The Market is not Enough to end Fossil Fuel use

In recent years, proponents of clean energy have taken heart in the falling prices of solar and wind power, hoping they will drive an energy revolution. But a new study co-authored by an MIT professor suggests otherwise: Technology-driven cost reductions in fossil fuels will lead us to continue using all the oil, gas, and coal we can, unless governments pass new taxes on carbon emissions.

"If we don't adopt new policies, we're not going to be leaving fossil fuels in the ground," says Christopher Knittel, an energy economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. "We need both a policy like a carbon tax and to put more R&D money into renewables."

While renewable energy has made promising gains in just the last few years -- the cost of solar dropped by about two-thirds from 2009 to 2014 -- new drilling and extraction techniques have made fossil fuels cheaper and markedly increased the amount of oil and gas we can tap into. In the U.S. alone, oil reserves have expanded 59 percent between 2000 and 2014, and natural gas reserves have expanded 94 percent in the same time.

"You often hear, when fossil fuel prices are going up, that if we just leave the market alone we'll wean ourselves off fossil fuels," adds Knittel. "But the message from the data is clear: That's not going to happen any time soon."

This trend -- in which cheaper renewables are outpaced by even cheaper fossil fuels -- portends drastic climate problems, since fossil fuel use has helped produce record warm temperatures worldwide.

The study concludes that burning all available fossil fuels would raise global average temperatures 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100; burning oil shale and methane hydrates, two more potential sources of copious fossil fuels, would add another 1.5 to 6.2 degrees Fahrenheit to that.

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Gasoline as a Biofuel?

Imagine a world where vehicles run on beer. Some might think of this as a devastating waste of good hops, but a University of Maryland (UMD) team sees a lot of promise for the idea. The team has been awarded a patent for a process that uses natural microorganisms to ferment biomass or gases into hydrocarbons. In short, they've figured out how to brew gasoline naturally.

The inventors, Professor Richard Kohn and Faculty Research Associate Dr. Seon-Woo Kim, are at the University of Maryland, had been awarded a patent for microorganisms that are ethanol-tolerant and which produce ethanol from biomass materials. The team has now been awarded a similar patent for the same process, but producing hexane and octane, the core ingredients of gasoline. In both cases, the fuels separate from the biomass and rise to the surface of a fermentation broth.

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Now THAT'S Green Power: a Fuel Cell Using Cyanobacteria Respiration and Photosynthesis

Researchers from Concordia University in Montreal are looking to tap into what may be the most plentiful yet overlooked source of power in the world. The group has invented a power cell that harnesses the electricity created during the natural processes of photosynthesis and respiration in blue-green algae.

The microorganisms, also known as cyanobacteria, can be found in just about any ecosystem on the planet, across all latitudes, with respiration and photosynthesis taking place in the organism's cells both involving electron transfer chains.

"By taking advantage of a process that is constantly occurring all over the world, we've created a new and scalable technology that could lead to cheaper ways of generating carbon-free energy," says Concordia engineering professor Muthukumaran Packirisamy.

We've seen algae put to similar use in a building in Germany, and on a smaller scale in algae-powered lamps, but algae is probably better know for its potential to produce energy as a biodiesel feedstock.

The Concordia group's prototype photosynthetic power cell is currently small scale, with the algae being placed in an anode chamber, alongside the cathode and proton exchange membrane that make up the unit. An external load connected to the device extracts the electrons released by the algae to the electrode surface.

According to the paper, the team was able to measure open-circuit voltage as high as 993 millivolts, while a peak power of 175 microwatts was obtained under an external load of 850 ohms. The team claims its Micro Photosynthetic Power Cell (μPSC) could produce a power density of 36.23 microwatts/cm2, a voltage density of 80 millivolts/cm2, and a current density of 93.38 microamps/cm2 under test conditions.

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Cardiff University Produces new Catalyst to Improve Biodiesel Yields

Biofuels can be made from various source materials such as waste from the winemaking industry and woody biomass. Reseachers are also looking for new methods to improve its environmental credentials as there is still controversy as to how green biofuels really are. Now, a team at the Catalysis Institute at Cardiff University is hoping to make biofuel production more efficient and sustainable by recycling the leftovers from the process.

