Gregoire's CleanTech Blog

China's Coal Future (Part I)

A visitor arriving in Shanghai immediately notices China's technological conundrum. Through the windows of the magnetically levitated train that covers the 30 kilometers from Pudong International Airport to Shanghai at up to 430 kilometers per hour, both the progress the country is making and the price it is paying for it are apparent. Most days, a yellow haze hangs over Shanghai's construction frenzy. Pollution is the leading cause of death in China, killing more than a million people a year. And the primary cause of pollution is also the source of the energy propelling the ultramodern train: coal.

To keep pace with the country's economic growth, ­China's local governments, utilities, and entrepreneurs are building, on average, one coal-fired power plant per week. The power plants emit a steady stream of soot, sulfur dioxide, and other toxic pollutants into the air; they also spew out millions of tons of carbon dioxide. In November, the International Energy Agency projected that China will become the world's largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in 2009, overtaking the United States nearly a decade earlier than previously anticipated. Coal is expected to be responsible for three-quarters of that carbon dioxide.

And the problem will get worse. Between now and 2020, China's energy consumption will more than double, according to expert estimates. Ratcheting up energy efficiency, tapping renewable resources with hydro dams and wind turbines, and building nuclear plants can help, but--at least in the coming two decades--only marginally. Since China has very little in the way of oil and gas reserves, its future depends on coal. With 13 percent of the world's proven reserves, China has enough coal to sustain its economic growth for a century or more. The good news is that ­China's leaders saw the coal rush coming in the 1990s and began exploring a range of advanced technologies. Chief among them is coal gasification. "It's the key for clean coal in China," says chemical engineer Li ­Wenhua, who directed advanced coal development for Beijing's national high-tech R&D program (better known in China as the "863" program) from 2001 through 2005.

Gasification transforms coal's complex mix of hydrocarbons into a hydrogen-rich gas known as synthesis gas, or "syngas." Power plants can burn syngas as cleanly as they can natural gas. In addition, with the right catalysts and under the right conditions, the basic chemical building blocks in syngas combine to form the hydrocarbon ingredients of gasoline and diesel fuel. As a result, coal gasification has the potential both to squelch power plants' emission of soot and smog and to decrease China's growing dependence on imported oil. It could even help control emissions of carbon dioxide, which is more easily captured from syngas plants than from conventional coal-fired plants.

Despite China's early anticipation of the need for coal gasification, however, its implementation of the technology in power plants has lagged. The country's electricity producers lack the economic and political incentives to break from their traditional practices.

In contrast, large-scale efforts to produce liquid transportation fuels using coal gasification are well under way. China's largest coal firm, Shenhua Group, plans to start up the country's first coal-to-fuels plant in 2007 or early 2008, in the world's most ambitious application of coal liquefaction since World War II. Shenhua plans to operate eight liquefaction plants by 2020, producing, in total, more than 30 million tons of synthetic oil annually--enough to displace more than 10 percent of China's projected oil imports.

China's progress in constructing coal-conversion plants puts it far ahead of the United States, where coal gasification is still recovering from a damaged reputation. Gasification demonstration programs initiated in the U.S. after the energy crises of the 1970s were orphaned when oil and gas prices plummeted in the 1980s. That left many with the impression that the technology itself was unreliable (see "Carbon Dioxide for Sale," July 2005). In China, by contrast, oil never looked cheap, and coal has never lost its shine.

Coal and Cashmere

Northern China is fast becoming the epicenter of China's energy industry. The leading draw is the Shenfu Dongsheng coalfield, a 31,000-square-kilometer solid layer of shallow coal that stretches from the northern tip of China's Shaanxi Province to the southern edge of Nei Mongol, or Inner Mongolia. The Dongsheng field's estimated reserve of 223.6 billion tons of coal makes it the world's seventh largest; efforts to convert much of that coal to transportation fuels could make it the world's most profitable.

Until recently, Inner Mongolia's coal capital, Erdos, was largely untouched by the modern world, bounded by mountain ranges and the Great Wall to the south and by the Yellow River to the north. Its isolation is now over, thanks to freshly poured highways and new rail lines rolling over its fissured hills and steep valleys. An airport should open this year.

Erdos's GDP doubled between 2001 and 2004, largely because of coal, chemicals, and cashmere (Erdos supplies a quarter of the world's cashmere). To reach the coalfields, you drive 40 minutes south of the city, passing a 1950s-era mausoleum for Genghis Khan, the 13th-century warrior who conquered much of Asia. As you approach the dry floodplain of the Wulanmulun River, the imposing infrastructure of a dozen coal mines, including some of the world's largest and most mechanized, leaps out of the barren landscape. The region is also home to several hundred smaller, less modern mines (gases and cave-ins kill at least 6,000 Chinese coal miners a year). Miners on their day off zip by on mopeds, three or four to a vehicle, racing past 40-ton trucks heaped with coal. Along the highway, coal-­sorting terminals load railcars destined for power plants and ports on the industrialized east coast.

None of that infrastructure and activity, however, prepares a visitor for Shenhua's coal-to-fuels complex, which rises from a plateau cut into the hills. It is an impressive site, with its own coal-fired power plant, gasification plants, and two massive reactors where coal will be liquefied, each weighing 2,250 metric tons (Shenhua claimed the world hoisting record when it lifted the reactors into place last June). Flush from a $2.95 billion IPO in 2005 and $5 billion in annual revenues from its integrated mines, railroads, and power plants, Shenhua is rapidly expanding its operations. It sold 113 million metric tons of coal in just the first half of 2006, nearly matching the previous year's total. If Shenhua maintains that pace this year, it may become the world's largest producer of coal.

China's government in Beijing created Shenhua a decade ago to bring economies of scale and modern technology to bear on the Dongsheng coalfields. The company's $1.5 billion coal-to-fuels plant is an expression of that strategy--a facility so technically ambitious that many experts, Chinese and Western alike, doubted it would ever be built.

