Gregoire's CleanTech Blog

Great Point Energy converts coal into pipeline-grade natural gas : coal will be back in your basement

In the second half of the 20th century, oil- and natural gas-burning furnaces drove coal out of the home-heating business across North America. But if Great Point Energy--a Boston-area startup with a low-cost process for converting coal into pipeline-grade natural gas--has its way, coal may start keeping us toasty again before long.

Great Point Energy of Cambridge, MA, says its process is cheaper and more reliable than drilling for new natural gas or importing liquefied natural gas from the same unstable regions. "We can take coal out of the ground and put it in a natural-gas pipeline for less than the cost of new natural-gas drilling and exploration activities," says CEO Andrew Perlman.

Traditional coal-to-methane plants like the 1970s-era Dakota Gasification plant in Beulah, ND, and new plants envisioned by General Electric (GE) and ConocoPhillips are costly because they require a series of chemical plants operating at a wide range of conditions. In these plants, cryogenic equipment operating just a few degrees above absolute zero feeds pure oxygen to the gasifier, where coal baked to up to 2,500 ºF breaks down into a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen called syngas. From there, the syngas is subsequently catalytically transformed into high-grade methane in a separate reactor.

In contrast, Great Point compresses the process into one single, efficient reactor by moving the catalysts into the gasifier itself. The key is a proprietary, recyclable catalyst developed in house with help from gasification and catalysis experts at Southern Illinois University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Tennessee, among others. The catalyst (which Perlman cagily describes as "a formulation of abundant low-cost metals") lowers the amount of heat required to gasify coal and simultaneously transforms the gasified coal into methane. In fact, the heat released in the syngas-to-methane step is sufficient to sustain the gasification, eliminating the need to fire up the reactions with purified oxygen. "It's perfectly heat balanced," says Perlman.

On the strength of lab-scale demonstrations with its catalyst, Perlman and his partners have picked up $37 million from venture-capital firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Advanced Technology Ventures to test their catalyst in a pilot plant. Rather than building a pilot plant from scratch, Great Point accelerated the process by leasing one from the utility-supported Gas Technology Institute at Des Plaines, IL. Perlman says Great Point ran the plant's 14-inch-in-diameter, 60-foot-high gasifier for a week in November with the firm's proprietary catalyst, converting Illinois Powder River Basin low-sulfur coal into between 13,000 and 14,000 cubic feet of natural gas per day. He anticipates that a second run this spring will give him and his partners the data they need to take the next step: designing a larger but still precommercial plant that he expects to have operating by 2009. Subsequent testing at Des Plaines will evaluate the catalysts with dirtier yet more energetic petroleum coke, a byproduct that the average refinery generates at the rate of 5,000 to 10,000 tons per day--more than enough to fuel a commercial-scale synthetic-gas plant.

Meanwhile, Perlman says he is searching for a coal mine or refinery in the western United States to site Great Point's first plants. The idea is to produce natural gas close to oil producers who need the synthetic-gas plant's largest byproduct: carbon dioxide. Dakota Gasification has blazed this trail. Its synthetic-gas plant converts 18,000 tons of lignite coal into 170 million cubic feet of synthetic natural gas per day--enough to heat 2,500 homes for a year. But it also sells its CO₂ to the aging oil fields of southeastern Saskatchewan, in the process burying more CO₂ in a year than 100,000 cars release in their operational lifetime. (See "Carbon Dioxide for Sale.") "Our CO₂, instead of being a liability, is actually a saleable byproduct," says Perlman, who estimates that oil producers in the west are willing to pay $20 to $40 per ton of CO₂. That said, Perlman has not factored revenue from CO₂ into his business plan. What is clear is the potential for coal. "The U.S. has 3 percent of the world's natural gas but 26 percent of the coal," he says. "Wyoming's coal could supply U.S. natural-gas needs for 100 years."