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CELF Process: a Novel Pretreatment Could cut Costs for Biofuels by 30%

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have invented a novel pretreatment technology that could cut the cost of biofuels production by about 30 percent or more by dramatically reducing the amount of enzymes needed to breakdown the raw materials that form biofuels.

As partners in the BioEnergy Science Center (BESC), the team from the Bourns College of Engineering Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering and Center for Environmental Research and Technology (CE-CERT) have shown that this new operation called Co-solvent Enhanced Lignocellulosic Fractionation (CELF) could eliminate about 90 percent of the enzymes needed for biological conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to fuels compared to prior practice. This development could mean reducing enzyme costs from about $1 per gallon of ethanol to about 10 cents or less.

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Altaeros Energies' Airborne Turbine

The first time you see this bizarre aircraft floating high above the horizon, you may be confused. It looks kind of like a giant, winged doughnut.

It's 35 feet wide, and inventors call it the BAT.

It's an unmanned, helium-filled, cylindrical blimp wrapped around three spinning blades that turn wind into electricity.

Can the BAT, which stands for buoyant airborne turbine, help bring life-saving electricity to an estimated 1 billion people in rural areas where power is unavailable?

Altaeros Energies, launched four years ago by a group of MIT grads, hopes so. The young company is competing with Google and other outfits trying to bring the first viable airborne wind turbine to market.

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New Mexico Unveils 10 MW Geothermal Eletrical Plant

Cyrq Energy Inc. on Wednesday celebrated the opening of its geothermal power plant, the first of its kind in New Mexico.

The company provided tours of the $43 million plant to state officials, local residents and students. Gov. Susana Martinez had been scheduled to attend the open house but remained in Roswell in the wake of Tuesday’s middle school shooting.

The governor has promoted the project as a way for the state to diversify its renewable energy resources and meet sustainability goals.

[...]

The plant is currently supplying four megawatts of electricity to Public Service of New Mexico and is under contract to ramp up to 10 megawatts later this year.

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Lockheed Signs Deal with China to Build World's Largest (10 megawatt) Ocean Thermal Power Plant

Leading U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin signed a contract on Wednesday to design the biggest power station fueled by differences in ocean temperatures, a 10-megawatt plant that would provide electricity for a new Asian resort.

The contract between Lockheed and Beijing-based Reignwood Group, a Chinese consumer products and lifestyle firm, is the initial 10-month stage in a 3-1/2-year effort to build the green energy electric plant, which would generate power using a process known as ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC).

"This is just more or less the tip of the iceberg and what both parties are most interested in is ultimately getting the plant built so we can offer it to other customers. And that's where the business is for Lockheed," said Dan Heller, vice president of new ventures for Lockheed's Mission Systems and Training unit.

Heller declined to say how much the contract is worth for Lockheed or to estimate the potential cost of constructing the facility, which uses a process that has been tested in smaller plants but has never been developed on a commercial scale.

Other companies and organizations are pursuing OTEC energy projects as well. But Heller said the facility planned for Reignwood would "be magnitudes larger than anybody else, including ourselves, have ever attempted."

Heller said the two firms agreed to an initial 10-month contract for design of the plant because of the uncertainty surrounding the ultimate cost of a small commercial-scale facility. He said the design phase would help clarify the cost.

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Biohydrogen Breakthrough? Using Xytose to Produce Hydrogen

A team of Virginia Tech researchers has discovered a way to extract large quantities of hydrogen from any plant, a breakthrough that has the potential to bring a low-cost, environmentally friendly fuel source to the world.

“Our new process could help end our dependence on fossil fuels,” said Y.H. Percival Zhang, an associate professor of biological systems engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Engineering “Hydrogen is one of the most important biofuels of the future.”

Zhang and his team have succeeded in using xylose, the most abundant simple plant sugar, to produce a large quantity of hydrogen that previously was attainable only in theory. Zhang’s method can be performed using any source of biomass.

The discovery is a featured editor’s choice in an online version of the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie, International Edition.

[...]

Obstacles to commercial production of hydrogen gas from biomass previously included the high cost of the processes used and the relatively low quantity of the end product.

But Zhang thinks he has found the answers to those problems.

