Diesel

By exposing healthy adults to diesel fumes before having their brain activity imaged in an fMRI machine, researchers have shown how traffic pollution can impair brain function, offering evidence of the connection between air quality and cognition.

​Having now reached the deepest parts of the ocean, the plastic pollution problem is calling for some creative solutions. An organic chemist and a sailor are trying to make plastic waste worth collecting, by turning it into a usable diesel fuel through a semi-portable reactor.

​Electric vehicles are hitting the roads in greater numbers every year, but in the meantime, scientists are working on ways to clean up existing fossil fuels. A new refining process uses a potassium catalyst to reduce the amount of sulfur in gasoline and diesel to a fraction of their current levels.

Just weeks after producing its first batch of synthetic diesel fuel made from carbon dioxide and water, Audi has laid claim to another synthetic, clean-burning and petroleum-free fuel called "e-benzin." The fuel was created by Audi's project partner Global Bioenergies, in France.

Audi is making a new fuel for internal combustion engines that has the potential to make a big dent when it comes to climate change – that's because the synthetic diesel is made from just water and carbon dioxide.

In a process they say produces more energy than it used, researchers from the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC) at the University of Illinois have converted plastic bags into various petroleum products, including diesel, natural gas, naphtha, gasoline, waxes, and lubricating oils.

The BioBot 20 tabletop diesel processor is a (relatively) simple chemical reactor for converting used kitchen oils into biodiesel fuel at home.

Scientists from the University of Cambridge have developed a system that uses microwaves to convert waste oil into vehicle fuel.

New research has found that in one year, a single large container ship can emit cancer and asthma-causing pollutants equivalent to that of 50 million cars.

Promising significant fuel and emissions savings, GE's Evolution Hybrid locomotive captures and stores the energy generated by braking a 207 ton train and delivers it back to the propulsion system in the form of an on-demand, 2000 horsepower boost.

April 21, 2006 Another wonderous enabling technology has been announced - a microreactor, about half the size of a credit card that produces biodiesel by comb