And natural-gas distributors are eager for the gas. Evansville, IN-based utility Vectren, which supplies gas and power to more than one million customers in Indiana and Ohio, has signed a 30-year deal to pay roughly $5 to $6 per million BTUs for synthetic gas from the $1.5 billion plant that GE hopes to build in Indiana. Vectren spokesman Mike Roeder acknowledges that there is a risk that the gas price could fall in the future, but he says the security of supply is worth it. "Reasonably priced gas has not been an option for our customers for at least the past five years," he says. "So we have a very strong interest in the project moving forward."

The attraction is clear: gasification of coal offers a fixed-price alternative to the volatility of natural-gas markets. Indiana officials note that natural gas from GE's plant at $5 to $6 per million BTUs would be well below the current price of $7.50 to $8.50 per million BTUs. Projecting that natural-gas prices will remain high, the officials estimate that GE's plant would save consumers more than $3.7 billion over the next 30 years. Therein lies the challenge in financing these plants: no one wants to be left on the hook if the natural-gas price crashes, as it did in the 1980s and '90s. Great Point Energy's simpler conversion process offers a safer bet, says Perlman, because it should deliver pipeline-quality gas from coal for less than $3 per million BTUs.

Source :Technology Review

Universal Display Corporation and the University of Southern California design flexible display based on new organic LED technologies

Researchers at the University of Southern California have designed a phosphorescent dye molecule that emits near-infrared light and have used it to make long-lasting organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs).

The diodes could be used to make a cheap and flexible near-infrared (NIR) display that would be unreadable to the naked eye but could be read with night-vision goggles. Such a display could be integrated into a soldier's uniform or a device that could be stashed in a pocket, allowing soldiers to read communications at night without being spotted by enemy snipers.

These organic LEDs could also be converted into the infrared-detector diodes that make night vision possible. Infrared detectors are essentially the reverse of LEDs, converting light into an electric current. Warm objects emit infrared radiation, which has wavelengths longer than near-infrared radiation and is also invisible to the human eye. Just as the light detectors in cameras sense visible light, infrared sensors made of inorganic semiconductors detect infrared light in the night-vision goggles and cameras used by the military, police, border security agents, and firefighters. But detectors based on OLEDs would offer an important benefit: because the thin organic polymers that make up these diodes can be deposited on a variety of substrates, including bendable plastic, organic IR detectors could be flexible enough to incorporate into a helmet visor.

"Flexibility is very beneficial … next-generation displays are all going to be on flexible substrates," says Mark Thompson, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California, who led the research. Organic LEDs are the crucial technology for flexible displays, because they are easy and cheap to pattern on bendable substrates, he says. They are already being used in camera and cell-phone displays, and they hold tremendous promise for future large-area computer and television screens.

Research in organic LEDs has largely focused on visible-light applications; no one has previously made an organic LED that efficiently emits NIR light. Thompson and his colleagues at Princeton University and Universal Display Corporation, a company based in Ewing, NJ, described their organic LED online in Angewandte Chemie on January 9.

Organic LEDs that emit invisible NIR wavelengths could be used to make displays that you do not want everyone to see. "For covert military applications, night-vision displays will be very important, and these diodes would be key to that," says Ghassan Jabbour, an optical-sciences professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who developed the first NIR-emitting organic molecules.

The secret to the new LED is a specially designed phosphorescent dye molecule that the researchers use in the emissive layer sandwiched between the device's two electrodes. Typically, organic LEDs contain an emissive layer that is doped with fluorescent dyes. The electrodes inject negative electrons and positive "holes" into the layer, where the charged particles combine and excite the dye molecules. When the molecules return to their unexcited state, they emit photons. The new phosphorescent molecules emit very efficiently in the NIR region. They also emit light for a longer time than fluorescent dyes, increasing the lifetime of the device--a traditional weak point for organic materials.

The device emits at wavelengths close to 800 nanometers, which is right at the border of the visible and near-infrared spectrum, and boasts an efficiency of more than six percent, which is at least 60 times that of other NIR-emitting devices reported in the past. Right now, it runs for 1,000 hours at its maximum brightness. But at the lower brightness levels required in displays, "we're talking at least a million hours," Thompson says. By comparison, red or green organic LEDs have lifetimes of 100,000 hours, he says.