For seven years, Zhang’s team has been focused on finding non-traditional ways to produce high-yield hydrogen at low cost, specifically researching enzyme combinations, discovering novel enzymes, and engineering enzymes with desirable properties.

The team liberates the high-purity hydrogen under mild reaction conditions at 122 degree Fahrenheit and normal atmospheric pressure. The biocatalysts used to release the hydrogen are a group of enzymes artificially isolated from different microorganisms that thrive at extreme temperatures, some of which could grow at around the boiling point of water.

The researchers chose to use xylose, which comprises as much as 30 percent of plant cell walls. Despite its abundance, the use of xylose for releasing hydrogen has been limited. The natural or engineered microorganisms that most scientists use in their experiments cannot produce hydrogen in high yield because these microorganisms grow and reproduce instead of splitting water molecules to yield pure hydrogen.

To liberate the hydrogen, Virginia Tech scientists separated a number of enzymes from their native microorganisms to create a customized enzyme cocktail that does not occur in nature. The enzymes, when combined with xylose and a polyphosphate, liberate the unprecedentedly high volume of hydrogen from xylose, resulting in the production of about three times as much hydrogen as other hydrogen-producing microorganisms.

The energy stored in xylose splits water molecules, yielding high-purity hydrogen that can be directly utilized by proton-exchange membrane fuel cells. Even more appealing, this reaction occurs at low temperatures, generating hydrogen energy that is greater than the chemical energy stored in xylose and the polyphosphate. This results in an energy efficiency of more than 100 percent — a net energy gain. That means that low-temperature waste heat can be used to produce high-quality chemical energy hydrogen for the first time. Other processes that convert sugar into biofuels such as ethanol and butanol always have energy efficiencies of less than 100 percent, resulting in an energy penalty.

I haven't found the paper in the journal...help?

CleanTech Cleans Up Investment

Investors are betting big on cleantech. In the first quarter of 2010, companies raised more than $1.9 billion globally in 180 deals, a new high, according to a report released last week by the Cleantech Group and the accounting firm Deloitte.

Investment leaped 29 percent from the fourth quarter of 2009 and 83 percent from the same period a year ago, with both venture capitalists and big corporations (among them Royal Dutch Shell and General Motors) showing an interest.

But while the number of deals set a new record — the previous peak was 165 deals in the fourth quarter of 2009 — the total value is still $1 billion off the high, which was in the third quarter of 2008, and the deals are much smaller in size.

"The first three months of 2010 represent the strongest start to a year we have ever recorded," Sheeraz Haji, president of the Cleantech Group consultancy, says about the deal volume. But the environment is still tough for many cleantech companies. "You have less dollars per deal going into startups, and plenty of big companies are struggling to raise the capital they need."

Investors were sweet on the transportation sector, in particular electric vehicles. A $350 million investment in Better Place, a Palo Alto-based company that is building a network of charging stations for electric cars in Australia, California, Canada, Denmark, Hawaii and Israel, lifted transportation to a record quarter: $704 million in 27 deals. Two other California start-ups – Fisker Automotive and Coda Automotive – picked up $140 million and $30 million, respectively.

Why the interest in transportation, which requires huge outlays of cash? It's cooler, Haji told the Daily Finance. "People are watching exactly where Nissan's lease price is at," he said, referring to the company's pricing of its Leaf electric car. "There's anticipation that there's a market there."

The solar sector recorded $322 million in 27 deals, and investors poured $217 million into 39 deals in energy efficiency. The top three deals all went to lighting start-ups.

"Lighting is hot," Haji said in a statement. "A lot of entrepreneurs and venture firms are looking for lighting deals."

North American companies received 81 percent of investment globally, with Europe (including Israel) picking up 14 percent; China, 4 percent; and India, 1 percent. North American companies raised $1.5 billion in the first quarter. California-based companies topped the list, pulling in more than half of the total investment: 57 percent, or $870 million. Oregon was a distant second, with $179 million or 12 percent of the total investment.

