As previously reported in another thread, my day job is editor of the Canadian Journal of Chemistry. Now and again, I come across stuff that may be of marginal interest to car-heads.

Btw, all internet users with Canadian ISP addresses are automatically subscribed to all the NRC Research Press journals through a federal funding program. Scientific information is supposed to be available to everybody, is the thinking behind that, I believe. See http://pubs.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/rp-ps/journals.jsp?lang=eng for the main entry point to the journals.

There was an article in the July 2006 issue of Can J Chem by Lucia et al. (p. 960) that may be of interest. It's about the use of biomass as replacement for petroleum in the production of base chemicals used in manufacturing. This is not airy-fairy lab-only stuff, industrial-sized plants are going up all over the world to make stuff from bark, corn stalks and sawdust that we need in our manufacturing processes. Plant material is composed of a wide variety of organic molecules, like petroleum is, and with some tweaking, you can derive many (if not most) of the stuff that we currently get from petroleum refining from plants instead. The author points out in that article that one of the original design requirements in the first diesel engines was that they run on biodiesel. One of the engines at some turn-of-the-20th-century world's fair ran on peanut oil-derived fuel.

There will be another article in the August 2008 issue about biodiesel from a different point of view. The research is from Queen's in Kinsgton. The source for biodiesel need not only be from plants but also from animal by-products. This raises the need to reliably detect prions in animal-derived raw material that may be used to make biodiesel. Prions (or their mutations) are what are believed to be at the root of mad cow disease and of the human version. We will need to be able to detect prions in bio-diesel (or in the raw feedstock that is used to make biodiesel) to avoid health risks. Easy, quick and reliable detection methods do not currently exist, so the researchers are busy developing some.