Gareth Redmond, who studies nanoscale organic photodetectors at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland, calls the work a breakthrough toward NIR emission in organic material. Redmond says that the new organic LED shows "really good performance in terms of efficiency and lifetime which hasn't been achieved before."

Thompson and his colleagues plan to make other phosphorescent dye complexes that emit light at wavelengths longer than 800 nanometers, pushing deeper into the IR region. Then, Thompson says, it would be possible to "flip" the organic LED, converting it into an organic IR detector for a night-vision helmet visor. This would require modifying the device structure or tweaking the organic materials, but he says the conversion would be easy because LEDs and photodetectors are "cousins" with essentially the same diode structure but reverse functions--an LED converts electric current into light while a detector does the opposite.

But it is too early to say when such an organic IR detector would be available. It's not just that the jury is still out, he says; "the jury hasn't even been formed."

 

Source :Technology Review

Idéologique (2)

EDF_Les_apprentis_sorciers2
Vidéo envoyée par ledud1

ça continue, comme la première partie...

Idéologique ?

EDF_Les_apprentis_sorciers1
Vidéo envoyée par ledud1

Que penser d'un tel reportage fait par notre service public ? Document à charge contre l'ouverture du marché de l'électricité à la concurrence et la libéralisation. On aurait au moins pu s'attendre à un débat contradictoire, mais non, pas dans notre pays. Pourtant sans faire des comparaisons avec les télécoms où l'ouverture des marchés a permis le développement de l'innovation et la création d'emplois, il y avait aussi des raisons de fonds qui ont poussé à la libéralisation du marché électrique : constitution d'une Europe de l'énergie pour assurer une meilleure sécurité des approvisionnements, financement par le marché, et non par l'impôt, des nouveaux actifs de production indispensables pour répondre à la croissance de la demande, prise en compte des contraintes environnementales en favorisant le développement de l'innovation. Mais non, ce document est idéologique, à charge...Ca n'est pas comme cela que l'on va informer, "éduquer" nos concitoyens.

Quelques images des équipements de Photowatt

Pierre Yves ROBERTI - Photovoltaïque
Vidéo envoyée par guillaumeroberti

Solar inverters : turning DC to AC power

Nice video to understand the role of a DC/AC inverter...

Eestor ambitions to repalce electro-chemical batteries in every applications

A secretive Texas startup developing what some are calling a "game changing" energy-storage technology broke its silence this week. It announced that it has reached two production milestones and is on track to ship systems this year for use in electric vehicles.

EEStor's ambitious goal, according to patent documents, is to "replace the electrochemical battery" in almost every application, from hybrid-electric and pure-electric vehicles to laptop computers to utility-scale electricity storage.

The company boldly claims that its system, a kind of battery-ultracapacitor hybrid based on barium-titanate powders, will dramatically outperform the best lithium-ion batteries on the market in terms of energy density, price, charge time, and safety. Pound for pound, it will also pack 10 times the punch of lead-acid batteries at half the cost and without the need for toxic materials or chemicals, according to the company.

The implications are enormous and, for many, unbelievable. Such a breakthrough has the potential to radically transform a transportation sector already flirting with an electric renaissance, improve the performance of intermittent energy sources such as wind and sun, and increase the efficiency and stability of power grids--all while fulfilling an oil-addicted America's quest for energy security.

The breakthrough could also pose a threat to next-generation lithium-ion makers such as Watertown, MA-based A123Systems, which is working on a plug-in hybrid storage system for General Motors, and Reno, NV-based Altair Nanotechnologies, a supplier to all-electric vehicle maker Phoenix Motorcars.

"I get a little skeptical when somebody thinks they've got a silver bullet for every application, because that's just not consistent with reality," says Andrew Burke, an expert on energy systems for transportation at University of California at Davis.

That said, Burke hopes to be proved wrong. "If [the] technology turns out to be better than I think, that doesn't make me sad: it makes me happy."

