Can the bus beat the airplane to get to Montreal?

Today we thank the fleet-footed dog that gives meaning to speed. Greyhound is also the name of the inter-city bus service that operates a fleet of buses that provide 13,000 daily departures to 2,300 cities and transports over 25 million passengers each year. Greyhound announced last week that their buses will be upgraded to service that meets the needs of twenty first century passengers. New buses with Wi-Fi access, power outlets, three point seat belts, and extra legroom are now being used on the company’s New York to Montreal and New York to Toronto bus routes. Soon more routes will have the Greyhound Running Dog new Prevost X3-45 buses are similar to the buses that rock stars and entertainers use for touring the country.

The X3-45 seats fifty passengers and has a fuel economy of about seven miles per gallon of diesel fuel. If Greyhound manages to fill the buses, the effective fuel economy will be three hundred and fifty miles per gallon. Had all these passengers travelled instead in a Prius together with three other passengers, their effective miles per gallon will only equal approximately two hundred miles per gallon. This proves that buses are the greenest mode of transportation and it would be good public policy for the Feds to give Greyhound some of the bailout and stimulus money. The X3-45 is 45 feet long and has an empty mass of 36,000 pounds and has a diesel tank that holds 208 gallons. It is powered by a 14 liter Detroit Diesel engine that has a capability of delivering 445 horsepower. This is not your Grandmother’s Greyhound bus, it is one sleek and fast bus that will change our opinion of bus travel. The air conditioner is capable of nine tons of refrigeration so you can be rest assured the coach will be comfortable during an August trip from the Big Apple to Montreal.

Had the fifty passengers boarded an Embraer ERJ-145 jet for the trip from New York to Montreal, their carbon footprint would have been five to six times larger than taking a ride in the Greyhound. If the passenger lives in Manhattan and wishes to visit downtown Montreal it could also be argued that they would reach their destination in less time if they opted for the bus for the 331 mile trip. This is due to the fact that JFK is quite remote from Manhattan and so is PET (Pierre Eliot Trudeau) from downtown Montreal, as well as all the time it takes to clear security. The cost of the Greyhound ticket will also be much less than that the cost of the Air Canada ticket. Certainly the leg room in the Embraer ERJ-145 is miniscule and the flight can hardly be described as being luxurious. Greyhound just may have a winner in its new Prevost X3-45 and they may even hand out DVDs of Back To The Future for passengers to watch on their laptops. As most Greyhound terminals are rather dilapidated and as cities are clamoring for stimulus funds we may also see revamped downtown bus terminals. This may be a case where “going to the dogs” may actually be an improvement on what we have.

Did you know the Zulus gave us Impalas long before GM?

The G word of the week is a Gazelle. The term gazelle is used for animals that belong to a wide range of antelope. Gazelles are known for their speed and ability to run for an extended period of time. It is time to name a car a Gazelle. Chevrolet does have an Impala. For many years taxonomists incorrectly placed Impalas in the same species as Gazelles. The word Impala come from Zulu and the Zulu’s did not distinguish between gazelles and impalas they simply called any animal that looked like an impala an impala. The Zulus were driving Impalas long before Darwin and the study of Origin Of A Species.

This makes me think that all cars are beginning to look the same. Engineers at the various auto companies test shapes of cars for aerodynamic drag in wind tunnels and either they are all coming to the same conclusion on the best shape to minimize the drag coefficient or they are just copying each other and producing cars that all look alike. The 2009 Chevrolet Impala looks like the 2009 Toyota Camry. This was not the case in 1959 when the car that Toyota made could fit in the trunk of a 1959 Chevrolet Impala. The 1959 Chevrolet Impala had fins the size of a great white shark and an engine the size of a locomotive. Maybe we are lucky that just about all cars are looking the same and almost performing the same. All this sameness means that most car brands are now a commodity and they simply have to lower their price to sell to the average Joe.

On my way to Starbucks this morning I passed by the Porsche dealership and they have a bunch of used cars for sale. Interesting two used cars on the lot that were parked side by side had the same sale price of $16,999. These two cars were a 2005 BMW Z4 Roadster and a 2009 Smart For Two. These are two cars that do not look the same nor perform the same, although they both only seat two people. The Z4 is a zippy car that kind of like looks like sports cars out of the 1950s and the Smart For Two is the car of the future. The Z4’s engine has three times the displacement of the Smart (three liters versus one) and the Z4 has four times the horsepower, yet the Smart has the same price. Does this mean value is now being placed on fuel efficiency and ease of parking or is this simply a fad that Smarts are cool to drive? I hope it means that we are now making that sea change in our driving habits and we are once again not simply ignoring the rapid depletion of the fossil fuel reserves on the planet and the concurrent increase in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. The Zulu word for being a fool or not so smart is Mampara and growing up as a child in South Africa we would tease each other that we were Mamparas. Today is April Fools’ Day, but now that the world depends on wise choices in our collective energy policy let’s not be Mamparas .

