Environment

Electric car made 'as logical as possible'

Written by Dick Pryor Tuesday, 15 September 2009 20:48

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - The top officer of an Atlanta-based company that is manufacturing all-electric low-speed vehicles says the car has been designed to make it "as logical as possible" for consumers. Wheego Electric Cars Inc. CEO Mike McQuary and officials from AMP Control Inc. of Piedmont, which will assemble and sell the cars in Oklahoma, showed off the car to reporters and local and state government officials on Tuesday at the state Capitol. The current top speed of the two-seat Wheego Whip is 35 mph, although McQuary says his company is working on a model that should be out next summer that will travel up to 65 mph. AMP Control will assemble the vehicles at a plant that will be built in either Piedmont or Kingfisher.

Oklahoma watermelons could be turned into ethanol

Written by Dick Pryor Tuesday, 08 September 2009 16:12

LANE, Okla. (AP) - An Oklahoma-based chemist for the U.S. Agriculture Department says sugars in the juice of watermelons could be used to make ethanol.
Wayne Fish works with the department's research service laboratory in Lane. He says his research began two years ago during a study on how to enrich watermelons for their effect on health. Watermelon producers asked researchers if they could find a use for cull or discarded watermelons, which Fish says led to the discovery.

He says there are advantages to using watermelons instead of corn to make ethanol. Unlike corn, in which starch must be broken down before it can be fermented, the watermelon researchers went directly to fermentation. But he says one disadvantage of using watermelons is the cost of picking them, transporting them and returning the finished product to a farm.

EPA reports clean water violation in Oklahoma City

Written by Dick Pryor Wednesday, 15 July 2009 22:52

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - The Environmental Protection Agency has issued cease and desist orders to two companies for violating the federal Clean Water Act on the Oklahoma River. Spokesman Dave Bary says Murphy Products and Oklahoma National Stockyards Co. were cited after inspectors visited a compost
facility operated by Murphy on land owned by the stockyards. He says they found piles of manure that could run into the river - particularly during a heavy rain. The finding comes after dozens of participants in a May triathlon reported getting sick after swimming in the river. Oklahoma National Stockyards president Rob Fisher says neither he nor Murphy officials knew there was a problem. Calls to Murphy Products were not returned Tuesday. The companies have 30 days to submit a plan to address the issue.

In 1st phase of experiment, only 1 tornado found

Written by Dick Pryor Monday, 29 June 2009 18:24

NORMAN, Okla. (AP) - The first phase of an $11.9 million experiment to study tornadoes ended with researchers only finding one twister during a 35-day period. The initial phase of the Verification of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment 2 -- also called Vortex2 -- started May 10 and ran through June 13. A second phase will run from May 1 through June 15 next year. About 120 people from 18 universities and government agenciestraveled more than 11,000 miles during Vortex2's first phase, but found only a strong EF-3 tornado in far southeastern Wyoming that lasted about 30 minutes.

Don Burgess, a research scientist at the University of Oklahoma, says the time period had the least number of tornadoes since theearly 1990s. He says Vortex2 was designed to be a two-year experiment in case something like that happened. Burgess says that despite the lack of tornadoes, the first year of the Vortex2 project still proved beneficial, in part because researchers found and recorded information from three tornadic storms that did not produce any twisters.