There were 13 clean-tech IPOs during the quarter, which raised a total of $1.5 billion. China led the way with eight offerings. In February, Tesla Motors (founded by Inc.'s 2007 Entrepreneur of the Year Elon Musk) filed its IPO documents – following filings by Fremont, California-based Solyndra, a maker of skinny tube-shaped solar panels for commercial rooftops, and Codexis (No. 924 on Inc.'s 2009 Inc. 5000), a Redwood City, California company that crafts designer enzymes for biofuel production.

no time again...

Enzyme Companies Have Cellulosic Fuel Breakthrough?

Many cellulosic fuel producers are working with enzymes to break down tough, inedible plant parts, such as corncobs or switch grass, into simpler sugars that can be fermented to ethanol. Now enzyme companies say they are near to breaking down another tough obstacle: the cost of enzymes that will make the next generation of low-carbon fuels.

The progress may help put cellulosic ethanol on course to compete commercially when the first large plants open next year.

Novozymes, the world's largest industrial enzyme producer, today launched a new line it says will yield ethanol from plant wastes at an enzyme price of about 50 cents a gallon. The latest product of a decade of research, this marks an 80 percent price drop from two years ago, according to Global Marketing Director Poul Ruben Andersen.

The advances, Andersen said, will help bring cellulosic ethanol production prices to under $2 a gallon by 2011, a cost on par with both corn-based ethanol and gasoline at current U.S. market prices.

Yesterday, Novozyme's competitor, California-based Genencor, a division of enzyme giant Danisco, announced its own new enzyme product, which falls within a similar price range of about 50 cents to make a gallon of fuel, according to Philippe Lavielle, executive vice president of business development.

"What we can see now is that it's feasible to do this today. Of course, that being said, you have to bear in mind that you have to build the large-scale factories to do this," Andersen said.

That capacity, though nearer than ever, has long been a future prospect. Next year, the nation's first commercial-sized plants are expected to open their doors. Among the climate benefits experts see are that the use of corn stover and other waste products rather than corn will cut the need for fertilizer, plowing and other greenhouse gas-producing steps currently used to make ethanol.

*crosses fingers*

Japanese To Invest In Space Based Power?

Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and IHI Corp. will join a 2 trillion yen ($21 billion) Japanese project intending to build a giant solar-power generator in space within three decades and beam electricity to earth.

A research group representing 16 companies, including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., will spend four years developing technology to send electricity without cables in the form of microwaves, according to a statement on the trade ministry’s Web site today.

“It sounds like a science-fiction cartoon, but solar power generation in space may be a significant alternative energy source in the century ahead as fossil fuel disappears,” said Kensuke Kanekiyo, managing director of the Institute of Energy Economics, a government research body.

Japan is developing the technology for the 1-gigawatt solar station, fitted with four square kilometers of solar panels, and hopes to have it running in three decades, according to a 15- page background document prepared by the trade ministry in August. Being in space it will generate power from the sun regardless of weather conditions, unlike earth-based solar generators, according to the document. One gigawatt is enough to supply about 294,000 average Tokyo homes.

Takashi Imai, a spokesman for the Institute of Unmanned Space Experiment Free Flyer, which represents the 16 companies, confirmed the selection when reached by phone in Tokyo.

Interesting...

Global Potential for Wind-generated Electricity

1. Xi Lua, (a)
2. Michael B. McElroya, (b) and
3. Juha Kiviluomac (c)


a School of Engineering and Applied Science, Cruft Lab 211, and
b Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, 100E Peirce Hall, 29 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 0213
c VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, P. O. Box 1000, 02044 VTT, Finland


Abstract

The potential of wind power as a global source of electricity is assessed by using winds derived through assimilation of data from a variety of meteorological sources. The analysis indicates that a network of land-based 2.5-megawatt (MW) turbines restricted to nonforested, ice-free, nonurban areas operating at as little as 20% of their rated capacity could supply >40 times current worldwide consumption of electricity, >5 times total global use of energy in all forms. Resources in the contiguous United States, specifically in the central plain states, could accommodate as much as 16 times total current demand for electricity in the United States. Estimates are given also for quantities of electricity that could be obtained by using a network of 3.6-MW turbines deployed in ocean waters with depths [less than] 200 m within 50 nautical miles (92.6 km) of closest coastlines.

Link at the top as always.

Is this related to what you were looking at, Noel?

Duck Weed to the Rescue!

