Joule Solar Fuel

While producing biofuels from feedstock has drawn heavy criticism, much money and research is being put into next generation biofuels. The world’s largest oil company, Exxon Mobil, that has shunned other forms of renewable energy, has poured billions into next generation biofuel R&D.

One of the most exciting innovations in this field is Joule, a Massachusetts based company.

Joule produces biofuels by mimicking photosynthesis. Their SolarConverter, that facilitates the production process, contains a mixture of brackish water, nutrients, and genetically engineered organisms. Carbon dioxide gas is fed into the mixture, and the device is designed to expose the organisms in the mixture to the sun. The organisms are photosynthetic, meaning that they absorb light energy and carbon dioxide to form compounds. Joule has engineered its organisms to secrete ethanol and hydrocarbons and chemicals.

The organisms mimic photosynthesis and uses sunlight and carbon dioxide to produce liquid fuels and chemicals. According to the company they can produce up to 20 000 gallons (75 700 litre) per acre per year. They are also price competitive with oil at around US $50 per barrel.

Cellulosic biofuels made from wood or grass and algae-based methods reduce water and land needs, but they are currently more expensive than fossil fuels or have yet to become commercially viable.

Another company doing similar work to Joule is Amyris. Amyris uses synthetic biology to create microbes that metabolize sugar and churn out long hydrocarbon chains that are better known as diesel fuel.

Original article: Kevin Bullis. Technology Review. 27 July 2009. Read more…

Comprehensive water management

Water and the lack thereof have been cited by water experts to be at least as big a problem as climate change in the twenty first century. About 2 billion people around the world either lack access to sufficient quantities of water or are supplied with water unfit for drinking and this shortage is going to worsen in the near future due to the rise of the world’s population and to the redistribution of water recourses due to global warming.

According to UBS underinvestment in water infrastructure has resulted in great inefficiencies and cities like London and Shanghai are wasting more than 60% of their water supply due to something as simple to fix as leaky pipes.

Globally, UN reports put the loss of drinking water before it reaches the consumer at 33%. The total cost of ‘non revenue water’ is conservatively estimated at $14,6bn per year. One of the first companies geared to comprehensively address this is Israeli company Miya.

Miya is the first global player to offer a comprehensive water efficiency solution and a one stop shop for water loss projects. Their mission is to help the cities of the world benefit from the huge opportunity presented by water loss reduction and effective management of urban water. Their products and services include pressure management, leak detection, filters, pumps and measurement tools.

The benefits of their solutions for Water Loss Management are:
• Produce /purchase less water
• Energy savings due to improved efficiency of the system
• Reducing the amount of chemicals used to treat the water
• Saving or postponing investments in increasing water capacity or developing alternative water sources
• Extending the lifespan of existing infrastructures
• Reducing maintenance cost
• Increase revenues by reducing commercial losses caused by lack of metering and/or poor metering and billing policies.
• Lower contamination risks to the water supply from bursts and antiquated pipes

For more information, read here…

GreatPoint Energy Hydromethanation

Burning natural gas made from coal in a modern power plant generates about 60 percent less in greenhouse-¬gas emissions than burning coal directly and eliminates almost all other pollutants. Converting coal into natural gas has long been too expensive to implement on a large scale. But, GreatPoint Energy has developed a process called catalytic hydromethanation, which can economically convert coal (or petroleum coke or biomass) into pure natural gas while removing and capturing most of the carbon.

The Company’s cost of production is expected to be significantly lower than current prices of new drilled natural gas and imported liquefied natural gas (LNG), and the natural gas it produces, called bluegas™, meets all high-grade natural gas quality specifications. It can be transported through the thousands of miles of pipelines already in place around the world and can be used interchangeably with drilled natural gas for all applications, including power generation, residential and commercial heating, and the production of chemicals. SynGas produced by Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) cannot be distributed in this way.

Currently natural gas provides about 24% of the world’s energy needs.

Original article: Andrew Perlman. Technology Review. September 2009. Read article here…

Direct Carbon Fuel Cells

The Direct Carbon Fuel Cell (DCFC) converts fuel to electricity directly rather than burning it to boil water to make steam to turn a turbine, to turn a generator, to produce electricity. The DCFC can convert solid fuels to electricity at 70% efficiency and reduce CO2 emissions by 50% without sequestration.

A Fuel Cell is an electrochemical device that efficiently converts a fuel’s chemical energy directly to electrical energy without burning the fuel. However, instead of using gaseous fuels, as is typically done, DCFCs use aggregates of extremely fine (10- to 1,000-nanometer-diameter) carbon particles distributed in a mixture of molten lithium, sodium, Yttrium-stabilized zirconium or potassium carbonate at a temperature of 600 to 850°C. The overall cell reaction is carbon and oxygen forming carbon dioxide and electricity.