Richard Weir, EEStor's cofounder and chief executive, says he would prefer to keep a low profile and let the results of his company's innovation speak for themselves. "We're well on our way to doing everything we said," Weir told Technology Review in a rare interview. He has also worked as an electrical engineer at computing giant IBM and at Michigan-based automotive-systems leader TRW.

Much like capacitors, ultracapacitors store energy in an electrical field between two closely spaced conductors, or plates. When voltage is applied, an electric charge builds up on each plate.

Ultracapacitors have many advantages over traditional electrochemical batteries. Unlike batteries, "ultracaps" can completely absorb and release a charge at high rates and in a virtually endless cycle with little degradation.

Where they're weak, however, is with energy storage. Compared with lithium-ion batteries, high-end ultracapacitors on the market today store 25 times less energy per pound.

This is why ultracapacitors, with their ability to release quick jolts of electricity and to absorb this energy just as fast, are ideal today as a complement to batteries or fuel cells in electric-drive vehicles. The power burst that ultracaps provide can assist with stop-start acceleration, and the energy is more efficiently recaptured through regenerative braking--an area in which ultracap maker Maxwell Technologies has seen significant results.

On the other hand, EEStor's system--called an Electrical Energy Storage Unit, or EESU--is based on an ultracapacitor architecture that appears to escape the traditional limitations of such devices. The company has developed a ceramic ultracapacitor with a barium-titanate dielectric, or insulator, that can achieve an exceptionally high specific energy--that is, the amount of energy in a given unit of mass.

For example, the company's system claims a specific energy of about 280 watt hours per kilogram, compared with around 120 watt hours per kilogram for lithium-ion and 32 watt hours per kilogram for lead-acid gel batteries. This leads to new possibilities for electric vehicles and other applications, including for the military.

"It's really tuned to the electronics we attach to it," explains Weir. "We can go all the way down from pacemakers to locomotives and direct-energy weapons."

The trick is to modify the composition of the barium-titanate powders to allow for a thousandfold increase in ultracapacitor voltage--in the range of 1,200 to 3,500 volts, and possibly much higher.

EEStor claims that, using an automated production line and existing power electronics, it will initially build a 15-kilowatt-hour energy-storage system for a small electric car weighing less than 100 pounds, and with a 200-mile driving range. The vehicle, the company says, will be able to recharge in less than 10 minutes.

The company announced this week that this year it plans to begin shipping such a product to Toronto-based ZENN Motor, a maker of low-speed electric vehicles that has an exclusive license to use the EESU for small- and medium-size electric vehicles.

By some estimates, it would only require $9 worth of electricity for an EESU-powered vehicle to travel 500 miles, versus $60 worth of gasoline for a combustion-engine car.

"My understanding is that the leap from powder to product isn't the big leap," says Ian Clifford, CEO of ZENN, which is also an early investor in EEStor. "We're the first application, and that's thrilling for us. We took the initial risk because we believed in what they are doing. And energy storage is the game changer."

The key challenge, however, is to ensure that the barium-titanate powders can be made on a production line without compromising purity and stability. "Purification gives you better production stability, gives you better permittivity, and gives you the high voltages you're looking for," says Weir. "We've now got the chemicals certified and purified to the point we're looking for." (Better permittivity of the insulator improves the amount of charge that can be stored without letting the current leak across the two plates.)

EEStor announced this week that the first automated production line for its powder has performed as required and that permittivity will meet or exceed expectations. It also said that it achieved 99.9994 percent purity for its barium-nitrate powder, a crucial ingredient in the dialectric. San Antonia-based Southwest Research Institute independently confirmed the results.

In a traditional ultracap, that permittivity is given a rating of 20 to 30, while EEStor's claim is 18,500 or more--a phenomenal number by most accounts. "This is a very big step for us," says Weir. "This puts me well onto the road of meeting high-volume production."

Jim Miller, vice president of advanced transportation technologies at Maxwell Technologies and an ultracap expert who spent 18 years doing engineering work at Ford Motor, isn't so convinced.

