Blast rips West Side plant; 2 seriously hurt


Crews inspect the site of an explosion at a West Side plant. (Michael Tercha / Chicago Tribune)

At least two people were seriously injured in a "massive explosion" that tore through a commercial biodiesel and vegetable oil plant on the West Side, authorities said.

The two victims were taken to Stroger Hospital, one in serious to critical condition and other in fair to serious condition, a Fire Department spokesman said. Other workers were being decontaminated on-scene following the explosion, said Fire Department spokesman Quention Curtis.

Another 10 people complained of illness because of fumes, possibly because of the explosion, at a nearby Metra yard in the 2900 block of Grand Avenue, and were being taken to area hospitals in good to fair condition, a Fire Department spokesman said.

The explosion also disrupted Metra's Milwaukee District North and West Lines, halting some trains and delaying others, according to the rail company's Web site.

A hazardous materials alarm was canceled about 10:15 a.m., although police continued to shut down all streets in the area within two blocks of the explosion. But there appeared to be no danger to residents of nearby condos and two-flats. They had not been ordered to evacuated and were milling in the street.

The blast occurred as chemicals were being mixed and a truck was being unloaded in the plant a little after 9 a.m. at the plant located in the 800 block of North Albany Avenue. The address is listed to Columbus Foods Co.

The 100-foot-by-100-foot building where the explosion happened handles between 20,000 and 40,000 pounds of biodiesel fuel each day, said Fire Department spokesman Will Knight. The building was partially collapsed by the explosion, he said.

Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford described the explosion as "massive."

Laura Hampton had just finished jogging in Humboldt Park when she heard the explosion and saw area apartment buildings shake. "I thought a semi had run into a building or something."

She said she smelled a strong odor of sulfur, but said it dissipated after a few minutes.

Sulfuric acid is used in the work done at the plant, and may have been involved in the explosion, Curtis said. A chemical cloud rose from the explosion, and area buildings were evacuated and streets blocked off, he said.

Five ambulances and hazardous materials team were initially called to the scene. A hazardous materials response was declared under control by about 10:15 a.m., but fire officials remained on scene, Knight said.

An experiment with low-cost, solar-powered light emitting diode (LED) lamps that is lighting up the lives of a handful of families in rural India could become a beacon of hope for millions of poor people worldwide who currently rely on kerosene lamps and other lighting solutions that are toxic--and frequently lethal--when used indoors.

Solar Lighting Eliminates the Need for Electricity in Rural Areas
The Grameen Surya Bijli Foundation (GSBF), a Bombay-based nongovernmental organization that is committed to bringing light to rural India, installed the $55 lamps in about 300 homes. About 100,000 villages in India still do not have electricity, and the cost of lighting those villages by traditional means is prohibitive. The solar LED technology eliminates the need for electric lights. After the initial cost, solar energy continues to light the lamps free of charge.

“Children can now study at night, elders can manage their chores better," one relieved villager told The Christian Science Monitor. "Life doesn't halt anymore when darkness falls.”

LED Lamps Provide Safer and Better Light For Less
Replacing kerosene lamps with clean solar-powered LED lamps also provides healthier and safer living conditions as well as better light for less money. According to The Christian Science Monitor, about 1.5 billion people worldwide use kerosene to light their homes, but the fuel is dangerous.

Separate reports by the Intermediate Technology Development Group and the World Health Organization indicate that indoor air pollution from kerosene and similar fuels used for indoor lighting and cooking cause more than 1.5 million deaths annually. The risk of fire is another significant health hazard with kerosene lamps.

Kerosene Expensive and Dangerous
Kerosene is also expensive for people living in poverty. In rural India, for example, buying kerosene requires nearly 4 percent of a typical household budget. Finally, LED lamps are simply more efficient and provide more useful light. According to The Christian Science Monitor, LED lamps produce “nearly 200 times more useful light than a kerosene lamp and almost 50 times the amount of useful light of a conventional bulb.”