The reaction yields 80 percent of the carbon–oxygen combustion energy as electricity, yet no burning of the carbon takes place. DCFCs provide up to 1 kilowatt of power per square meter of cell surface area — a rate sufficiently high for practical applications.

The overall process of producing electricity in a DCFC from biomass gains efficiency by its simplicity. It involves only two steps: (1) drying (and/or pyrolysis, or hydrothermal carbonization) to obtain char, and (2) feeding the resulting fuel directly to the DCFC.

If the carbon feedstock for the fuel cell were to be derived from biomass, and the CO2 captured and sequestered, super-efficient carbon-negative electricity would be generated. That is: electricity the use of which results in the active removal of CO2 from the atmosphere

DirectCarbon, a company spun out of Stanford University in 2006, are currently trying to commercialise this technology. Great progress has also been made at the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the University of Queensland in Australia.

For more information read here orhere.

Jeremy Baskin – SA has compelling reasons to cut hothouse emissions

SA has no detailed climate change policy, as the government acknowledges. It is too late to develop one before next month’s Copenhagen conference. This is disappointing, given that SA is a Group of 20 economy and the world’s 13th-biggest CO² emitter, but not fatal as long as detailed, informed policy measures are in the pipeline.

Most troubling is SA appears to be going into Copenhagen with a position arguably not in the national interest, nor in the interests of combating climate change. It is also hard to square with some of the strong policy signals given by the government to date.

I write as a South African living abroad, who has for the past eight years worked on issues of climate, development and business risk and watched the policy debates in a number of countries closely.

Southern Africa is likely to be among the world’s hardest-hit regions when it comes to the physical, human and economic effects of climate change. These effects will vary between regions, districts, towns and suburbs (the details urgently need more research). But all indications are that changes in temperature, weather patterns and rainfall are likely to be especially nasty in Southern Africa and affect the livelihood and physical existence of millions of people. So SA has a strong self-interest in achieving the maximum possible mitigation and the highest possible global emission-reduction targets.

Without cuts from all major emitters, including developing countries such as China, the biosphere won’t get the reprieve it needs to avoid dangerous climate change. It is vital to encourage deep cuts by China, the US and Europe, which together account for more than 55% of global emissions. Our focus in international talks should be on maximising the extent of overall global mitigation.

In relation to global mitigation targets, it is in our interests to bridge the developed/

developing country divide, notwithstanding our historic and emotional identification with the Third World. There is, of course, a real issue of climate justice. The argument is ethically persuasive that most developing countries are not responsible for historic emissions, and they need emissions headroom to develop and financial assistance to adapt.

This is the position adopted by the African bloc, and argued strongly by, among others, India and China. There is certainly a valid argument to be made by, say, Mali or Bangladesh or even India (which emits less than two tones of CO² per capita a year).

These are all poor countries using less than their share of a scientifically credible global carbon budget. On any consideration of equity, they deserve our support for special consideration. But even China (with about half SA’s per capita emissions) is not a credible member of this group, a fact it implicitly recognises when it makes major emissions- reduction commitments even as it avoids the language of targets.

We delude ourselves to think we are in this special category. We are already a high-emissions country, one of the highest per capita emitters both historically and today. The science now suggests that, if we are to reduce the risk of dangerous climate change, the biosphere can only tolerate concentrations closer to 350ppm than to the more commonly cited 450ppm. This, in turn, equates to a global carbon budget of about two or three tones per capita emissions by 2050, about a fifth of SA’s current emissions.

Other than in the very short term, we will not get away with the argument some in government are voicing, that we be allowed to increase emissions in the name of development and get financial assistance to cut later. We will be accused, as the middle class is in India, of “hiding behind the poor”. Not only will we not get away with it, but we risk undermining our primary interest, which is to see the highest possible global mitigation efforts. The most we can expect, and what we should push for, is some financial assistance to transition to a low-carbon economy now.

It is true that our average emissions, like our middle-income country status, conceal deep inequalities. This is an argument for ensuring our domestic adaptation and mitigation policies, at the very least, reduce inequality. It is not an argument for being given space to ramp up our emissions. Many countries have seen growth and development and still have lower emission profiles today than we do — South Korea, Brazil, and post- war Japan to name but a few.