The production of transportation fuels from coal dates to early-20th-century Germany, where chemists developed two approaches to converting coal's solid long-chain hydrocarbons into the shorter liquid hydrocarbons found in motor fuels. (Nazi Germany, with little access to oil, relied heavily on these processes to fuel its highly mechanized army and air force, producing gasoline, diesel, and aviation fuel from coal.) Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch invented the better known of the two approaches in the 1920s. Fischer-Tropsch synthesis reduces coal to syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. A catalyst, often cobalt, then causes the carbon and hydrogen atoms to reconnect into new compounds, such as alcohols and fuels. Fischer-Tropsch synthesis is conventional chemistry today: in South Africa, for example, Johannesburg-based Sasol built Fischer-Tropsch coal-to-oil plants to ensure the country's fuel supply during the trade boycotts of the apartheid years; and by swapping in different catalysts, China's coal-to-chemicals gasification plants have employed Fischer-Tropsch for decades to yield products such as synthetic fertilizers and methanol.

Shenhua's plant, in contrast, chose Fischer-Tropsch's lesser-known rival, invented by Friedrich Bergius a decade earlier. Though used extensively by the Nazis, Bergius's process was subsequently abandoned. The process has come to be known as direct liquefaction, because it bypasses the syngas step. In direct liquefaction, the bulk of the coal is pulverized and blended with some of the plant's synthetic oil, then treated with hydrogen and heated to 450 °C in the presence of an iron catalyst, which breaks the hydrocarbon chains into the shorter chains suitable for refining into liquid fuels.

Direct liquefaction produces more fuel per ton of coal than Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. Experts at the Chinese Coal Research Institute in Beijing estimate that the process captures 55 to 56 percent of the energy in coal, compared to just 45 percent for Fischer-Tropsch. However, direct lique­faction is also far more complicated, requiring separate power and gasification plants to deliver heat and hydrogen and considerable recycling of oil, hydrogen, and coal sludge between separate sections of the plant. And breaking down hydrocarbons to just the right length requires exquisite control of the operating conditions and a consistent coal supply.

Shenhua redesigned the process over the last five years to boost efficiency and reduce waste but, at the same time, increased its complexity. And the company is taking a huge engineering and economic risk by pursuing so novel a technology on such a vast scale.

By the end of this year, Shenhua hopes to be pumping out 20,000 barrels of synthetic oil per day, nearly 500 times as much as its pilot plant in Shanghai produces. According to Jerald Fletcher, a natural-resource economist at West Virginia University in Morgantown, the Erdos plant constitutes a $1.5 billion experiment that could only take place in China. "It would be hard to get that kind of commitment of funds in the West without a more proven technology," says Fletcher. Eric Larson, an expert in energy technology and modeling at Princeton University, puts it more bluntly: "It doesn't make a lot of sense to build a huge plant like that, because it may not work."

But for the Chinese government, the rewards could be worth the risk. Despite its 2005 IPO of some assets, ­Shenhua remains a largely state-owned firm, and the direct-­liquefaction plant serves a critical state interest: energy security. "No matter how big the cost, Shenhua will build it," says Zhou Zhijie, a gasification expert at East China University of Science and Technology's Institute of Clean Coal Technology in Shanghai. "China's government will support this project until the liquid flows."

Of course, if the new plant works, Shenhua stands to earn a substantial profit. The company predicts that its synthetic oil will turn a profit at roughly $30 a barrel, though many analysts say $45 is more realistic. (The U.S. Department of Energy's most recent price forecast predicts that crude oil will dip to $47 a barrel in 2014, then climb steadily to $57 a barrel in 2030.) Hedging its bets, Shenhua has also entered a preliminary agreement with partners Shell and Sasol concerning several similar-sized or bigger Fischer-Tropsch fuel plants in Northern China, which would start up in 2012.

Shenhua's Chinese coal competitors, too, are already breaking ground on their versions of coal-to-fuel plants. The Yankuang coal group, the second-largest coal producer in China, is planning a Fischer-Tropsch fuel plant near Erdos that will use a proprietary gasifier and catalyst.

Beyond the risks inherent in the large-scale deployment of unproven technology, the gasification building boom also is an environmental gamble. Indeed, what may ultimately check China's coal-to-oil ambitions is water. China's Coal Research Institute estimates that Shenhua's plant will consume 10 tons of water for every ton of synthetic oil produced (360 gallons of water per barrel of oil), and the ratio is even worse for Fischer-Tropsch plants. Last summer, China's National Development and Reform Commission, the powerful body charged with regulating China's economy and approving large capital projects, issued a warning about the environmental consequences of the "runaway development" of synthetic-oil and chemical plants, which it said will consume tens of millions of cubic meters of water annually.

That prediction sounds particularly ominous in northern China, where water is scarce. Erdos is a mix of scrub and desert whose meager water supplies are already overtaxed by population growth and existing power plants. Zhou Ji Sheng, who as vice manager of ZMMF, one of Shenhua's Erdos-based competitors, is seeking financing for a gasification project, acknowledges that water scarcity could put an end to coal gasification in the area. "Even though we have so much coal, if we have no water, we will just have to use the traditional way--to dig it out and transport it," he says. "Water is the key factor for us to develop this new industry." Zhou says his firm plans to supplement its water supply by building a 120-kilometer pipeline to the Yellow River. But evaporation from hydroelectric reservoirs, the increased demand of growing cities and industries, and the effects of climate change mean that in the summer, the Yellow River barely reaches the sea.

