Green Tech

The Oyster in open position.

(Credit: Aquamarine)

A new approach to harnessing the ocean's power for energy is getting some positive attention.

The Oyster, a giant oscillating device developed by Aquamarine Power that uses hydraulic technology to convert wave power into electricity, won the "Innovator of 2009" award from Britain's Renewable Energy Association in June.

Then on July 15 the Edinburgh, Scotland-based company was awarded 60 million pounds (over $101 million) by the U.K.'s Department of Energy and Climate Change to further develop its device.

Now comes the that the Oyster is set to be installed and working at a test site by this fall, according Aquamarine Power.

Unlike other attempts at ocean power, the Oyster does not use the waves themselves as the force to turn turbines and generate electricity directly with an underwater generator. Instead, the wave power is harnessed to activate a series of pistons in the Oyster to vigorously pump ocean water to shore through an underwater pipeline. A conventional hydro-electric generator is then used to convert what has become a high-pressure water source into electricity.

The simple approach, which has been tried in other forms by projects like the Seadog Pump, is thought to be more scalable.

The Oyster will be installed at European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) by Fugro Seacore in the waters of the Orkney Islands, the series of islands off northern Scotland where the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean come together.

Preliminary studies on the device conducted in wave pools showed that 10 Oysters could supply power to about 3,000 homes, according to statistics provided by Aquamarine Power.

A new study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has found that Greenland's melting ice may have a greater effect on sea level rise on the northeastern coasts of the U.S. and Canada than previously hypothesized.

"If Greenland's ice melts at moderate to high rates, ocean circulation by 2100 may shift and cause sea levels off the northeast coast of North America to rise by about 12 to 20 inches (about 30 to 50 centimeters) more than in other coastal areas. The research builds on recent reports that have found that sea level rise associated with global warming could adversely affect North America, and its findings suggest that the situation is more threatening than previously believed," NCAR said in its preliminary report.

Additional sea level rise from Greenland ice melt in centimeters.

(Credit: Graphic courtesy Geophysical Research Letters, modified by University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR))

The group of researchers on the project, which was led by NCAR's Aixue Hu, included scientists from NCAR, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Florida State University. The report research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

Greenland ice has been melting at a rate of about 7 percent per year within the last few years. But Hu and his group modeled several different scenarios based on different melting rates using NCAR's Community Climate System Model, which simulates global climate change. They did not include overall global sea level rise by other factors such as Arctic ice melt, but sea level rise based on Greenland ice melt alone.

The group wants to educate the public on the misconception that the oceans of the world spread out evenly.

"The oceans will not rise uniformly as the world warms. Ocean dynamics will push water in certain directions, so some locations will experience sea level rise that is larger than the global average," NCAR scientist Gerald Meehl, co-author of the paper, said in a statement.

If Greenland's ice melt rate slows to 1 percent per year, northeastern sea levels would, at most, rise 8 inches (20 cm) by 2100.

If Greenland's ice melt rate slows to 3 percent per year, it could raise world sea level by 21 inches (54 cm) by 2100.

Most interesting may be the group's predictions in the unlikely event that Greenland's ice melt rate were to continue its 7 percent increase per year.

In that scenario, the increased drain of freshwater into the North Atlantic would change oceanic circulation of warm water pumping into the Arctic, which would in turn lead to a temporary recovery of Arctic sea ice.

A full report of NCAR's findings will be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters this Friday.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The fledgling ocean energy industry is awash in ideas for making electricity from moving water but it is still reaching for a toehold in the commercial world.

Greentech Media last week released a summary of an ocean energy report that forecasts great potential for wave and tidal energy.

Click on the image to see a photo gallery of different wave and tidal energy machines.

(Credit: Ocean Power Delivery)

Ocean power--a resource often located near large population centers--could ultimately generate 25 percent of today's total electricity usage, said report co-author Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development.

In the next six years, electricity production from the ocean could swell from just 10 megawatts now to 1 gigawatt a year, a $500 million market.