Are goats really green?

Has the green machine lost his mind thanking old Billy for helping save the planet. I started thinking of goats a couple of weeks ago when I received this email at work that a company in Framingham Massachusetts has received FDA approval for a biological drug that was recovered from goat’s milk in genetically modified goats. The drug is a protein called Antithrombrin and is used to untangle blood clots. There are approximately one in five thousand patients in the USA that have a genetic disorder of not producing antithrombrin and are at high risk during surgeries or pregnancy. The company chose the route of using genetically modified goats rather than modifying ecoli or Chinese Hamster Ovary cells to express the protein. Ecoli and Chinese Hampster Ovary cells are commonly used to make biological drugs that Genentech, Amgen, J&J and other sell.

A herd of one hundred and fifty genetically modified goats in Massachusetts express the two hundred and twenty pounds of Antithrombrin protein that otherwise would otherwise have to be produced from every drop of blood that is donated in the USA each year. These are very special goats and I bet you they have special herders who make sure they do not escape from their farm where they are fed better food than your average goat. A female goat produces about eight pounds of milk a day and will do so for approximately three hundred day during lactation. Therefore a single goat will produce two thousand four hundred pounds of milk a year. The herd of one hundred and fifty goats will therefore produce three hundred and sixty thousand pounds of milk a year. The concentration of the Antithrombrin protein in the goat’s milk prior to purification is therefore 0.061 percent or about 0.6 grams per liter. Goats were chosen over cows, sheep and rabbits because of their productivity in producing milk. Goats also are far lower emitters of methane gas than cows.

I recently co-authored an article in Biopharm International that compared the carbon and water footprints of traditional stainless steel biological drug manufacturing facilities with single use plastic alternates. The single use plastic systems had significantly lower water usage and moderately lower carbon footprint. Now that the goat method is FDA approved I will have to research the data, but my hunch is that this method will be hard to beat as goats thrive in arid climates even though they have sweat glands. Goats are raised for their meat as well as their milk. Goat’s milk is naturally homogenized and the cream remains suspended in the milk and does not rise as does cow’s cream, hence we do not have goat cream but we can produce goat butter.The meat from young goats is called kid, while older animals yield mutton or chevon, not to be mixed up with Chevron.

Goat meat is low in cholesterol and is comparable to chicken. The digestive system of goats is able to breakdown just about any organic fodder but they do prefer the tips of trees and woody shrubs. Their favorite hay is alfalfa and therefore goats would vote for Gore over any other politician. As global warming starts to convert Texas into Sudan we may have to start eating more chevon and chevre. If Texas does become Sudan, its capital will be called car-tomb and the state name will change to Sedan.

Do fat geese add to our carbon burden?

Happy New Year! The first episode of Green Machine for 2009 deals with the most common New Year’s resolution, that of losing weight. Gras is the French word for fat so it is fitting we honor Gras as the G word of the week now that we have all resolved to lose some weight. I have previously written that one requires an extra mile of blood vessels for each pound of fat cells in our bodies. Losing weight is also good for improving our fuel efficiency, as our vehicles require less power to move lighter bodies.

I read the grossest news clip on Boxing Day. Craig Alan Bittner, a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills (Heavily Bills that is) was using the fat he liposuctioned from patients to produce bio-diesel for his girlfriend’s Lincoln Navigator SUV. This is illegal in California as we do have laws governing the disposal of human medical waste. Bittner boasted on his website that he invented “lipodiesel”. It is quite amazing that Bittner believed his green efforts advertised on his web site would promote business rather than incurring the long and fat arm of the law.

Another common New Year’s resolution is to quit smoking. As tobacco consumption has dropped so have the number of farms cultivating tobacco in the USA. The US Department of Agriculture reports that in 1954, 512,000 farms cultivated tobacco, in 2002 only 56,977 farms grew tobacco as their cash crop. In 1946 over two billion pounds of tobacco was grown in the USA. This had dropped to one billion pounds in 2002. An acre of land yields approximately one ton of tobacco per year, therefore the average size of farms has increased in the past fifty years as many small farmers simply gave up on growing tobacco. The US population has grown two and a half times since 1946, therefore on a per capita basis we are using about one fifth of the tobacco we used when smoking was a socially acceptable and an even encouraged pastime.
Kansas was the last of the states to end prohibition on smoking of tobacco back in 1927. The cost of a pack of twenty cigarettes was at parity with the cost of a gallon of gasoline for most of the twentieth century. Back in 1946 this cost was twenty cents. In the 1960s it was fifty cents. In the mid to 1980s the Feds, state, and local governments placed far heavier taxes on cigarettes because of the burden on healthcare costs that smoking was causing. If only these governments had the wisdom then to have taxed gasoline as heavily as cigarettes the Hummer would possibly have never seen the light of day. For a while in July 2008 the cost of a gallon of gasoline again reached parity with the cost of a pack of twenty cigarettes, but with the precipitous drop in oil prices gasoline is again far less expensive than a pack of cigarettes.

