Getting used to a big city after staying in rural Iceland for the past couple of weeks has been weird, but I'm excited about our upcoming "field trips."
This morning we woke up around 8 am and had breakfast at a little bakery down the street called Sandholt I believe. At 9 am Caitlin met us at our hostel and we all walked several blocks to visit Carbon Recycling International, a company that focuses on capturing carbon dioxide emissions and using it to make fuel. Hydrogen is produced, the captured CO2 is purified, next is syngas compression, then methanol synthesis and distillation. Converting carbon dioxide to methanol is a creative solution to dealing with CO2 emissions, but it is not yet developed enough to become mainstream. The lecture was interesting, but I was sitting by a window (and wearing long sleeves) and it was so hot, so I had trouble concentrating.
After leaving Carbon Recycling International we met in a little square a couple of blocks away for lunch. Caitlin bought some snacks and sandwich fix-ins from a grocery store across the street.
When we finished lunch, we went to the bus stop nearby and took a bus to a local methane company called Sorpa. It took us quite a while to get there but the drive was nice, we got to see the outer parts of Reykjavik. At Sorpa we met Bjarni, the leader of the methane project. He spoke to us about using methane from landfills to fuel automobiles. While I enjoyed learning about methane as an alternative fuel source, he was quite opinionated and discredited many other alternative fuels. He was kind of crazy.
Once the lecture was over, we traveled to the landfill where the methane is collected. We also got to see his car, which ran on methane fuel. A few of the company's other vehicles also use methane.
Even though it was quite late in the afternoon when we left Sorpa, we still had our ethics class to go to. Gabriel, a friend of Caitlin's, was our lecturer for environmental ethics and met us at a bar to discuss how ethics tie into environmental issues. His lecture was really stimulating but I was struggling to stay awake since it was about 6 pm and we had been awake since early in the morning.
After ethics Caitlin gave us some money for dinner, and I went to a tapas bar with a girl from our group named Shannon. We both wanted to try puffin, and after searching around town for about 20 minutes we finally found a restaurant that served it. We ordered several tapas, among them smoke puffin with a blueberry Brennevin sauce (the "Black Death" alcohol I mentioned in my earlier blog) and Icelandic horse. The horse was delicious, but the puffin was more unusual. Since it was smoked it still kind of had a raw texture and wasn't very flavorful. However, with the Brennevin sauce it was very good.
That night we didn't really stay out long. I ended up just going to a bar with a few friends and we talked for a while, lamenting over the fact that we'd all be going home soon. I can't believe this trip is almost over!
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