Before ocean power becomes an economic reality, however, there are huge hurdles to overcome, including too many competing turbine designs, lengthy environmental permitting, costly installation, and, in many cases, a harsh working environment at sea.

Research in ocean energy is active, with most of it done in the U.K. There are a number of pilot projects in the works which, if completed, would total 650 megawatts of electricity production. That's roughly the size of one coal or natural gas power plant.

But charting the course from prototype to grid-connected generator has proven tricky, according to a number of speakers at an event last week hosted by the UK Trade and Investment initiative, Flagship Ventures, and Greentech Media.

"The challenges have been greater and the timelines have all slipped. It hasn't been an easy ride so far," said Andrew Mill, CEO of the U.K.'s New and Renewable Energy Center (NaREC). "Most of the devices to date haven't actually reached the water."

Many wave power machines are designed to capture the energy of the wave's motions through a bobbing buoy-like device. Another approach is a Pelamis wave generator, now being tested in Scotland and in Portugal, which transfers the motion of surface waves to a hydraulic pump connected to a generator.

Tidal power typically uses underwater spinning blades to turn a generator, similar to how a wind turbine works. Because water is far more dense than air, spinning blades can potentially be more productive than off-shore wind turbines for the same amount of space.

In addition to being renewable, another key advantage of ocean power is that it's reliable and predictable, said Daniel Englander, an analyst at Greentech Media.

Although they can't generate power on-demand like a coal-fired plant, the tides and wave movements are well understood, giving planners a good idea of energy production over the course of year.

Because it's an immature industry, ocean power is more expensive than other renewables. In the coming years, the costs are projected to go down to about the range of wind and solar today, according to Greentech Media. "But the fact that you know when the generator is going to spin gives you a lot more value," Englander said.

Wind circa 1980?
Many people consider ocean energy to be roughly at the same stage that wind power was at in early 1980s: there were a number of competing turbine and blade designs, and the cost of wind power was far higher than it is now.

As the number of ocean generator types consolidates and components become standardized--as has happened in wind power--the costs of ocean power devices should go down.

The visible portion of an underwater turbine that captures tidal energy in Port MacKenzie Inlet in Alaska.

(Credit: Ocean Renewable Power)

There has been about $500 million invested in ocean power since 2001, mostly in the form of government research and some venture capital, according to Greentech Media. That's tiny compared to wind or solar; several solar start-ups have individually raised more than that in the past year.

The report's authors predict that venture capitalists will be investing in ocean power as they seek new green-technology areas.

Big energy companies have dabbled in ocean power as well. General Electric purchased a stake in Pelamis Wave Power, while Chevron and Shell have invested in ocean companies through their venture capital arms, Englander said.

One positive sign is that ocean power appears to be developing quicker than wind, said John Cote, a vice president at General Electric's financial services arm.

"The wind industry, their Valley of Death (from product prototype to commercialization) was much longer," Cote said. "The development of standards is happening much quicker in the marine industry."

Tough sailing
But despite the optimism, life on the water is tough, according to executives at ocean power companies.

With almost no infrastructure around the industry, companies need to build a lot of their own equipment. To install and test devices, they have to hire expensive vessels, typically used for offshore drilling.

Ocean Renewable Power is testing two of its horizontal turbine design tidal machines in Maine and Alaska. It's working on a new design that uses composite materials instead of steel, which it hopes to finish by the end of year and test extensively next year.

While working in freezing temperatures and 30-mile-per-hour winds in the Bay of Fundy off the Maine coast, it found that "everything that can go wrong, will go wrong," said Ocean Renewable Power CEO Chris Sauer.

Most of the failures were related to weather and marine conditions and equipment problems. "As a start-up, we have to make our own instrumentation systems put together on the cheap," he said.

Wavebob's wave-power machine. Bobbing devices that convert wave motion to electricity are one of the most common designs.

(Credit: Wavebob)

New York City's East River, meanwhile, is the test site for another tidal power installation being led Verdant Power, which makes underwater turbines that get energy from changing currents.

In the space of three weeks, all six turbines being tested failed the same way--a mechanical problem in the connections point between the blade and hubs, said Ronald Smith, Verdant Power's CEO.

