Maria Alovert, a Berkely activist, is using old water heaters and the Internet to train the next generation of biodiesel fanatics.

It seems impossible, but biofuel startup Joule Biotechnologies claims that it has successfully produced fuel out of thin air--sort of. The company's mysterious engineered microbes require just sunlight and CO2 to squirt out ethanol, diesel, or other hydrocarbons.

Fish plus algae equals oil says a new startup called LiveFuels, the latest algae-based biofuel gambit that's as controversial as it is intriguing.

We recently received a press release from a fledging company called Renewed World Energies claiming that it has created the first commercially viable algae-processing system. The company expects to have two acres of commercial algae growing systems by this fall. It's quite a claim considering the slew of well-funded algae fuel startups racing towards commercial viability. Read More »

Chicken feather meal--a mix of processed chicken feathers, blood and innards--is one of the nastiest byproducts of the poultry processing industry. The 11 billion pounds of feather meal that pile up in the United States each year are mostly used as animal feed and fertilizer. A new study from scientists at the University of Nevada indicates that the feather/blood/innard mash-up might be better suited as a non-food based feedstock for biofuels.

We've written about bamboo bikes before, but the Philippines rice farming town of Tabontabon has taken the bamboo transportation craze to new heights with bamboo taxis. The taxis, commissioned by Tabontabon mayor Rustico Balderian, are made out of 90% bamboo and run on coconut biodiesel.