< A design group has come up with the perfect solution for those people who want the appearance of a fire, while reducing the risk of poisonous fumes and the mess of combustion. It is called “EcoSmart Fire” to emphasize how smart it is to have an Ethanol flame burning in your house.

My first questions were, of course, what is the actual heat output of this thing and whether it is practical to assume a ready supply of denatured ethanol. Unfortunately this is probably the wrong approach to this new technology — finding a way to enhance the ambiance of a space already running on central heat seems to be the main point, with only a very basic level of practicality, safety, and sustainability in mind.

Nonetheless, I found that the FAQ says the flame can “produce 14Mj/h equivalent to 13000BTU”. Not bad for a small room. Come to think of it the average PC power-supply generates about 1500BTU to 2500BTU but even if you ran five or so PCs to keep you warm you would still be on the grid and you couldn’t “safely” burn stuff. On the other hand, if you live in more than a 500 sq/ft bungalow you might need to invest in a lot of small fires, which just begs the question of whether you can run these fires from a centralized control system to manage output, burn-rate, etc. or if you are just supposed to setup a fire on its own in each room, as the Victorians did.

The marketing blurbs claim this really uses a renewable energy as the source of fuel, but burning wood is like burning ethanol in that regard, eh?

In fact I read that Alaska’s Senate passed a law recently (bill 337) to promote creating ethanol by processing waste wood with fish parts. So the comparison must be intended for petroleum or natural gas based fireplaces, not wood fires. Is that a big market?

Come to think of it I’m wondering why someone hasn’t yet figured out a way for restaurants to recycle their own cooking oil into beautiful and firery displays of ambiance. And if ethanol is actually available, then just mix it with the waste oil from food preparation and you end up with a convenient fuel for running your fireplaces as well as your vehicle…biodiesel.

You know the whole water into wine thing? Well, I hate to bring it up but what else comes to mind when the Army announces that their diesel-powered Humvees are going to be outfitted with technology that can return water from diesel exhaust? Just filter the exhaust through some “proprietary carbon filters” and put the results into a handy container in the Humvee and add a spigot. Pretty darn amazing idea, if you ask me, and apparently just one of the innovative things that happens when the chips are down in a desert and water is considered a truly precious commodity, yet diesel fuel is all around. Or as someone in logistics might put it “if you carry fuel, you already have your water”. Well, unless you run out of “proprietary” filters. But I digress…

once you taste the water, you realize the potential.

Great marketing slogan, because before I tasted the water I just thought it would be a convenient place to dump toxic waste from warships and munitions. To be frank, the risk equation being used here to justify the research is simple. The more complicated the supply logistics the more vulnerable the soldiers, so the brass are looking for ways to shore-up a water supply chain. Cleaning domestic superfund base sites? Civilians are vulnerable mostly, so no pressing need for the military to invest in new technology there…remember, the groundwork for the Internet was started by a project funded by the US military to help maintain the command structure during war.

Now, let’s say the situation with risk is different — contaminated water is all around, AND diesel refineries are nowhere to be found. Enter engines designed for bio-fuels? Hmm, maybe the next war, although the use of bio-diesel is known to lower the risk of damage from IEDs since it is less combustible. It also might make the water taste more like yesterday’s freedom fries.

In the meantime fuels like bio-diesel remain non-combat experiments and the ability to recycle the exhaust sounds like a cool use (pun intended) of energy tech that I hope makes it to the civilian world soon.

Whoa, the Seattle Times reports that Washington state is talking about low-interest loans for “biodiesel factories”. Just the fact that they call them factories instead of refineries means they probably are actually hoping that this will take off on a distributed level:

Gov. Christine Gregoire recently proposed low-interest loans for biodiesel factories, and a requirement that diesel sold in the state contain at least some biodiesel. State lawmakers from both parties are vowing to promote similar plans when the Legislature convenes next month. And Congress last summer included a tax credit for biodiesel in its energy bill.

Frankly, this seems very lopsided compared to the information technology revolution that led to the Personal Computer. Companies like Microsoft that kludged together some flimsy DOS system, sold it to a couple big customers and…the rest is history. But the energy age seems to be struggling with generating a reliable source of energy to be converted, rather than the efficiency of doing the conversion itself.

I think growing greens for oils (or processing fish, meat, etc.) might not be the best approach, since you could actually get another use out of the oil first and then process the remaining waste. We still find that each small restaurant produces 20 gallons of waste oil a week, with larger productions reaching 50-100 gallons a week. I will verify that this Friday, but what if you can tap into the waste issues of resort-towns with their close concentration of hotels and affiliated restaurants, or strip malls, or even large malls? It seems best for municipalities and counties to promote that for every 1,000 gallons/week of waste oils they will subsidize establishment of a bio-diesel station. Thus you are not only focusing production of the bio-diesel around a ready supply, but you are also reducing waste/land-fill issues.

I’m not suggesting that farmers shouldn’t grow their own fuel, but it seems to me that it would be better to convert to plain oil and retain flexibility by diversifying output options — they might be able to do a minor conversion to sell to restaurants, manufacturing, energy, etc.

One thing is for certain, beware the opportunists who pose as engineers:

“You have seen a lot of snake-oil salesmen come through with the next best thing,” acknowledged Conklin, the Palouse Biodiesel president.

Both examples in the story (straw-board and beets) illustrate what happens when a concept is marketed and sold as ready for production before it even has been properly tested (quality problems and equipment failures). And because that brings me back to the issues of security in a system development lifecycle (SDLC), I think I’ll categorize this post as security too.