But the biggest hurdles with the project has been environmental concerns, he said

Regulators want to make sure that fish, or other marine life, will not be killed in the blades. The company has equipped its devices with acoustic and other sonar devices to gather data for regulators, Smith said.

Another big potential cost for ocean power devices is operations and maintenance. Simply getting vessels--and staff--to service machines can be expensive, making the "survivability" of ocean energy gear a top priority.

Executives at the panel predicted that ocean power installations in the future will be several units, rather than one large device. For example, Ocean Renewable Power's 250-kilowatt modules can be stacked on top of them other, so if one machine fails, the entire operation isn't taken offline.

Even relatively successful companies--like Wavebob, which is set to build a 250-megawatt ocean power installation in Ireland--are doing software simulations, environmental reviews, and additional engineering to increase the odds of success.

"We're stopping on the edge of commercialization and taking two steps backward," Derek Robertson, the general manager of the company's North American business. "We're investing in detailed operations and systems engineering process to retire risk."

The junk is made, literally, from junk: 15,000 plastic bottles, a Cessna cockpit, and a used sail.

(Credit: Peter Bennett/Ambient Images Inc.)

Sailing 4,000 miles on the Pacific Ocean made Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal sick. It wasn't waves that turned their stomachs, but the amount of plastic garbage they encountered on a voyage with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation earlier this year.

The activists wanted more people to share their disgust about plastic litter that swirls, relatively unexplored, in continent-size patches of ocean.

To that end, they have built a motor-less craft from 15,000 recycled beverage bottles, fishing nets, and the cockpit of a Cessna, and are sailing it more than 2,000 miles from southern California to Hawaii. They left Long Beach, Calif., on Sunday.

The sailors plan to collect samples from plastic-polluted ocean water, but this mission's main aim is to attract attention.

(Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation)

The 1.5-ton junk features a solar panel and wind turbine to power GPS and other devices. It's made of six pontoons each 30 feet long, filled with 2,000 soda and sports drink bottles, and triple-wrapped in used fishing nets. Twenty sailboat masts provide a frame, secured to a cabin cut from a Cessna 310 fuselage.

On the last Pacific voyage that ended in February, Eriksen and Paschal helped marine researcher Charles Moore assess the extent of pollution in the waters leading up to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of plastic debris some estimate to be as large as the United States.

In early tests, a sample showed 48 parts of plastic to each part of plankton.

"They haven't finished processing the samples, but there was an exponential increase in the plastic," said Anna Cummins, who was also aboard and serves as Algalita's education adviser. "What looked on the surface like clean water, when you pulled it up, it looked like plastic soup. It was disgusting."

Algalita researchers said the floating, soupy landfill isn't well understood because satellites can't spot the translucent particles. And although efforts by scientists to explore plastic in five gyres around the world have been lacking, interest is expanding as the public learns more.

"No one really knows what's out in the other gyres," Cummins said. "In the north Pacific alone there's Capt. Moore with his research boat. We are a small organization with five or six paid staff members."

Eighty percent of the plastic comes not from ships but from land, where tossed consumer goods eventually travel from beaches and rivers into the ocean, according to Algalita.

Plastic concentrates poisons such as PCBs at levels a million times higher than found in the water, according to Japanese researchers.

The amount of plastic produced in the United States has nearly doubled in the past two decades, according to the American Chemistry Council.

"Recycling isn't the solution," Cummins said. "We think there absolutely needs to be a reduction in the overall use and consumption of plastic."

Cummins said she backs the attention-getting adventure but feels nervous about the safety of Paschal and Eriksen, her fiance.

For more than a decade Algalita researchers have been collecting samples from the North Pacific Gyre, which traps untold amounts of plastic particles in its eddies.

(Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation)

"Yes, we are risking our lives, but the issue of petroleum-based plastic and our national dependence on petroleum, warrant urgent action," noted Eriksen on a blog that will chronicle the journey.