Source : Technology Review

Nouveau Plan National d'Affectation des Quotas de CO2 : la France se montre moins laxiste

Le ministère de l'écologie et du développement durable a annoncé hier que "la France a transmis à la Commission européenne son plan national d'affectation des quotas de CO² pour la période 2008-2012 (PNAQ 2), d'un montant total de 132.8 millions de tonnes de CO² par an" [La Tribune].
Les Echos expliquent que "la Commission européenne [avait] donné fin novembre deux semaines au gouvernement français pour revoir sa copie, la version initiale de ce plan, portant sur 150 millions de tonnes, retirée in extremis par Paris, ayant été jugée trop laxiste". "Celui-ci prévoyait d'autoriser les secteurs industriels et énergétiques les plus émetteurs de gaz carbonique à rejeter annuellement 150.6 millions de tonnes de CO²" [La Croix]. "Or, les 1127 installations industrielles concernées n'en avaient émis que 132 millions de tonnes en 2005", ajoute le quotidien.
Le Figaro rapporte que "le ministère de l'écologie et du développement durable souligne que ce plan a été notifié à la Commission européenne après avis d'une Commission nationale d'examen regroupant industriels, ONG, administrations et experts".
"Les uns s'insurgent, les autres applaudissent. Les uns, ce sont les industriels, les autres les ONG", commente La Croix.  Le journal précise que "cette stabilisation des émissions des secteurs industriels est jugée 'raisonnable' par le Réseau action climat, qui rassemble les ONG, mais 'regrettable' par le Medef, qui estime que l'on fait à nouveau porter les efforts sur les secteurs économiques les plus vertueux".

Références :
- La France réduit ses quotas de CO² [Le Figaro, p. 23]
- La France rationne ses émissions de CO² [La Croix, p. 5]
- La France transmet son nouveau plan de quotas de Co² à Bruxelles [Les Echos, p. 21]
- La France transmet à Bruxelles son plan révisé de quotas de CO2 [La Tribune, p. 20]

Source : Touteleurope.fr

The Year in Energy by Technology Review

Biowaste to ethanol could soon power cars.
Converting a vehicle to run primarily on ethanol costs just a couple of hundred dollars. But ethanol won't make much of a dent in gas use as long as the source of ethanol in the United States remains corn grain, which requires a lot of energy and land in order to grow. A much better alternative is cellulosic materials such as wood chips and switchgrass, which are both cheap to grow and require fewer natural resources. (See "Biomass: Hope and Hype.") In an effort to reduce the processing costs of these materials, researchers are genetically engineering organisms that can devour grasses and waste biomass, digest the complex sugars, and then transform the resulting simple sugars into alcohol. (See "Better Biofuels" and "Redesigning Life to Make Ethanol.") Already, advances in parts of this process have led to planned cellulosic-ethanol plants. (See "Making Ethanol from Wood Chips.")

The plug-in hybrid-vehicle era begins.
For years, hobbyists and a few companies have been adding bigger battery packs to hybrid vehicles, which have both battery power and an internal combustion engine, and plugging them into electrical outlets. This allows the cars, which typically rely on the electric power only for short bursts or to assist the onboard gasoline engine, to run on electricity alone for short trips. The idea of the "plug-in hybrid" has now caught the attention of government officials and researchers, who note that gas consumption would plummet if drivers could rely almost exclusively on electricity for average daily driving of about 33 miles. The gasoline engine would be available to boost performance and make it possible to use the car for long trips. Now the major car companies are taking notice and are finally developing plug-in hybrids. (See "GM's Plug-In Hybrid.") Meanwhile, researchers are beginning to anticipate benefits from plug-ins beyond gasoline conservation: millions of plug-in vehicles could serve as massive energy storage to stabilize the electric grid and make renewable energy sources more feasible. (See "How Plug-In Hybrids Will Save the Grid.") Battery costs still need to drop before such cars will approach the price of conventional hybrids or gas-only vehicles. But better batteries are already becoming available.

Massive recalls spark interest in better batteries.
The safety-related recall of millions of lithium-ion laptop and cell-phone batteries made by Sony and Sharp put batteries in the spotlight this year. Just in time, a new type of lithium-ion battery that uses materials inherently much safer than those involved in the battery recall started appearing in professional power tools. In addition to being safer, the new batteries are more powerful, have longer useful lifetimes, and are potentially less expensive than those utilized in laptops and cell phones today. All of this could make them attractive for use in mass-produced plug-in hybrids. (See "More Powerful Hybrid Batteries.") Meanwhile, a number of materials-science advances promise to as much as double the storage capacity of batteries and make them more long-lived. (See "3M's Higher-Capacity Lithium-Ion Batteries" and "Making Electric Vehicles Practical.")

Cheaper solar power is on the horizon.
Solar cells have a well-deserved reputation for being too expensive. But a steady drop in costs, along with high electricity prices and government subsidies around the world, have led to a boom in the solar market. And while advances in conventional silicon cells will continue to play a major role in continuing this boom, emerging technologies will also play an important role. A number of companies are developing efficient solar cells based on microscopically thin layers of semiconductor material; they're also developing fast, high-volume manufacturing methods that could cut costs. (See "Large-Scale, Cheap Solar Electricity.") Meanwhile, others are developing similarly inexpensive manufacturing for mirrors and lenses to concentrate sunlight, which reduces the amount of expensive photovoltaic material needed. The concentrators make it feasible to use ultra-high-efficiency (and expensive) solar cells originally developed for use in space. (See "Cheap, Superefficient Solar.") This month one manufacturer of such cells set a new record by producing cells that convert 40.7 percent of the energy in sunlight falling on them into electricity. At the same time, others are developing advanced solar cells that mimic photosynthesis or harness nanocrystals to make better cells. (See "New Solar Technologies Fueled by Hot Markets.")

Clean coal technologies get mixed up in politics.
Coal will be a major source of electricity for a long time, especially in places such as China and the United States. That's because it's cheap. The problem is that burning coal emits huge amounts of carbon dioxide. While President Bush supports research into new technology that can reduce such emissions, the fact is that good technology, such as gasification, burning coal in pure oxygen, and methods for sequestering carbon dioxide, exists now that could make a big difference. (See "Simpler and Cheaper Clean Coal Technology" and "The Dirty Secret.") At this point, cleaning up coal is more in the hands of policymakers than in the hands of researchers.

