Local Travels Remembered...all about the Gas

It has been my pleasure to experience and see many different things as a student.  Appalachian State University has a great alternative energy center (http://energy.appstate.edu/).  As usual, I stumbled into something GREAT!! (but more on how this came to be later).

With the ASU Energy Center I had the pleasure and joy of hosting some visitors from Brazil!  The delegation came as a part of ASU's efforts in the Environmental Protection Agency's "Methane to Markets" (now the Global Methane Initiative found at www.globalmethane.org).  ASU won a phase one grant to study the feasibility of capturing landfill gas from a landfill (open pit dump) near the town of Maracanau in the Brazilian state of Ceara (northern Brazil).

Basically everyone is Brazilian except two, Ieda just wanted you to know for which team she cheers in the World Cup!

The Brazilians came to visit to see how a gas capture system would work, how it would work, and how they could use the system.  The great news for you is that these projects are very accessible for you to visit in North Carolina!  I was lucky to accompany them on a visit to two NC based landfill gas capture projects.  One was near Burnsville, NC and the other was a park in Jackson County (west of Asheville).

In the posts to come I'll give some photos, explanations, descriptions and opinions on those projects! 

Still Alive!!!

I'm still alive!!  I have not posted because I have not traveled!!  The unfortunate reality is that I have to keep a day job to support my travel.  One day I would hope to be self-sufficient for travel but that is a ways out.

I will continue to develop the blog so as not to disappoint my fan...(fans?)!

Just because I have not been on the road/water/air doesn't mean I have not been busy.  I constantly have projects going at the house while I am home.  I am starting a side blog to highlight some of these projects (www.ecoguyprojects.blogspot.com).  I hope you'll check it out to see some of my ideas and experiments.  These projects are framed in a sustainability viewpoint just as my travels.

For the travel focused I will highlight some of my previous travels.  I'll show some of my favorite locations and how they are interacting with the environment.  I will even show some local (for me) destinations in the hopes that if you cannot travel around the world you can at least travel down the block!