However, he added, the sailboat masts and aluminum airplane fuselage are easy for radar to detect. "We have a better chance of being seen by big ships than typical fiberglass sailboats do."

Two satellite telephones keep the sailors in touch with the rest of the world. They also have several GPS units, VHF radios, and a Coast Guard beacon. Three months' worth of food includes a bucket of Hershey's Kisses.

It's not the first junk journey for Eriksen, who holds a doctorate in science education. After serving as a Marine in the Gulf War, he traveled the Mississippi River in a handmade raft of plastic bottles, then wrote a book about the trip.

The current odyssey is costing between $40,000 to $50,000, with big support from donations, Cummins said. Most of the bottles were given by a Burbank, Calif., recycling center. Patagonia gave the crew 500 Nalgene bottles being phased out due to concerns about bisphenol-A leaching from them.

The crew, towed first to San Nicolas Island before setting sail, encountered gale force winds Tuesday night. They plan to arrive in Hawaii in about six weeks.

The junk, floating on bottles meant to support 6 tons of weight, left Long Beach on Sunday.

(Credit: Peter Bennett/Ambient Images Inc.)

Climos, a start-up that plans to mitigate climate change by stimulating plankton growth, said on Wednesday that it has raised a series A venture capital round of $3.5 million.

Braemar Energy Ventures led the round, which also included participation from investor Elon Musk, now chairman of Tesla Motors.

As previously reported, the funding will be used to develop and test Climos' ocean iron fertilization technique, in which an iron compound is put into the sea to stimulate the growth of plankton.

As the plankton grow, they take the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Over time, some of that plankton die and sink deeper in the ocean, thereby storing the carbon dioxide.

Ocean iron fertilization tests have taken place in the past two decades but have not been fully tested as an effective carbon storage technology. Climos intends to make money by selling the sequestered carbon as carbon offsets.

Planktos, a company with a similar business plan, last month folded because of a lack of funding and what it called a "disinformation campaign."

Indeed, the practice of ocean fertilization remains controversial, as it has brought criticism and skepticism from environmental groups.

Climos, staffed by renowned scientists, has called for a code of ethics in doing ocean experiments, saying it intends to work with permitting authorities before doing tests, CEO Dan Whaley said last month.

The company also intends to use the funding to hold a series of scientific workshops in preparation for a demonstration experiment.

In a statement, Braemar Managing Director Dennis Costello said Climos is one of the "most interesting investments in Braemar's history."

"While OIF (ocean iron fertilization) has been well-researched over the past 20 years by some of the world's top scientists, no private company has been able to combine the scientific expertise with the business management skills that Dan Whaley has assembled with his team," Costello said. "They have created a strong business plan for advancing this technology while addressing the questions surrounding it, which led to our funding of the company."

Plastic contamination in the world's oceans is worse than previously imagined and no amount of technology can clean it up, according to Charles Moore. The oceanographer returned February 23 from a five-week odyssey in the Pacific Ocean with samples showing 48 parts plastic for every part of plankton.

"We are damned to a future of pollution by plastic," said Moore, who has spent more than a decade investigating Pacific plastic pollution. "There's no evidence it will end in a millennium."

Moore and his crew continue to study samples of plastic 'soup' from deep in the Pacific Ocean.

(Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation)

A plastic "graveyard" double the size of Texas swirls in the Pacific Ocean between San Francisco and Hawaii. There, his crew had found in the water six parts of plastic for every part plankton, with a fivefold increase in the amount of plastic between 1997 and 2007.

But their latest voyage found the pollution even thicker in the "highway" of ocean leading to the great Garbage Patch, according to Moore, who founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, Calif. Moore said that area comprises 2.5 million square miles.

In the Pacific alone, heavily polluted plastic zones amount to the size of the continent of Africa, Moore estimated.

Bobbing in the waters, especially closer to shore, are leftovers of everyday consumer products: plastic bags, toothbrushes, cigarette lighters, bottles and their caps, toys, and fast food wrappers.

"We found a video camera case that was clean enough that you could put a video camera in it, but it was starting to get covered in barnacles," he said.