If wasting energy carries the same stigma as smoking, then the US will easily halve our energy consumption in the next twenty five years. I propose we have the position of “Engineering General Of The United States”. The Engineering General should be allowed to post in bold letters on any energy wasting vehicle: – “Warning The Engineering General has determined that operating this vehicle will cause damage to our collective health”. Did you all know we have an acting Surgeon General and his name is Rear Admiral Steven Galson MD? I hope that President Elect Obama appoints a full time rather than acting Surgeon General and that the post of Engineering General is soon created. Unfortunately the only general we have at present working on energy efficiency is General Motors, a half star general.

Green energy

Thermo Thursday Green Energy TGIT – Thank Guernsey It’s Thursday

Holy Cow what does Guernsey have to do with thermodynamics? Yes there is a connection and it comes to us from Sweden. Fox News as part of their Unfair and certainly Unbalanced section reports of a dairy in Southwestern Sweden deciding to route warm cows milk through the heating system an 18th Century Castle to help heat the castle and help chill the milk. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,327906,00.html

The diary has 1,100 cows and processes 7,900 gallons of milk a day. Remembering my previous Thermo Thursday about the 140 degree latte, I just had to calculate just how much energy can be recovered from 7,900 gallons a day of cows milk. First I had to establish the body temperature of a cow. It is 101.5 degrees F or about 3 degrees warmer than a human http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/PeiJunChen.shtml

Second I had to establish the specific gravity of cows milk and it is a smidgen more dense than water and has a specific gravity of 1.023 http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/AliciaNoelleJones.shtml

Third I had to establish the heat capacity of milk and it is a little lower than water at 0.9 btu/lb degree F http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-capacity-food-d_295.html

Knowing that a gallon of water has a mass of 8.34 pounds and assuming the cows milk will cool to a temperature of 65 degrees F in that castle, I calculated that the 7,900 gallons per day of milk can exchange some 2,214,135 BTUs per day into the air inside the castle. This equates to some 92,255 BTUs per hour. I did locate a web site that shows one how to determine the size of a furnace that is needed to heat a building. This web site shows that in order to heat an uninsulated building that is 100 feet long, 30 feet wide and 14 feet tall with an outside temperature of 10 degrees F, a furnace with a capacity of 183,750 BTUs per hour is needed http://yankeeserviceco.com/finder.htm

By all of these calculations the warm cow milk could heat a building that is 50 feet long by 30 feet wide by 14 feet tall. So it is quite likely that the Swedish Dairy Farmer will be able to heat his gym. There is no way on God’s Green Earth that he will heat the gym, the work shop and the 50 room accommodation center. To heat all of that he would have to capture the methane emissions form his herd of cows.

Not to be outdone by the engineering skills of the Swedes, the Dutch have introduced a robot to pump gasoline. This brilliant engineer from the low country upon seeing a robot that milks cows came up with the bright idea that he could develop a robot to pump gasoline. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,328907,00.html Well it turns out the robot will cost $100,000 and take a million years to payout compared with self serve. I guess we Americans are smart in having convinced the motorists that pumping your own gasoline is a simple as one two three. Someone should tell the Dutch how this is done.

Well the English who believe the Dutch and the Swedes are inferior have also wasted their time on a nonsensical invention. A bloke for Sussex has come up with a levitating chair that can support the mass of a 250 pound person suspended in a magnetic field. Folks with pacemakers need not apply and remember to remove your wallet as all your credit cards will be rendered inactive http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,328168,00.html

I am truly sorry that this week I have dealt with three village idiots from Europe who each in their own way are trying to be green and innovative. Next week I will do a Finance Friday about lithium a wonder chemical that treats mental disease as well as holds some promise for plug in vehicle batteries.

The word of the day is lubricous or having a smooth quality. This should not be mixed up with ludicrous which is how I would rate the three ideas from Europe that I discussed.

lubricious \loo-BRISH-us\, adjective:1. Lustful; lewd.2. Stimulating or appealing to sexual desire or imagination.3. Having a slippery or smooth quality.
The heroine, through some form of ESP, can hear, and be offended by, the lubricious speculations going on inside the heads of the men she meets.-- Philip French, "More about What Women Want", The Observer, February 4, 2001
And even if the public ate up every lubricious detail about their leaders, that same public grew offended that the news media would actually pander to their baser impulses.-- Jeff Greenfield, "Film at 11", New York Times, November 7, 1999
. . .urged women to give up their vanities, their cosmetics, and their high-heeled shoes, and to pile them on . . .bonfires next to lubricious works of art.-- Anthony Grafton, "The Varieties of Millennial Experience", The New Republic, November 1999
Here was a place where a kind of benign . . . anarchy seemed to rule, a lubricious, frictionless chaos into which one could simply disappear.-- Eugene Robinson, "On the Beach at Ipanema", Washington Post, August 1, 1999
Lubricious derives from Latin lubricus, "slippery, smooth."
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for lubricious