“This technology can light an entire rural village with less energy than that used by a single conventional 100 watt light bulb,” says Dave Irvine-Halliday, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Calgary, Canada and the founder of Light Up the World Foundation (LUTW). Founded in 1997, LUTW has used solar-powered LED technology to light nearly 10,000 homes in 27 developing countries.

Strategies Needed to Reduce the Initial Cost of LED Solar Lamps
For the program to work long-term in India, GSBF says it will be necessary to lower the cost of the LED lamps by manufacturing them inside India instead of importing them from China and elsewhere. Manufacturing the lamps locally would lower the cost from $55 to $22 per unit, but building a factory would cost approximately $5 million, and investment capital is not easy to find.

• New biofuel requires no car or plane engine modification
• Carbon Trust says production will take 'many years'

Gene scientist Craig Venter has announced plans to develop next-generation biofuels from algae in a $600m (£370m) partnership with oil giant Exxon Mobil.

His company, Synthetic Genomics Incorporated (SGI), will develop fuels that can be used by cars or aeroplanes without the need for any modification of their engines. Exxon Mobil will provide $600m over five years with half going to SGI.

"Meeting the world's growing energy demands will require a multitude of technologies and energy sources," said Emil Jacobs, vice president of research and development at ExxonMobil. "We believe that biofuel produced by algae could be a meaningful part of the solution in the future if our efforts result in an economically viable, low-net carbon emission transportation fuel."

Transport accounts for one-quarter of the UK's carbon emissions and is the fastest growing sector. Finding carbon-neutral fuels will be crucial to the government meeting its target to reduce overall emissions by 80% by 2050.

Algae are an attractive way to harvest solar energy because they reproduce themselves, they can live in areas not useful for producing food and they do not need clean or even fresh water. In addition, they use far less space to grow than traditional biofuel crops such as corn or palm oil.

"Algae consumes carbon dioxide and sunlight in the presence of water, to make a kind of oil that has similar molecular structures to petroleum products we produce today," said Jacobs. "That means it could be possible to convert it into gasoline and diesel in existing refineries, transport it through existing pipelines, and sell it to consumers from existing service stations."

The Carbon Trust, a government-backed agency that promotes low-carbon technologies, has forecast that algae-based biofuels could replace more than 70bn litres of fossil fuels used every year around the world in road transport and aviation by 2030, equivalent to 12% of annual global jet fuel consumption or 6% of road transport diesel. In carbon terms, this equates to an annual saving of more than 160m tonnes of CO2 globally with a market value of more than £15bn.

Ben Graziano, research and development manager at the Carbon Trust, said that alge-based biofuels offered the potential for "major carbon savings". "Exxon Mobil is estimating that algae could yield just over 20,000

litres of fuel per hectare each year, which is in line with our own forecasts. However, producing biofuel from algae on such a massive commercial scale is a major challenge, which will require many years of research and development."

Venter, who is best known for his role in sequencing the human genome, said the new partnership was the largest single investment in trying to produce biofuels from algae but said the challenge to creating a viable next-generation fuel was the ability to produce it in large volumes. "This would not happen without the oil industry stepping up and taking part," he said. "The challenges are not minor for any of us but we have the combined teams and scientific and engineering talents to give this the best chance of success."

The research programme will begin with the construction of a new test facility in San Diego, where Venter says different techniques to grow and optimise algae will be tested. These will include open ponds as well as bioreactors, where the algae are grown in sealed tubes. "We will be trying out these different approaches … using newly-discovered natural algae to test the best approaches we can come up with to go into a scale-up mode."

Venter has spent several years trawling the world's oceans in search of environmentally-friendly microbes that could be used, in one way or another, to bring down the world's carbon emissions. The organisms he has found include those that can turn CO2 into methane, which could be used to make fuels from the exhaust gases of power stations, and another that turns coal into natural gas, speeding up a natural process and reducing both the energy needed to extract the fossil fuel and the amount of pollution caused when it is burned.