Red Herring considers 2006 as "Clean Energy's big year"

It’s been a landmark year for clean energy, as solar and wind power blew past the records, despite supply shortages.

Michael Rogol, managing director for Photon Consulting, in October estimated that global solar industry sales would reach $19 billion this year. That expectation was raised from $16 billion in March, and represents a 58 percent increase from 2005.

Global numbers for wind power aren’t out yet, but at least two groups are predicting a record year.

The American Wind Energy Association estimates the wind industry will have installed a record 2.75 gigawatts of generating capacity this year, enough electricity to power the state of Rhode Island. The association in August said total U.S. wind energy installations surpassed 10 gigawatts, and the world’s largest wind farm, a 735-megawatt project in Texas, was also completed in the third quarter of 2006.

The British Wind Energy Association said the UK also had a record-breaking year. Wind power commissions grew 50 percent to 630 megawatts. Some 625-megawatts-worth of projects are under construction in the UK, and another 2,120 megawatts (2.12 gigawatts) have been approved.

Clean energy made plenty of news this year:

Confidence in Clean

Institutional investors were generous. Research firm New Energy Finance expects the renewable energy and low-carbon technology industries to set a record of $70.9 billion in investment this year, a 43-percent increase from 2005.

Of that amount, New Energy Finance expects venture capital and private equity investment to top $7 billion in 2006, a 167-percent increase from last year.

Numbers varied. According to a study by Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young, $761.4 million of venture capital was invested on a worldwide basis through the beginning of December, up 50 percent from $504.1 million invested during the first three quarters of 2005. In the United States alone, $585.6 million was invested in 60 cleantech companies during the first three quarters of 2006.

According to the Cleantech Venture Network, North America numbers were higher. Venture investment rose from $514 million in the first quarter to $843 million in the second quarter and $933 million in the third quarter, according to the Cleantech Venture Network. In Europe, investment grew in the first two quarters, reaching $268 million in the second quarter, then fell to $144 million in the third quarter.

Either way, it’s clear private investment is growing. Among other announcements, Virgin’s flamboyant Richard Branson said he would invest $3 billion in renewable energy technologies over the next 10 years, ethanol company Altra raised $120 million, and venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers said it would double their commitment to green technology, to $200 million.

Notable IPOs

IPOs were also notable. According to New Energy Finance, money raised in clean-energy-related IPOs more than doubled, reaching $10.3 billion in 2006, up from $4.3 billion in 2005 and $0.7 billion in 2004.

After a stock dip starting in May, clean-energy stock values are back up more than 30 percent from the start of the year, according to the WilderHill New Energy Global Innovation Index, which launched in January to track clean-energy stocks globally.

According to New Energy Finance, solar companies raised the most on the public markets, raising $4.4 billion, more than double the $1.7 billion raised in 2005 (see Trina Solar Has Rollercoaster IPO, IPO Watch: Hot, Crude, and Hertz, Chinese Solar Firm IPOs, Big Deals: IPOs).

Biofuels raised the second-most, raising $2.5 billion, more than 10 times the amount raised last year (see Ethanol Firm Plans $300M IPO, High on Ethanol). Wind IPOs raised $1.2 billion, compared with $1.1 billion last year.

Solar Silicon Shortage

While demand for solar continued to grow rapidly this year, the industry was constrained by a supply shortage of silicon, the material that turns sunlight into electricity in most solar panels. The shortage boosted prices and led solar manufacturers to strike long-term deals with silicon producers, which began installing new plants.

The shortage also sparked new interest in silicon technologies, as well as in silicon-efficient technologies like thin-film solar, a solar technology that uses little to no silicon, and concentrator technologies, which use mirrors and lenses to concentrate the sun into smaller solar cells (see Solar’s Going Thin).

Predictions about when the shortage will end vary from between 2007 and 2012. An ease in supply is likely to bring lower prices, and manufacturers have been investing in technology to hone their competitive edge once the shortage ends. Others have been looking at expanding into other solar services, such as installation and distribution.

Ethanol Grows

Ethanol production grew as new plants came online. According to New Energy Finance as of September, 36 new commercial ethanol plants were financed worldwide in 2006, compared with 25 in 2005 and seven in 2004.

Ethanol from materials like corn stover, wood chips, and switchgrass, got a boost from high oil prices and government backing. Ethanol benefited from a mention from U.S. President Bush in February, a U.S. goal set last year to replace 30 percent of its transportation fuel with biofuel by 2030, and a declaration from Brazil’s government that it would reach energy independence through the alcoholic fuel this year (see The Fuel of the Future?).

A number of ethanol startups raised funding, including Mascoma, Iogen, and GreenShift. And cellulosic-ethanol companies announced a series of milestones, such as the first cellulosic plant in China and the world’s first “commercial-scale demonstration plant” (in other words, a plant that produces more than 1 million gallons per year).

Electric Cars Make Comeback

Electric cars enthusiasts had a great year, as startups came up with high-end electric sports cars like Tesla Motors’ Roadster and Venturi’s Fetish (see Green Machines Get Mean). Forget slow-moving, short-range neighborhood vehicles; these are meant to appeal to the mainstream, even if only the top echelon of earners can afford to actually buy one.

Plug-in hybrids are a mid-step between hybrids and electric cars, as they are hybrids with a plug so their owners can recharge at their wall outlets and reach up to 100 miles per gallon. Startups like EnergyCS and Hymotion started converting hybrids into plug-ins, and at the LA Auto Show, GM announced it would make a production version—but gave no timeline. (See GM, Nissan, Toyota Plugging In, US Could Plug In Most Cars, Plug-In Hybrids Get Pledges, Plug-In Hybrids Gets 100 MPG).