To be credible in pushing for global reduction SA needs strong domestic mitigation targets. From outside it appears SA may be diluting its previously announced targets. This would be unfortunate. “Growth and development first, climate later” may be in the interests of the fossil fuel industry, or convenient for politicians facing other challenges. But it is a false dichotomy ultimately not in the national economic interest.

The truth is that globally we are seeing the emergence of a price on carbon. The price is still low, but the trend is clear and it is upwards. As one of the world’s most carbon- intensive economies, SA is highly exposed. Traditionally, we have used the lure of cheap electricity to attract investment and mineral- beneficiation projects. We are unlikely to do so in future if our electricity remains carbon intensive. Future aluminium smelters, for example, will gravitate to countries such as Iceland, Brazil or New Zealand, which have extensive geothermal or hydropower.

Our exports are vulnerable. Markets such as Japan, the US, Germany, China and the UK have signalled their carbon pricing intentions. A carbon tariff is emerging. Agricultural producers and component suppliers will have been asked by customers to account for the carbon-intensity of their products. If SA’s wine producers, for example, are not already planning to slash their footprint and lobby the government for low-carbon electricity they should sleep uneasily in the knowledge that their competitors in other countries are.

Given SA’s unemployment, the evidence globally is that renewable energy is substantially more employment friendly per megawatt hour or per rand invested than carbon-intensive alternatives. Viewed from afar, it is impressive SA is putting so much effort into fleshing out its climate policies and starting to pay more attention to the neglected challenge of adaptation. The devil will be in the detail and affected by electricity- sector investment, support for renewables at scale (such as pilot concentrated solar power plants), energy efficiency regulation, forestry policy, tax incentives, and so on.

It is in our interests to transition to a low- carbon economy sooner rather than later. notwithstanding our deep reliance on the resources sector, the best hope for the future is a low carbon one. It is not an easy route, and will involve higher energy prices and difficult structural changes. Handled skilfully it could also help to reduce inequality in the country. Those who argue, in relation to climate, “not us, not much, and not now” are being shortsighted and do the country a disservice.

* Jeremy Baskin is the Director of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership’s Australian office.

Original article: Jeremy Baskin. Business Day. 9 November 2009. Read more…

Can we manipulate the weather?

Chinese scientists claim to be able to control the weather by firing chemical filled rockets into the clouds to catalyze precipitation or to drive rain away.

Although the success of such weather alchemy is still disputed, there seems to be a growing interest in large scale geo-engineering exploits to counteract the impacts of climate change.

A recent article in the UK’s The Guardian newspaper asked: Can we manipulate the weather?

The unseasonal snow that fell on Beijing for 11 hours on Sunday was the earliest and heaviest there has been for years. It was also, China claims, man-made. By the end of last month, farmland in the already dry north of China was suffering badly due to drought. So on Saturday night China’s meteorologists fired 186 explosive rockets loaded with chemicals to “seed” clouds and encourage snow to fall. “We won’t miss any opportunity of artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from a lingering drought,” Zhang Qiang, head of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, told state media.

The US has tinkered with such cloud seeding to increase water flow from the Sierra Nevada mountains in California since the 1950s, but there remains widespread scientific sniffiness in the west at such attempts at weather control. The chemicals fired into the sky, usually dry ice or silver iodide, are supposed to provide a surface for water vapour to form liquid rain. But there is little evidence that it works – after all, how do investigating scientists know it would not have rained anyway?

Such doubts have not stopped China claiming mastery over the clouds. Officials said the blue skies that brightened Beijing’s parade to celebrate 60 years of communism last month were a result of the 18 cloud-seeding jets and 432 explosive rockets scrambled to empty the sky of rain beforehand. Last year, more than 1,000 rockets were fired to ensure a dry night for last year’s Olympic opening ceremony.

“Only a handful of countries in the world could organise such large-scale, magic-like weather modification,” Cui Lianqing, a senior meteorologist with the Chinese air force, told the Xinhua news agency after last month’s parade.

Magic or not, there is growing interest in such attempts to deliberately steer the weather, and on a much larger scale. Next spring, a group of the world’s leading experts on climate change will gather in California to plan how it could be done as a way to tackle global warming, and by whom. The ideas, some of which, similar to cloud-seeding, involve firing massive amounts of chemicals into the atmosphere, can sound far-fetched, but they are racing up the agenda as pessimism grows about the likely course of global warming.

As interest grows, so does concern about whether such techniques, known as geoengineering, could be developed and unleashed by a single nation, or even a wealthy individual, without wide international approval. “What will happen when Richard Branson decides he really does want to save the planet?” asks one climate expert. If China thinks it can make cloud seeding work, then what about geoengineering?