"We're skeptical, number one, because of leakage," says Miller, explaining that high-voltage ultracaps have a tendency to self-discharge quickly. "Meaning, if you leave it parked overnight it will discharge, and you'll have to charge it back up in the morning."

He also doesn't believe that the ceramic structure--brittle by nature--will be able to handle thermal stresses that are bound to cause microfractures and, ultimately, failure. Finally, EEStor claims that its system works to specification in temperatures as low as -20 °C, revised from a previous claim of -40 °C.

"Temperature of -20 degrees C is not good enough for automotive," says Miller. "You need -40 degrees." By comparison, Altair and A123Systems claim that their lithium-ion cells can operate at -30 °C.

Burke, meanwhile, says that there's a big difference between making powder in a controlled environment and making defect-free devices in a large quantity that can survive underneath the hood of a car.

"I have no doubt you can develop that kind of [ceramic] material, and the mechanism that gives you the energy storage is clear, but the first question is whether it's truly applicable to vehicle applications," Burke says, pointing out that the technology seems more appropriate for utility-scale storage and military "ray guns," for which high voltage is an advantage.

Safety is another concern. What happens if a vehicle packed with a 3,500-volt energy system crashes?

Weir says the voltage will be stepped down with a bi-directional converter, and the whole system will be secured in a grounded metal box. It won't have a problem getting an Underwriters Laboratories safety certification, he adds. "If you drive a stake through it, we have ways of fusing this thing where all the energy is sitting there but it won't arc … It will be the safest battery the world has ever seen."

Regarding concerns about temperature, leakage, and ceramic brittleness, Weir did not reply to an e-mail asking him how EEStor overcomes such issues.

Nonetheless, the company has some solid backing. Its board has attracted Morton Topfer, former vice chairman of Dell and mentor to Michael Dell.

The company is also backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture-capital powerhouse that has an impressive track record: it made early and highly successful bets on Google, Amazon.com, and Sun Microsystems, among others. Whether EEStor can translate that success to the energy sector remains to be seen.

"I'm surprised that Kleiner has put money into it," says Miller.

Weir maintains that his company will meet all of its claims, and then some. "We're not trying to hype this. This is the first time we've ever talked about it. And we will continue to meet all of the production requirements."

Source : Technology Review

GM announces new battery technology for electric vehicule

General Motors (GM) recently announced that it is developing two types of plug-in hybrid vehicles, cars designed to run exclusively or almost exclusively on electricity for daily commutes. (See "GM's New Electric Vehicle" and "GM's Plug-In Hybrid.") But the announcements came with this caveat: the battery technology isn't ready, and production will have to wait. In reality, the battery technology is actually quite close to being ready.

Indeed, GM's vehicle chief engineer, Nick Zelenski, says that individual batteries are already good enough. "We've got enough data at the cell level to feel that the technology is there," he says. What remains to be done is packaging the cells into large battery packs and testing them in actual vehicles. This will be a challenge, Zelenski says, since there is a big difference between using "a single cell and multiplying them all together to get the energy levels that we need for this type of vehicle." But according to development contracts GM recently signed with two groups of companies, such battery packs will be ready for testing in vehicles by the end of this year.

Making batteries for vehicles, especially plug-in hybrids, is very challenging. For accelerating and climbing hills, the battery pack has to deliver enough power to supply the electricity demand of several houses at once. The energy storage capacity required to give a vehicle a 40-mile range would be enough to power a laptop in continuous use for weeks. Yet the space on board for such a battery pack is limited. "What we need is a very reliable and long-lived battery that has also got quite high energy density so we can find a place for it in the car," says Peter Savagian, director of hybrid power-train systems at GM.

Developers also need to make packs that can survive extremes in temperature and constant vibrations on the road, and still last the life of a vehicle. And they have to make the batteries safe. Last year millions of laptops were recalled because of the danger of their batteries bursting into flame. A plug-in hybrid would have the equivalent of hundreds of laptop battery packs bundled together.