In the meantime, car manufacturers’ design teams won bragging rights at the LA Auto Show for coming up with the greenest concepts they could render.

Source : Red Herring

The Energy & Resources Institute (India) develops new plants for Biodiesel

Biodiesel could be an important renewable substitute for fossil fuels. And, in certain parts of the world, governments and some corporations consider the jatropha plant, common in hot climates, one of the most promising sources of biodiesel. The plant can grow in wastelands, and it yields more than four times as much fuel per hectare as soybean, and more than ten times that of corn. But the commercial-scale cultivation of jatropha, which has not previously been grown as a crop, raises several significant challenges.

This year, the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), an Indian research group, launched a 10-year, $9.4 million project to research issues involved in taking jatropha from seed to filling station. One challenge is growing the plant in poor soil.

The first crops of jatropha, planted in what was wasteland, have now flowered, says Alok Adholeya, director of TERI's Biotechnology and Management of Bioresources division. "It proves that we can do this," he says. He and other researchers at TERI spent five years testing different mycorrhiza microorganisms, symbiotic fungi that improve the ability of many plants to grow in poor soil. Adholeya's team found that the most effective was a fungus in the glomus species (he is not currently disclosing the exact fungus), which improves jatropha yields by 15 percent.

The TERI project is working in rural Andra Pradesh, a state in southeast India, collaborating with local financial institutions to develop loan guarantees to fund seed purchases; it's also collaborating with insurers to back the farmers against potential losses. In addition, it had to educate the farmers on how to cultivate the plant.

So far, the project has signed up 5,000 farmers representing 1,000 hectares of land. The goal is to have 8,000 hectares under cultivation by March 2008, and Adholeya says that the success of the first crops has drawn interest from many more farmers. By the end of 2008, TERI plans to have a production facility producing biodiesel from jatropha. Eventually, it aims to produce 90 million liters of biodiesel annually.

Adholeya is also working on genetically modifying jatropha to improve its yields. He leads a team of 20 microbiologists, molecular biologists, and field breeders who are looking for the genes in jatropha that cause it to fruit so that they can enhance the percentage of oil in the seed. He expects that it will take 18 months to isolate the genes and begin working to enhance them. The researchers plan to use a technique called molecular-assisted breeding, in which they identify a gene of interest, select particular genotypes, and breed them. Adholeya expects that by 2012, modified jatropha plants will be in cultivation.

He says that the Indian government, taking note of a report by TERI, is considering a national initiative around developing jatropha crops as a major source of fuel. That report calls for India to plant 400,000 hectares of jatropha in 22 of India's 28 states.

India is not alone in its interest in jatropha. Indonesia's government is promoting jatropha cultivation, as are several governments in Africa. Jatropha is attractive because of several desirable properties: it can grow in poor soil and survive drought; it's a perennial with an economic life of about 35 to 40 years; and it only needs two to three years to develop into a cash crop.

Jatropha seeds, when crushed, produce large quantities of an oil that can easily be converted to biodiesel that performs at levels close to that of conventional diesel oil. In fact, a hectare of jatropha produces 1,892 liters of fuel, which is better than rapeseed and far better than soybean or corn, according to data gathered by the Global Petroleum Club, an energy networking organization funded by the private-equity firm Forrest Equity Management.

"Jatropha is a one-stage conversion [to biodiesel]," says Adholeya, explaining that converting the plant oil to an oil that can be burned as fuel requires only one stage of heating and mixing with methanol. The resulting fuel, he says, "is a very good quality diesel that can be used in any transport vehicle."

 

Source : Technology Review

US Department of Energy considers that plug-in hybrid could save the grid

Major automakers and the Department of Energy are pouring money into research on plug-in hybrid vehicles. These cars promise to cut petroleum consumption by allowing commuters to drive to work using primarily electricity--stored on board in batteries--rather than gas. Although critics have warned that the vehicles could put too much pressure on an already strained electrical grid, experts are now arguing that rather than being a strain on the grid, plug-in hybrids may actually help prevent brownouts, cut the cost of electricity, and increase the use of renewable energy.

Plug-in hybrids, like today's hybrid cars, can run on either an electric motor or an internal combustion engine. But plug-ins have much larger battery packs and can be recharged by being plugged into the wall, making it possible to rely much more on the electric motor. Although a handful of companies sell conversion kits to change conventional hybrids into plug-ins, the kits add thousands of dollars to the cost of the car (see "Plug-In Hybrids Are on the Way"). This additional cost, which is primarily from the batteries, is one of the reasons the major automakers haven't yet mass produced such vehicles, although they are now developing them. GM, for example, recently committed to making a plug-in version of a Saturn SUV (see "GM's Plug-In Hybrid").

The concern is that plug-ins are not a good way to reduce gasoline consumption, because if they become popular, and millions of car owners recharged their cars at three in the afternoon on a hot day, it would crash the grid. But plug-in hybrids could actually help stabilize the grid if owners charged their cars at times of low demand, and if the vehicles could return excess energy to the grid when it's needed--say while parked in the company lot at work during peak demand.

Since utilities have built enough power plants to provide electricity when people are operating their air conditioners at full blast, they have excess generating capacity during off-peak hours. As a result, according to an upcoming report from the Pacific Northwestern National Laboratory (PNNL), a Department of Energy lab, there is enough excess generating capacity during the night and morning to allow more than 80 percent of today's vehicles to make the average daily commute solely using this electricity. If plug-in-hybrid or all-electric-car owners charge their vehicles at these times, the power needed for about 180 million cars could be provided simply by running these plants at full capacity.

This could be a boon to utilities, because they'd be able to sell more power without the added cost of building more plants. Ideally, this will translate into lower electricity prices, says Robert Pratt, a scientist at PNNL. It might also help utilities justify the added capital costs of building cleaner coal-burning plants, because they'll be able to recover their investment faster by "selling more electricity with the same set of iron, steel, and concrete," Pratt says.

