Jim Gardner’s Energy Tech Talk

The renewable carbon energy industry is almost 20 years old…if you did not know about Rudolf Diesel.  Rudolf Diesel was born in Paris in 1858.  His parents were Bavarian immigrants.  Rudolf Diesel was educated at Munich Polytechnic.  After graduation, he was employed as a refrigerator engineer.  However, his true love lay in engine design.

Rudolf Diesel designed many heat engines, including a solar-powered air engine. In 1893, he published a paper describing an engine with combustion within a cylinder, the internal combustion engine. In 1894, he filed for a patent for his new invention, dubbed the diesel engine.  Rudolf Diesel was almost killed by his engine when it exploded.  However, his engine was the first that proved that fuel could be ignited without a spark. He operated his first successful engine in 1897.  His fuel was peanut oil.

We forgot about his renewable fuel for almost a century. We are back, and we are using renewable carbon sources for fueling internal combustion engines and turbines for mobility and electric power generation.

The current industry was stimulated in corn, rapeseed and soybean fields by farmers wanting to develop their own fuels from their crops and reduce their country’s dependence on foreign sourced fossil fuels.

Negative world opinion about using food crops to produce fuel has forced GREEN Tree Huggers to research other renewable forms of renewable carbon sources to produce fuels.  Governments, research institutions, colleges and universities are leading the way to reduce the use of food stocks to produce energy.

A group of farmers in the Ozarks is taking the lead by stepping back in time to replace their fescue fields with the native grass of the Ozarks, called switchgrass.  Polk County farmer and cattleman Ed Cahoj gathered some of his associates, and together they have formed the National Biomass Growers Association, Inc., a not-for-profit corporation focused on using switchgrass as an alternative energy source.  Check out www.biomass-producer.org.  Talk about a “grass-roots” organization!!

Ed is on the board of directors for Ozarks New Energy and is currently serving as the board’s vice president.

Jim Gardner

Many bloggers are too young to know much about the world before it was OK to be Green Tree Huggers. Throughout human history, mankind has been using “green” energy. Early Europeans used wind-powered mills to grind their grains into powers. Ancient sailors traveled across large bodies of water using wind-powered sail boats. Early loggers would use flowing water to float their log harvest to a buyers’ market. Our ancestors learned that if they built dams across flowing streams and rivers, they could use the weight of falling buckets of water (water wheel) to turn a shaft and that shaft could do powerful work. The list could go on for pages.

Humans discovered that when heating water, the water becomes a vapor called steam. They found that by confining steam in a strong vessel and releasing it in a controlled manner, steam could do even more work. The machine age really got a boost when farmers discovered some gooey black stuff in their fields that burned better than wood or coal. Now we’re in the age of high mobility when our machines are powered by refined oils, and they can take us anywhere we want to go. Science keeps finding newer and better ways to use more energy and as consumers; most of mankind demands it.

Being the smart, lazy humans we are, we used the cheapest and easy access fuels to serve our greed for toys and equipment do work and play faster, cheaper and harder than was ever known to man. Land owners and governments now build wind and later electric pumps to pull water out of aquifers below the surface to water their crops, their livestock and their communities.

As we continue to learn more about our world and its history, we are beginning to understand the negative impact we humans are having on our now limited land space, clean water supplies, air we breathe and food we choose to eat.

Green Tree Hugging people are taking the lead to change how we do things. We are now producing electricity from wind, waves, sun, the earth’s core, renewable carbon sources and more….all considered to be renewable energy. We are replacing fossil-based carbon sources with renewable carbon sources, and we are learning how to store energy in more efficient ways.

On this Web site, Ozarks New Energy writers, contributors and bloggers will dialogue about the world of developing renewable energy sources and how individuals can utilize this exciting new way to live. I love being a GREEN Tree Hugger!

Jim Gardner