and truck fleets on biodiesel. Unfortunately, it still costs a full dollar more than petroleum diesel. Why is that?

In our attempts to reduce our dependence on foreign supplies of fossil fuels, biodiesel seems like a pretty easy fix. I live near a rail line, over which I see literally hundreds of tank cars a day moving thousands of gallons of vegetable (and sometimes animal) oil per car. We can recycle old engine oil, used fry grease, even rendered road kill (and slaughterhouse leftovers, and animal shelter victims) to make biodiesel. But who will use it – or ethanol, which isn’t such a great environmental deal – if it consistently costs a lot more than petroleum? Doesn’t that defeat the whole plan?

We’ll be taking a closer look at fuels over the next few months, but in the meantime readers will get a lot of good information on trends and technologies from the Save Fuel blog. Check it out!