Remarkably, at the level of individual cells, many of these problems have already been addressed. Lithium-ion batteries have much higher capacity than the lead acid batteries used in electric cars in the past, and even more than the nickel-metal hydride used in hybrids today. According to GM, its new Chevrolet Volt concept vehicle stores the same amount of energy as the company's EV-1 electric vehicle, but in just one-third the area. And while lead acid battery packs have to be replaced every couple of years, new lithium-ion batteries seem from lab tests to be able to last 10 years or more.

New lithium-ion batteries are also safer and less expensive than those in a laptop. One of the companies under contract with GM to develop battery packs is A123 Systems, based in Watertown, MA. It has developed a nanostructured iron phosphate­-­based electrode that is much safer than the cobalt-oxide laptop batteries that were recalled last year. For example, while a cobalt-oxide battery will burst into flame if punctured by a nail, the A123 battery merely releases innocuous wisps of steam. (See "Safer Lithium-Ion Batteries.") A123 is already producing millions of its batteries for use in professional power tools, and now it has developed a new, larger cell designed to be more rugged and hold more energy. The company has also modified the electrolyte to make the battery able to operate very well at -20 ˚F or temperatures up to 140 ˚F. As a result, "the car can operate in Scandinavia, in Patagonia, or in the summer in the middle of a tropical city," says Ric Fulop, cofounder and vice president of business development at A123 Systems.

At this point, cost may still be an issue. But that will change as more of the cells get made. "At the end of the day, it's a scale game," says Alan Mumby, CEO of a joint venture between Johnson Controls, in Milwaukee, WI, and Saft, in Paris, France. The venture has been awarded one of the two contracts for developing battery packs for GM .

Overall, "the fundamental tool kit--the weight, volumetric efficiency, the demonstration of life in a lab basis, and safety through extensive testing--have all

been demonstrated," says David Vieau, president and CEO of A123 Systems. "So this is not a pie in the sky. However, the actual execution of all functionality in cells in actual vehicles hasn't been done."

Although integrating the batteries into large packs is a challenge, in fact it has been done before. According to Scott Lindholm, vice president of systems engineering at Cobasys, based in Orion, MI, which is teaming with A123 Systems on the GM contract to develop battery packs, many of the problems involved in making lithium-ion battery packs are similar to those the company has already solved for the nickel-metal hydride packs it already produces for GM hybrids. What's more, several companies have already made large lithium-ion battery packs for vehicles. For example, Hymotion, based in Ontario, has used A123's power-tool batteries to make kits for converting the Toyota Prius into a plug-in hybrid. Indeed, its design is one of the contenders for converting hundreds of New York State's government-owned hybrids into plug-in hybrids. These packs are smaller than that used in GM's Volt concept vehicle, but companies such as Tesla Motors have already successfully engineered lithium-ion packs that are a few times larger than GM's pack.

The question is whether such packs can be engineered to have the life, safety, and cost that GM wants. As it is, these battery packs can cost tens of thousands of dollars, placing them out of the range of most consumers. But part of the cost has to do with scale, and that should change if GM puts the vehicle into production. The price is also coming down as the batteries are used in other applications, such as power tools.

In all, it seems as though battery technology is falling into place, just as demand for more fuel-efficient cars is rising. "It's really exciting for us to be in this business," says Fulop. "The timing ended up quite nice. We developed these products, and the plug-in-hybrid thing is really happening."

Arnold Schwarzenegger introduces world’s first standard reducing carbon content in fuels

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday called for the world’s first low-carbon fuel standard, a rule that would reduce carbon emissions from transportation fuels in the state by 10 percent by 2020.

Once it’s put in place by the state’s Energy Commission and Air Resources Board, the standard will require fuel refiners and sellers to replace 20 percent of passenger-vehicle fuels with lower-carbon fuels. The standard is part of the move to reduce greenhouse gases in California under the Global Warming Solutions Act signed into law in September, which mandates that 2020 emissions match those of 1990.

