oil

Producing a biofuel cheap enough to compete at the pump with oil has remained as elusive as a ghost on the walls of Elsinore castle. But this week, two Danish companies announced they had developed enzymes capable of breaking down cellulose into ethanol cheaply enough to produce $2-a-gallon gas.

An oil-free deep fryer, which its inventor hopes could hit the market later this year, could let health-conscious consumers have their donuts and eat them, too.

Call it an infrared-wave, radiant fryer, or miracle oven -- it makes french fries with half the fat, no engineered chemicals like Olestra, and the same crispy, oily goodness we all know and love.

Successfully navigating a complex maze is the basic lab test for intelligence. Rats can do it. Cuttlefish can do it. And now, inanimate droplets of oil can do it. By creating a pH gradient, scientists induced the an oil drop to navigate a maze, an advance with important applications in drug delivery, urban planning, and computer modeling.

Spongebob may want to look into a nanotech upgrade that could permit him to walk on water. Chinese scientists have created carbon nanotube sponges that don't absorb water, leaving them plenty of room for absorbing oil or other icky organic goo.

The new sponges rely upon interconnected carbon nanotubes that naturally repel water, and can absorb 180 times their weight in organic matter. Current sponges used for oil spill cleanups and industrial applications can only absorb up to 20 times their own weight.

Bolivia is primarily known for two things: being the poorest country in South America, and having a president with a terrible haircut. However, it might soon be known for a third thing: lithium. Turns out Bolivia has the world's largest reserves of the light metal, and according to Foreign Policy, that positions Bolivia as the Saudi Arabia of our carbon-less, battery-powered future.

A robotic swarm of "ring-wing" submarines could someday scout underwater locations for oil.

Engineers from GO Science, an engineering firm specializing in aerodynamic robots, have struck a $10 million deal with an unnamed oil company. GO's ring-wing foil concept has applications for aerial vehicles as well, but the startup company has currently focused on undersea flyers.

In a move that might seem oxymoronic on the surface, Chevron has plans to install a solar steam plant which will power one of their oil fields in Central California. The 29-megawatt power source uses 7,000 mirrors spread across 100-acres to focus light on a boiler tank sitting 323-feet high.

In 2005, we came the closest we ever had before to drilling into the mantle: the layer beneath the Earth's crust. Now, with new drilling technology adapted from the oil and gas industry, scientists might finally be ready to reach that holy grail of depth.

Each year, around 10 million vehicles are disposed of in the United States. Before vexing your conscience though, you should know that over 95 percent of these “retired” cars head straight to one of the 7,000 vehicle recycling operations around the country and 75 percent of these cars' parts are completely recycled, letting cars claim top spot as the world's most recycled product.

DriverSide explores what happens to these automotive materials.

There must be too many local fishermen out for pleasure cruises at night through eel-infested waters. European eels are in crisis, their numbers mysteriously plummeting in the last decades.

Also in today's links: farting machines, death via LHC and more.

When you're a performance artist, creating the right ambience in your show is everything. It all starts with lighting. So two years ago, my partner and I decided to build a lamp that would capture the aquatic theme of a show that our company, Radiohole, was putting on. We wanted to make a lightbulb look like it was submerged in water, so we used mineral oil, a liquid that's clear and nonconductive (we spilled a lot of oil before finally hitting on a fixture that was both portable and leakproof).

Name: Perdido Spar
Where: Gulf of Mexico
Cost: Undisclosed
Estimated Completion: First oil, 2010; all wells online, 2016
The Challenge: Moor a skyscraper-size floating rig to the seafloor, then drill the world's deepest subsea well

Two hundred miles off the coast of Galveston, Texas, below 10,000 feet of water and another 9,000 feet of mud, salt and rock, lies Shell Oil's most ambitious new target, a swath of seabed the size of Houston that holds enough oil and natural gas to produce up to 130,000 barrels a day.

Plus, oil sands, oily studies, and more, in today's links.

A question from reader Craig Westbrooke:

From a very unscientific source, dialog from a scene in the 1976 King Kong movie stated that the oil found on the island would not be usable for another 10,000 years. Is there such a thing as immature oil? Is new oil being made now?

You might guess that magma or tumbling rocks fill the void, but the truth is much more prosaic: water. Petroleum deposits, which are naturally mixed with water and gas, lie thousands of feet below the earth’s surface in layers of porous rock, typically sandstone or limestone. (Contrary to what you might imagine, drilling for oil is more like sucking oil from a sponge with a straw than from a giant pool of liquid.)