Such a system could be further optimized by using smart chargers and other electronics. This system would include a charger that runs on a timer, charging cars only during off-peak hours. Researchers at PNNL are taking this a step further with smart chargers that use the Internet to gather information about electricity demand. Utilities could then temporarily turn off chargers in thousands of homes or businesses to keep the grid from crashing after a spike in demand.

The next step would be to add smart meters that would track electricity use in real time and allow utilities to charge more for power used during times of peak demand, and less at off-peak hours. Coupled with such a system, the PNNL smart charger could ensure that the plug-in batteries are charged only when the electricity is at its cheapest, saving consumers money.

But what many experts are excited about now is a concept called "vehicle-to-grid," often abbreviated V2G. In such a system, plug-in hybrids, rather than being merely an extra burden to the grid, become a much needed way for grid managers to balance the amount of energy generated at any given time to match the amount of energy being consumed. Millions of cars, each with several kilowatt hours of storage capacity, would act as an enormous buffer, taking on charge when the system temporarily generates too much power, and giving it back when there are short peaks in demand.

In a V2G system, the batteries of millions of plug-ins would be used as a buffer to even out supply and demand and to help keep the grid stable, says Karl Lewis, chief operating officer of GridPoint, a startup based in Washington, D.C., that has developed technology that could help make such a system work. In this kind of system, each vehicle would have its own IP address so that wherever it is plugged in, the cost of the energy it uses to recharge would be billed to the owner. With the right equipment, the car could also return energy to the grid, giving the owner credit. Mock-ups of such systems have already been tested by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in Golden, CO, and by a company called AC Propulsion, based in San Dimas, CA.

Plug-ins could also serve as backup sources of power. In extreme cases, such as a blackout from a hurricane, the cars could keep essential systems up and running in homes and businesses. Even in this case, when the batteries could be drawn down considerably, the owner could rely on the internal combustion engine in a plug-in hybrid for transportation.

As an added benefit, "if millions of these [plug-in hybrids] were produced, it would enable some of the renewable technologies to really take off," say Terry Penney, a technology manager for advanced vehicle technologies at NREL. The challenge of using a renewable source such as wind is that wind is intermittent, varying day by day and minute by minute. A network of plug-in hybrids could smooth out these fluctuations by storing extra energy and sending it to the grid when the wind dies down. Such a network would also improve the economics of wind power by making it possible to capture more of the excess power generated on windy days, says Willett Kempton, senior policy scientist in the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Delaware.

Such systems are many years off, as it will take time to install the needed infrastructure. Once plug-in cars are widely available, however, they could help relieve some of the pressure on the grid today.

 

Source : Technology Review

Carbon capture and storage : North Sea is emerging as center of development

The North Sea is emerging as a center of development of carbon capture and storage technology, and it's not just because of the region's tightening regulation of greenhouse gases. The main attraction is the North Sea's rapidly-maturing offshore oil reservoirs, which offer both a place to store carbon dioxide from fossil-fueled power plants and an opportunity to use it to increase oil extraction. Oil production is slowing as many of the North Sea wells mature, and carbon dioxide pumped down the hole can loosen up and release the remaining oil.

Several oil giants, including BP, Shell and Norway's Statoil, recently announced plans to build new power plants designed to convert North Sea natural gas into hydrogen, burn the hydrogen to produce electricity, and ship the resulting carbon dioxide to offshore oil wells. BP expects to produce an extra 40 million barrels of oil as a result of its plant between 2010 when the plant starts and 2030.

Meanwhile, an Oslo-based startup, Sargas SA, has secured industrial backers to build a coal-fired power plant in Norway using a new technology called pressurized combustion that co-produces power and carbon dioxide; it plans to sell its CO2 to offshore drilling sites. Before that, Sargas hopes to begin building a smaller plant early in 2007 that could be the prototype for offshore platforms producing power and CO2 where they're needed most: out in the North Sea oil fields.

"There is a real economic driver for the use of the CO2 for enhance oil recovery," says MIT process design expert Gregory McRae, who is tracking developments in carbon capture. "Its an incredibly exciting time."

Using industrial CO₂ to enhance oil recovery could squeeze an extra 7.3 billion barrels of oil from the North Sea and simultaneously stow away 10 billion metric tons ofcarbon dioxide, according to a December 2005 study by the European Commission's Institute for Energy. The latter is the equivalent of stopping Europe's greenhouse gases releases for two and a half years.

What is holding up full development of the use of carbon dioxide for enhancing oil recovery is, ironically, a dearth of CO2. Dozens of natural gas and coal-fired power plants ringing the North Sea produce plenty, but capturing it is expensive because the CO2 in the flue gas is at very low pressure and concentration (most of the exhaust from a conventional planet is actually nitrogen gas carried through from the air used to fire the fuel). Carbon capture is estimated to add a 30 percent to 50 percent premium to the cost of producing electricity.

BP, Shell and Statoil's solution to the problem is a new plant design. Instead of just burning natural gas, the plants will use a chemical process called reforming to convert the fuel into concentrated streams of pure hydrogen and CO2. The hydrogen will be burned to produce electricity, while the CO2 would be pressurized and sent by pipeline to offshore oil platforms to be pumped into the hydrocarbon reservoirs below.

Sargas seeks instead to make the capture of carbon dioxide more efficient by cranking up the pressure. Its plants would burn gas or coal at high pressures, thus yielding a high-pressure exhaust in which the CO2 pressure is about 20 times higher than in a conventional coal plant. That pressure makes separating the CO2 from nitrogen and left-over oxygen in the exhaust far less costly.