The move is expected to more than triple the size of California’s renewable fuels market and add more than 7 million alternative fuel or hybrid vehicles, 20 times current numbers. It could be a harbinger of policy change in the rest of the country and the world, as the European Union is also considering a similar measure. It’s also likely to spark another round of investment and innovation in fuels, companies said.

“Today’s announcement is very important news for California entrepreneurs and investors,” said Bob Epstein, head of Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), who added that more than $500 million was invested in alternative fuels last year. “If you know how to make fuels that don’t use oil and reduce carbon, California is the place to be.”

Environmentalists say the standard could make a big difference because transportation fuels in California contribute a significant portion of greenhouse gases. California relies on petroleum alone for 96 percent of its transportation needs.

And transportation fuels make up 40 percent of the greenhouse gases in the state, said Linda Adams, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency. This standard alone could go 10 percent of the way toward fulfilling the goal set by the global warming law, removing 13 million tons of carbon dioxide, she said.

In a statement, Chevron said it "shares the concerns of government and public alike on the issue of greenhouse gas emissions," but did not indicate that it endorsed or opposed Gov. Schwarzenegger's move. Other oil companies could not be reached for comment, and did not speak at the press conference in San Francisco.

David Crane, a senior advisor to the governor, said oil companies are aware of the standard. “We believe we have their support,” he said. “We weren’t able to arrange for anyone [from the oil companies] to be here, but you will soon hear from them.”

Robert Sawyer, chair of the California Air Resources Board, said the agency plans to make decisions about how to put the standard in place over the next few months, with those decisions taking effect over the next year and a half.

Dan Skopec, undersecretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, said the Environmental Protection Agency will look to fuel companies to provide information about the carbon content of their fuels. The agency will audit that information and make sure it’s correct, he said.

The intention is to leave the decisions up to refiners and sellers as to exactly how to meet the standard.

That leaves the door open for new fuels still being developed or invented, Mr. Skopec said, who also mentioned cellulosic ethanol—ethanol from materials like wood chips, corn stalks, and switchgrass, which has less carbon than carbon from starches like corn, wheat, and sugarcane—as a goal.

“The government is not predicting winners and losers; the market will decide what the best fuel is based on economics, needs for consumers, and carbon content,” Mr. Skopec said.

The standard is an important signal to the investors, some of which have been burned by short-term, wavering government policies in the past, that demand for these fuels will be secure for at least 13 years, he said.

It could also spark an early version of carbon trading in the state, another opportunity for new business models. Fuel providers able to produce more low-carbon fuel than required will get credits they can bank or sell, Mr. Skopec said.

Bill Jones, former secretary of state and the chair of Pacific Ethanol, said the standard deals with the problems of greenhouse gases and energy independence without leaving out economics. He bragged that the company’s ethanol plant in Madera, California, generated jobs and brings $1 million in taxes to the city’s coffers.

The standard “allows everyone to go out and work hard and maybe come up with some new solutions that might surpass what we have now,” he said.

Gov. Schwarzenegger plans to introduce the standard during his state of the state speech Tuesday evening, asking California to “blaze the way” for the U.S., China, and the rest of the world.

“Our cars have been running on dirty fuel for too long,” according to an excerpt from his prepared statements. “Our country has been dependent on foreign oil for too long. I ask you to set in motion the means to free ourselves from oil and from OPEC. I ask you to encourage the free market to overthrow the old order. California has the muscle to bring about such change. I say use it."

Source : Red Herring

China's Coal Future (part II)

While China's desire to end its dependence on foreign oil is helping to drive huge capital investments in liquefaction technology, the country's power producers are moving much more slowly to take advantage of coal gasification. What they, like their American counterparts, are missing is an incentive to upgrade from conventional pulverized-coal plants to the more expensive gasification plants. According to Li Wenhua, the former 863 program manager (who now directs gasification research in China for General Electric), Chinese industrialists perceive pulverized-coal plants as a license to print money. "People say you shouldn't call it a power plant; it's a money-making machine," says Li. As yet, no power company has been willing to be the first to hit the off switch.