Researchers at North Carolina State University have found that a tiny aquatic plant can be used to clean up animal waste at industrial hog farms and potentially be part of the answer for the global energy crisis. Their research shows that growing duckweed on hog wastewater can produce five to six times more starch per acre than corn, according to researcher Dr. Jay Cheng. This means that ethanol production using duckweed could be "faster and cheaper than from corn," says fellow researcher Dr. Anne-Marie Stomp.

"We can kill two birds – biofuel production and wastewater treatment – with one stone – duckweed," Cheng says. Starch from duckweed can be readily converted into ethanol using the same facilities currently used for corn, Cheng adds.

Corn is currently the primary crop used for ethanol production in the United States. However, its use has come under fire in recent years because of concerns about the amount of energy used to grow corn and commodity price disruptions resulting from competition for corn between ethanol manufacturers and the food and feed industries. Duckweed presents an attractive, non-food alternative that has the potential to produce significantly more ethanol feedstock per acre than corn; exploit existing corn-based ethanol production processes for faster scale-up; and turn pollutants into a fuel production system. The duckweed system consists of shallow ponds that can be built on land unsuitable for conventional crops, and is so efficient it generates water clean enough for re-use. The technology can utilize any nutrient-rich wastewater, from livestock production to municipal wastewater.

Large-scale hog farms manage their animal waste by storing it in large "lagoons" for biological treatment. Duckweed utilizes the nutrients in the wastewater for growth, thus capturing these nutrients and preventing their release into the environment. In other words, Cheng says, "Duckweed could be an environmentally friendly, economically viable feedstock for ethanol."

If it doesn't really require anything more than what corn does, this has huge potential. It isn't a food crop. It doesn't compete with the production of food crops. It wouldn't - if works as advertised - be possible to put into production using methods that do not require much development past scaling up, unlike the cellulosic ethanol.

UC Berkeley Energy Symposium

SCHWEEEET! Congratz, Dr Chu!

Life's been a mess here due tot he fact that Lyuda's PT has been in the fscking shop for the last week. The shop, the dealer really, has blown multiple turbochargers. I'm about to go rain down hell upon them in person, but while I have been so preoccupied with my personal problems, they slipped a fast one past me.

President-Elect Obama has selected my boss' boss' boss, Steve Chu, to be the Secretary of Energy. Because the Director's Page is likely to be updated with a replacement in the not too distant future, here's a small grab of his bio there:

Chu’s own research has resulted in numerous awards, including the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips, for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. He did the work that led to the prize while at AT&T Bell Laboratories, from 1978-87; in 1987 he joined Stanford University as a professor in the Physics and Applied Physics Departments and was a highly decorated scientist, teacher, and administrator there until he accepted the directorship of Berkeley Lab.

Chu has published more than 220 scientific papers and is a fellow or member of the world’s leading scientific academies. He serves on numerous boards including the Hewlett Foundation, the University of Rochester, and the Executive Committee of the National Academies’ Board on Physics and Astronomy. He has been an advisor to the directors of the National Institutes of Health and the National Nuclear Security Agency.

His undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics were from the University of Rochester and his Ph.D from UC Berkeley. He has been awarded ten honorary degrees and has held numerous visiting lectureships at universities including Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, and the Collège de France.

Chu was born in Saint Louis, Missouri on February 2, 1948. He is married to Jean Chu, who was trained as a physicist at Oxford University and was formerly Stanford’s Dean of Admissions and the university president’s chief of staff. He has two grown sons, Geoffrey and Michael.

Oh, if the scuttlebutt is true, his siblings consider him a slacker, relatively speaking, since even though he has a PhD and a Nobel and run a lab and now is going to be a dept head of a nontrivial part of the government, he only has a single PhD. IDK if there's truth to that or not, but still an amusing rumor.

For the rest of you, he's huge into renewable energy, expect that for a major agenda item, and also synthetic biology, so look for that to be added more to the DOE's platform. Oh and he's not been a fan at all to what has been done to LANL and LLNL for management contracts. There's a slight ray of hope there, but only a slight one.

On a personal note, I've met him a few times. A very nice guy and very bright. PHD-itis is not something that has afflicted him.

Congratz, Dr Chu!