“If climate change turns ugly, then many countries will start looking at desperate measures,” says David Victor, an energy policy expert at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Logic points to a big risk of unilateral geoengineering. Unlike controlling emissions, which requires collective action, most highly capable nations could deploy geoengineering systems on their own.”

Victor is a heavyweight policy analyst, but one of his most impressive academic feats could have been to smuggle the name of the world’s favourite secret agent into the sober pages of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. “Geoengineering may not require any collective international effort to have an impact on climate,” he wrote in an article published last year. “A lone Greenfinger, self-appointed protector of the planet and working with a small fraction of the [Bill] Gates bank account, could force a lot of geoengineering on his own. Bond films of the future might [enjoy incorporating] the dilemma of unilateral planetary engineering.” Move over, Goldfinger.

Unilateral geoengineering worries experts for two reasons. First, the massive side effects; what it could do to the world’s rainfall, for example. Second, once started, geoengineering would probably have to be continued, as stopping could bring an abrupt change in climate. “One of the many dangers with unilateral geoengineering is that once a country starts, it becomes very hard to stop,” Victor says. “Removing a warming mask, even if it is a flawed mask, would expose the planet to even more rapid and probably dangerous warming.”

In a world where action on global warming has created new markets in carbon worth billions of pounds, countries are not the only players. Geoengineering would require investment and the private sector is already eyeing up opportunities. Two companies have emerged with a business plan based on dumping iron in the sea and then selling carbon offsets based on the extra pollution supposedly soaked up by the resulting algal bloom. And in their new book, Superfreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner talk approvingly of Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, whose company, Intellectual Ventures, is exploring the possibility of pumping large quantities of reflective sulphur dust into the Earth’s stratosphere through a patented 18-mile-long hose held up by helium balloons.

This is the point where most people will shake their heads, say the whole silly idea will never happen, and skip to the crossword. They could be right, but the global warming story has a tendency to outpace most attempts to predict its path. Just a few years ago, scientists and politicians talked of the need to avoid a 2C rise in global temperature, yet experts recently gathered at an Oxford University conference openly talked of a likely 4C rise, which, without urgent and unlikely action, a new report from the Met Office says could come within many of our lifetimes.

A decade ago, an unproven idea called carbon sequestration, that would see carbon emissions from power stations trapped under the ground, was talked up by a small group of advocates, but was dismissed by most people as too expensive and unworkable on a large scale. Renamed carbon capture and storage, the idea is now mainstream energy policy in countries including Britain, despite still being unproven and dismissed by many as too expensive and unworkable on a large scale. Last month, the International Energy Agency said the world should build 100 full-scale carbon-capture power stations by 2020, and 850 by 2030.

If the geoengineering narrative follows a similar arc, then how long until nations or individuals that have the most to lose, or are the first to accept that the required massive emission cuts are impossible, turn to the presently unthinkable option? The US government, under President Bush, has already lobbied the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to promote geoengineering research as “insurance”. When the Royal Society recently carried out an investigation of the options, senior figures privately expected it to dismiss the whole concept as nonsense. Instead the society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, concluded in September that methods to block out the sun “may provide a potentially useful short-term backup to mitigation in case rapid reductions in global temperature are needed”. The society stressed that emissions reductions were the way to go, but recommended international research and development of the “more promising” geoengineering techniques.

“My guess is that we will be taking geoengineering a lot more seriously in the next decade,” says Victor, “but we won’t be in a position to deploy systems for some time. Most nations will decide it is needed only if we have really bad luck as warming unfolds and if we fail miserably in controlling emissions. I put the odds of using such systems in the next 40 years at perhaps one in five.”

Of all the apparent obstacles to geoengineering, cost is not likely to be among them. Compared with the expense of investing in renewable energy and phasing out fossil fuels, the cheapest geoengineering options come with a price tag of just a few billion pounds, perhaps 1% of what it could cost to tackle global warming through emissions cuts.

Alan Robock, an expert on volcanos and climate at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has looked at how much it might cost to carry out one of the most commonly discussed geoengineering options, to mimic the cooling effect of a volcanic eruption by filling the high atmosphere with sulphur compounds, which reflect sunlight.

The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 threw so much shiny sulphurous dust into the atmosphere that temperatures across a shaded Earth dropped a year later by about 0.5C. The 1815 explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia triggered the notorious “year without a summer” and widespread failure of harvests across northern regions including Europe, the north-east US and Canada.

Robock has worked out the likely cost of technology needed to deposit a million tonnes of sulphur in the stratosphere each year, an amount equivalent to a Mount Pinatubo eruption every four to eight years, and which scientists think could be enough to cancel out the global warming caused by a continued rise in carbon emissions.

