OK, fame would be overstating it, even on a local level. But we did get air. At any rate, Check out last night’s green energy link on WVEC-TV 13. Now it’s looking forward to actually doing the work . . .
Food for Thought
“Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation.”
Theodore Roosevelt
Nice! Hard hitting piece: “Jet fuel has a lot of characteristics.” That’s journalism. Hope all’s well with you.
Hey Andy — great to hear from you! I don’t understand what you mean – jet fuel does have a lot characteristics!
Seriously, I winced when I heard that one too. That indeed is journalism. But I thought she did a good job generally getting an appropriate message out, given that reporters in our area are, on the whole, not intimately engaged with science.
Given the limitations of a 2 min piece, I thought it was pretty substantial. The reporter probably just left out a word or phrase out on the jet fuel bit. It sounds as if you have been successful in generating interest within DoD?
Thanks Eric. She did seem to imply that we were on the DoD gravy train but I think that was spun out of my mentioning that the Navy had just signed a contract (with Solazyme in San Diego, I think) to provide algal fuel for jets and even ships. Hope we can get a little of that action too!
Thanks for the pointer Emmett. Solazyme’s website indicates a multimillion dollar contract for the ship fuel and $200K for the jet fuel. Skimming their website, it appears they have developed just a potentially more efficient (?) way of turning terrestrial plant material into fuel, as opposed to your approach which would seem to eliminate the terrestrial biomass altogether. I don’t know anything about this field of research, but have to believe that if there were the potential for significant differences in the efficiencies of the two processes, someone ought to be interested in learning that.