Ironically, China's move to a more open economy has hampered efforts to deploy more innovative technologies. In the 1990s, it looked as if China's power sector was headed for its own gasification revolution. In 1993, China's leading power engineering firm, China Power Engineering Consulting in Beijing, began designing the country's first gasification power plant. The monopoly utility of the era, the State Power Corporation, planned to build the commercial-scale plant in Yantai, a thriving seaport not far from the Bohai Sea. The Yantai plant was to be the beginning of a transition to cleaner coal technology, says Zhao Jie, the plant's designer, now vice president of China Power Engineering. "China wanted to take a cleaner and more efficient way to produce power," says Zhao. Instead, the demonstration plant she designed went on a roller-coaster ride to nowhere. Design work was temporarily halted in 1994 when the cost of the technology was deemed unacceptably high, revived in the late 1990s, and then cut adrift after 2002 by the breakup of the State Power Corporation.

The Yantai power plant was based on integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) technology. IGCC plants resemble natural-gas-fired power plants--they use two turbines to capture mechanical and heat energy from expanding combustion gases--but are fueled with syngas from an integrated coal gasification plant. They're not emissions free, but their gas streams are more concentrated, so the sulfurous soot, carbon dioxide, and other pollutants they generate are easier to separate and capture. Of course, once the carbon dioxide--the main greenhouse gas--is captured, engineers still need to find a place to stow it. The most promising strategy is to sequester it deep within saline aquifers and oil reservoirs. In preliminary analyses, Chinese geologists have estimated that aging oil fields and aquifers could absorb more than a trillion tons of carbon dioxide--more than China's coal-fired plants would emit, at their current rate, for hundreds of years.

The Huaneng Group, a power producer based in Beijing, has pulled together a consortium of power and coal interests (Shenhua included) called GreenGen to build the first Chinese IGCC demo plant by 2010; like the related ­FutureGen project organized by the U.S. Department of Energy, GreenGen is to start with power production, then add carbon capture and storage. China's vice premier, Zeng Peiyan, made an appearance at GreenGen's ceremonial debut last summer, indicating Beijing's support for the project.

The problem is that IGCC plants still cost about 10 percent to 20 percent more per megawatt than pulverized-coal-fired power plants. (And that's without carbon dioxide capture.) China's power producers--much like their counterparts in the United States and Europe--are waiting for a financial or political reason to make the switch. In part, what's been missing is regulation that penalizes conventional coal plants. And China's environmental agencies lack the resources and power to make companies comply even with regulations already on the books. Top officials in Beijing admit that their edicts are widely ignored, as new power plants are erected without environmental assessments and, according to some sources, without required equipment for pollution control.

Even advocates of IGCC technology expect that its widespread deployment in China will take at least another decade. Indeed, Du Minghua, a director for coal chemistry at the Chinese Coal Research Institute, predicts that it will be 2020 before application of IGCC technology begins in earnest.

Waiting to Inhale

Despite such pessimistic predictions, China's vast experience with advanced coal technologies and its proven ability to implement new technologies at a startling pace provide ample room for optimism. When you're racing into Shanghai at one-third the speed of sound on a train supported by an electromagnetic force field, it's hard to believe that a country capable of such an engineering feat will continue to ignore the deadly pollution engulfing its cities.

To some analysts, the switch to clean-coal technology seems almost inevitable. "China has to rely on coal for future electricity and fuel needs, and it will eventually have to cap its CO₂ emissions," says Guodong Sun, a technology policy expert at New York's Stony Brook University who has advised the Chinese government on energy policy. "Gasification is one of a very few technologies that can reconcile those conflicting scenarios at reasonable cost."

Still, the timing of such a technology transition is very much in question. Will China really wait until 2020 to start the process of cleaning up its coal-fired power plants? The answer will depend, ultimately, on when China begins to feel that using coal gasification to generate electricity is as urgent as using it to produce transportation fuels--when the costs of air pollution become as worrisome as the costs of relying on foreign oil.

Source : Technology Review