Last week a consortium of companies in Norway including aluminum giant Alcan (a major power consumer) and Norwegian energy firm Norsk Hydro announced plans to build a 400-megawatt coal-fired power plant using Sargas' design; startup is targeted for 2011. Dale Simbeck, vice president of technology for Mountain View, CA-based energy consultancy SFA Pacific, calls it a "clever scheme" because coal is relatively cheap, while the high pressure system will help contain the cost of capturing the CO2. "What they're doing can make sense," says Simbeck.

Tor Christensen of Sargas says the company is working with a major United States-based oil and gas producer to exploit another feature of high-pressure combustion: the system's compact design. For a given power output Sargas' generators handle a volume of gas 40-50 times smaller than would a conventional plant. As a result the equipment is more compact—compact enough to put a 100-megawatt natural gas-fired plant on an offshore platform. "It's not much for an offshore platform," says Christensen of the 5,000 metric ton design. "A single crane can lift the whole thing."

McRae says the idea should be attractive for oil and gas producers. For one thing, Sargas' plants will capture CO2 on-site, eliminating the need to ship CO2 from shore. For another, they will serve the platform's power needs better than the diesel generators and relatively small gas turbines used today. "One of the big problems with offshore oil platforms is the power supply that you need to pump the oil and process the gas that comes out the ground. Sargas will allow you to get much larger power in a smaller space," says McRae.

Christensen says Sargas' goal is to deliver CO2 to oil platforms at roughly $20 per metric ton and, as a rule of thumb, each metric ton of CO2 should yield two or three extra barrels of oil. If oil prices stay high, says Christensen, "there's a tremendous amount of money to be made."

 

Source : Technology Review

Solar-powered hydrogen generation technologies

Researchers in Switzerland have demonstrated more-efficient water-splitting solar cells based on a cheap, abundant, and long-lasting material: rust. The advance could lead to a cheap and energy-efficient way to generate hydrogen for fuel-cell vehicles using solar energy.

Water-splitting solar panels would have important advantages over existing technologies in terms of hydrogen production. Right now, the primary way to make hydrogen is to separate it from natural gas, a process that generates carbon dioxide and undercuts the main motivation for moving to hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles: ending dependence on fossil fuels. The current alternative is electrolysis, which uses electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen, with the two gases forming at opposite electrodes. Although electrolysis is costly, it can be cleaner if the source of the electricity is wind, sun, or some other carbon-free source.

But if the source of the electricity is the sun, it would be much more efficient to use solar energy to produce hydrogen by a photochemical process inside the cell itself. By improving the efficiency of such solar panels, Michael Grätzel, chemistry professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland, and his colleagues have taken an important step toward this goal.

The researchers have shown that by including small amounts of silicon and cobalt, they can grow nanostructured thin films of iron oxide that convert sunlight into the electrons needed to form hydrogen from water. And the iron oxide films do this more efficiently than ever before with this material.

Iron oxide has long been an appealing material for such solar panels, in part because it holds up well in contact with water. But although it can absorb sunlight, the resulting charge carriers could not easily escape the material, so they recombined, canceling each other out before they could split any water. By doping the rust with silicon, the researchers coaxed the material to form cauliflower-like structures with extremely high surface area, ensuring that a large part of the atoms in the material were in contact with the water, or very close to it. That way, holes could easily escape into the water, where they prompt the generation of oxygen gas. The silicon also improves electron conductivity in the material, which is important for generating hydrogen gas at an opposite electrode. The researchers further improved the process by adding cobalt, which acts as a catalyst for the reactions.

Grätzel's new iron-oxide films can convert an impressive and, according to the researchers, "unprecedented" 42 percent of ultraviolet photons in sunlight into electrons and holes. But the system's overall efficiency is only about 4 percent, in part because iron oxide doesn't absorb all the parts of the solar spectrum.

The main achievement of Grätzel's new research, which appears in the current issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, is that it examines the interactions at work in the system in great detail, says Brian Holcroft, CEO of Hydrogen Solar, a company based in Guildford, UK, that is developing ways to mass-produce panels inspired by Grätzel's materials. The findings suggest several strategies that could help the iron-oxide-based panel reach the 10 percent efficiency level that would make the technology competitive with current ways of creating hydrogen, Holcroft says. (Iron oxide could theoretically be as much as 20 percent efficient.) These include adjusting the amount and arrangement of silicon and cobalt, and improving the structure of the films.

If this level of efficiency can be met, hydrogen-generating solar energy could mitigate some of the challenges that threaten to make hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles impractical, says George Sverdrup, hydrogen technology manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in Golden, CO. For example, if consumers and businesses used these panels to make hydrogen, rather than getting hydrogen from a large facility, it would cut out the cost of shipping hydrogen, making hydrogen more affordable. Solar-to-hydrogen panels would be more efficient than small electrolysis machines, and they would ensure that the hydrogen comes from a renewable source.

But challenges remain. Researchers at Hydrogen Solar, for example, are looking for a replacement for the expensive platinum now used in one of the cell's electrodes, which will be important for keeping down costs, especially as demand increases for platinum in this and other applications, such as fuel cells. Meanwhile, Sverdrup says other researchers, including those at NREL, are working with materials that are much more efficient than iron oxide but so far have lasted only hours. If researchers can make them last longer, the materials could challenge iron oxide.

Source : Technology Review

MIT makes new strain of yeast to make more ethanol and faster

Researchers at MIT have created a new strain of yeast that tolerates high levels of ethanol and ferments sugars more efficiently, making more ethanol and doing it faster.

The advance could lead to smaller, cheaper ethanol manufacturing plants, as well as reduce the notoriously high amounts of energy needed to make ethanol.

The result, described in the current issue of Science, is also an important advance in the wider effort to make organisms that can convert cheap biomass, such as corn leaves and stalks, agricultural waste, and fast-growing plants including willow and switchgrass, into ethanol. Ethanol from such sources is widely agreed to be the key to making this biofuel economically competitive with fossil fuels.