The cheapest option could be to use giant mid-air refuelling aircraft, such as the US air force’s KC-10 Extender, filled with sulphur dioxide or hydrogen sulphide gas. It would be a round-the-clock operation, with nine aircraft each required to fly three sorties a day. In a new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Robock and his colleagues say it could be done for “several billion” dollars a year. The results have forced Robock to revise a high-profile list of 20 objections to geoengineering he published last year. “It turns out that being way too expensive is not the case.”

Robock’s new analysis still includes 17 reasons why geoengineering is a bad idea. Throwing sulphur into the atmosphere could slow down the world’s water cycle and do more damage to rainfall patterns than the global warming it aims to prevent. And because techniques that focus on stopping sunlight do nothing to stop carbon dioxide pollution from cars, factories and power stations, they cannot address the looming disaster of ocean acidification. The surface of the world’s ocean is slowly turning to acid as our extra carbon pollution dissolves in seawater. Coral reefs already appear doomed and many shellfish could follow. Altering the atmosphere could also weaken solar power and reverse years of work to close the hole in the ozone layer.

With such a catalogue of potential disasters waiting to unfold, there must be a law against geoengineering? The international rulebook is fuzzy on this issue. The only international framework that directly covers many geoengineering techniques, the 1976 Environmental Modification Convention, designed to stop nations at war from meddling with each other’s weather, has never been tested. The 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty could be used to regulate activities and experiments in those shared spaces, but releases to the atmosphere are legally more problematic because nations have sovereignty over their own airspace.

Rather than laws and treaties, many experts argue that the best way to prevent countries or companies from going it alone is to plunge in and start serious research. “The way to tame the worst forms of unilateral geoengineering is to promote a lot more research, especially [into] the side effects,” Victor says. “One of the biggest dangers is that some governments will try to create a taboo against geoengineering. A taboo would stop a lot of research but it wouldn’t stop determined rogues. That scenario would probably be the worst, because rogues would not abandon their efforts and the rest of us would not have done enough research to know what to expect.”

Mike MacCracken, chief scientist at the Climate Institute in Washington, is organising the California meeting next spring, which aims to figure out some guidelines. He says large-scale unilateral geoengineering is “not very plausible” and his main concern is fairness to future generations. Once started by anybody, a geoengineering attempt would probably need to be continued by everybody else because it would offer a mask on global warming that could be dangerous to remove.

“It might be that this is how unilateral concerns should be reframed; this generation more or less deciding it will take only slow action on any type of emissions, essentially forcing the next generation to be more likely to have to invoke geoengineering to save much that anyone considers beneficial and unique about the Earth.”

Read between the lines of most scientific reports on geoengineering and there is a tacit assumption that the idea sounds so extreme that merely discussing it will refocus efforts on emission cuts. But what if the reverse is true? What if a heavily funded research programme, and articles such as this, promote the idea to people who have little interest in moving to a low-carbon world?

“Knowledge is hard to hide,” says Robock. “It would be great if people didn’t know how to build nuclear bombs, but they do. We need to research and debate the consequences and then use politics and influence to let people know what would happen.”

Original article: David Adam. 4 November 2009. The Guardian. Read more…

More renewable energy sources added to REFIT

Biomass, biogas and three varieties of solar power technology were on Friday added to the list of renewable energy sources that qualify for feed-in tariffs to be paid by Eskom.

The tariffs, known in South Africa as Refit, are set to top up earnings of independent power producers (IPPs). They are determined by the National Energy Regulator of SA (Nersa).

The latest tariffs are

• R3.13 a kilowatt-hour for concentrating solar power without storage;
• R3.94 for grid-connected solar photovoltaic systems producing more than 1 megawatt;
• R1.18 for solid biomass;
• 96c for biogas; and
• R2.31 for concentrating solar power with six hours of storage.

It estimated that the cost of generating electricity from coal would more than triple from 51.9c a kilowatt-hour this year to R1.66 in 2030, while the cost of power from nuclear sources would increase from 72c a kilowatt-hour to R1.76.

Meanwhile, the cheapest renewable generation technology in two decades would be landfill gas at 75c a kilowatt-hour, down from 90c currently, Nersa forecast. The next cheapest source would be biogas at nearly 87c a kilowatt-hour, against 93c currently.

Wind and biomass were projected to be the next cheapest in 2030 at about 89c a kilowatt-hour, down from R1.25 and R1.18, respectively.

Original article: Ingi Salgado. Business Report. 2 November 2009. Read more…