Researchers hope to engineer a single organism that will both break down the cellulose in these sources into sugars and ferment them to produce ethanol. The work by MIT chemical-engineering professor Gregory Stephanopoulos and his colleagues focuses on the second part of this process: fermenting sugars to make ethanol. The yeast strain they made can tolerate ethanol concentrations as high as 18 percent--almost double the concentration that regular yeast can handle without quickly dying. In addition, the new strain makes about 20 percent more ethanol by processing more of the glucose, and it speeds up fermentation by 70 percent.

Higher ethanol tolerance could lead to smaller, cheaper equipment for ethanol plants. Michael Ladisch, director of the laboratory of renewable-resources engineering at Purdue University, says ethanol fermentation is primarily carried out in tanks that have to be emptied and cleaned between batches. "The same volume of tank will make double the amount of ethanol in the same time period for a 10 percent final solution than for 5 percent, or the same amount of ethanol if the tank volume is halved," he says. "If the fermentation proceeds 10 percent faster for the same final concentration, the reduction in tank volume would be 10 percent." The higher concentrations also reduce the amount of water that must be removed in a final distillation step, thereby saving energy.

Improving yeast-ethanol tolerance is difficult because it is a complicated trait involving many genes. To tailor the expression of many genes at once, Stephanopoulos uses a process to induce random mutations in the genes for master regulator proteins. Each of these proteins controls the expression of multiple genes, so by altering them, Stephanopoulos sets off a cascade of changes in gene expression widespread enough to alter a trait like ethanol tolerance. The researchers randomly changed these proteins in a large yeast population, which led to some with an increased tolerance for ethanol.

So far the researchers have only modified a laboratory strain of the yeast, not the type now used in ethanol plants. "The next step is to show that this technology works with industry strains," Stephanopoulos says.

If their approach can modify industrial yeast, it would drive down the cost of ethanol, Ladisch says. And eventually this research could have a wider impact, he says, because the mechanism that the researchers used to make the ethanol-tolerant yeast could be used as a blueprint to develop other wanted traits in microbes. "They now have a handle into fundamental metabolic pathways in how the yeast might be modified," he says.

Stephanopoulos believes that cellulosic-ethanol yields could be improved by tailoring certain traits in microbes using his technique. It might be possible to make microbes that are tolerant of compounds other than ethanol that are created in the fermentation process and toxic to the microbes. He also hopes to produce strains that eat sugars with five carbon atoms, such as xylose, that are produced when cellulose is broken down. The microbes used in today's processes only ferment sugars like glucose that have six carbon atoms.

Much work remains to be done to develop a single organism that can first break down cellulose into sugars before fermenting these sugars. Breaking down cellulose is a key constraint to the viability of making ethanol from biomass, says Lee Lynd, professor of engineering at Dartmouth College. "The research and development-driven advances with the greatest impact on producing cellulosic ethanol at low cost and high efficiency have to do with converting biomass into sugars," he says.

 

Source : Technology Review

Texas Tech and GE team up to use wind turbines to power water-desalination plant

Researchers at Texas Tech are teaming up with General Electric (GE) to try to optimize what is in theory an ideal marriage: using wind turbines to power water-desalination plants. That way, many water-deprived areas could ultimately obtain clean drinking water in a sustainable way. And wind-turbine farms could gain a place to use excess electricity on high-wind days.

It may sound straightforward, but it's a tricky task: the water-desalination process envisioned for the project--known as reverse osmosis--operates best at stable, continuous rates. And that's difficult to achieve when the electricity source is variable. The technology goal is a control unit that can keep the desalination plant running as stably as possible, store some power at certain times, sell some to the grid at peak times, and also pump water to and from the system as necessary.

Within several years, the Texas Tech researchers hope to erect a 1.5 megawatt turbine that will power a desalination plant capable of supplying water to the town of Seminole, TX, which has about 10,000 residents. A 1.5 megawatt wind turbine, generating full power and supplying electricity to a reverse-osmosis unit, could generate about 1,500 cubic meters of clean water per hour from brackish supplies. (Ocean water is saltier and would yield less fresh water.) GE hopes the project--one in a handful of similar R&D initiatives around the world--will yield a commercial product capable of meeting the demands of municipal water suppliers.

The project will get started in early 2007 with a scaled-down test model at Texas Tech that uses a very small, five kilowatt wind turbine.

Supplies of fresh water around Lubbock, a windy but dry area in west Texas, are running out fast. The vast Ogallala aquifer--which sits under eight Great Plains states--is being exhausted by farms, businesses, and homes far faster than it can be naturally replenished. "We are now looking at a potentially serious water problem in west Texas," says Andy Swift, director of the wind-science engineering center at Texas Tech. "That aquifer is simply being drained faster than it recharges. It could be bled dry within 50 years." Beneath the Ogallala aquifer, there is a brackish aquifer at depths of 1,000 to 2,000 feet that these states may have to tap.

In a reverse-osmosis system, brackish or salt water is pumped against one side of a special membrane. Fresh water passes slowly through the membrane, with the brinier water staying behind. A lot of electricity is required to pump the brackish or salt water into the system, maintain water pressure against the membranes, and, finally, pump the resulting fresh water to water towers to meet demand.

The key goal is keeping costs reasonable. "We do know you can bring [wind power and desalination] together, but can you bring down the cost of the system?" asks Minesh Shah, the project leader at GE Global Research, in Niskayuna, NY. "To be able to bring down capital, energy, and life-cycle costs, we need to be smarter in how we operate. It's all about the energy-management system for these two integrated products. We look at it as energy sustainability and water sustainability."

Any excess wind power could be sold to the power grid during peak times, when--in some regions--electricity fetches higher prices. "You would be making a real-time decision as to how the output of the wind turbine is going to be used: to deliver electricity to the grid, or to run the reverse-osmosis unit," says Swift.

Source : Technology Review