Eighty percent of garbage within waterways, most of it plastic, begins its journey on land rather than coming from boats, according to Algalita and the California Coastal Commission.

Toxic plastic kills wildlife, poisons seafood, and could even exacerbate global warming.

Stories abound of the bellies of birds and sea creatures stuffed with colorful plastic caps and wrappers mistaken for food.

On their latest trip, Moore's crew was shocked to find that plastic could be creating new habitats. Hungry gulls are traveling far from home into the ocean to feast upon barnacles and crabs attached to plastic debris.

Although there's no solid data about how much plastic birds and fish are eating, plastic in seafood is likely harmful for people to eat, as are better-understood toxic metals such as mercury. Plastic acts like a sponge for poisons such as PCBs, concentrating them at levels a million times higher than in seawater.

Plastic ingredients are linked with various cancers and reproductive problems. For instance, bisphenol A, found in water bottles, has shown in lab rats to disrupt hormones and is associated with obesity and diabetes.

Some scientists believe that those bobbing bits of polymer in the ocean could contribute to global warming by creating a shaded canopy that makes it harder for plankton to grow.

Pelagic crabs attached to plastic, like this laundry basket pulled from the ocean, attract hungry birds.

(Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation)

The deeper Moore's crew traveled into the Garbage Patch, the harder it became to tell what the plastics used to be. That's because the material breaks down into dusty bits. The plastic "soup" is visible up close but not from the air, making its scale difficult to measure with satellite or aerial imagery, he said.

"Day after day, sitting on the bow of that ship, seeing confetti on the surface of ocean, you really become appalled," Moore said.

He gets e-mails nearly every day from companies proposing plastic cleanup methods for the oceans, but none seem feasible by a long shot, he said.

"They want to have navies trawling the ocean, but the ocean's average depth is 2 miles. First you've got to prove you can sift the Sahara Desert."

And Moore is cautious about plans from start-ups such as Climos, which is seeking to seed the ocean with plankton, because there's no proof the algae they'd grow would be safe.

Because Moore sees no way to eliminate the plastic pollution, he urges consumers to change their habits to keep plastic out of waterways. And he wants plastics that can't be recycled not to be produced in the first place.

He and other activists hope for the government to accelerate research into alternatives, perhaps even subsidizing the makers of bioplastics, while building a better recycling infrastructure.

Only about 3 percent of plastics are recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. And of those that are recycled, most appear to be sent abroad because there are relatively few plastics recycling centers in the United States.

Moore is suspicious, however, of new, 'green' plastics that haven't been studied in-depth and whose labels don't show how long they would take to break down in water as opposed to a compost heap.

Only a few weeks after ocean iron fertilization venture Planktos folded, rival Climos is set to announce a first round of venture funding totaling $4 million.

Climos CEO and founder Dan Whaley said Thursday that the company will announce funding early next week.

The green area is a natural plankton bloom in Lake Titicaca, South America.

(Credit: NASA)

Iron stimulates the growth of plankton, which consumes the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Once the plankton sinks several hundred meters, it is considered sequestered from the atmosphere.

The practice of ocean iron fertilization, which has been experimented with since the 1990s, has been condemned by some environmental groups and remains controversial.

Read the full story on Climos here at CNET News.com. For more background on Climos, here is a longer interview with Whaley.

In some of the most ambitious efforts by green tech start-ups, a handful of businesses have emerged with plans to capture large amounts of carbon dioxide by stimulating the growth of ocean plankton.

On Monday, a group of watchdog environmental bodies, including Greenpeace and the ETC Group voiced their opposition to a project proposal from Australia-based Ocean Nourishment.

The company is said to be planning on "seeding" the Sulu Sea between the Philippines and Borneo with a nitrogen nutrient called urea, which would be pumped into the ocean from a special plant.

A plankton bloom. Good to capture carbon dioxide?

(Credit: Planktos)

The idea behind these geo-engineering projects is to drop large amounts of food into the ocean, which acts as a fertilizer to grow plankton. During metabolism, the plankton should be able to consume large amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas linked to global warming.

Other clean tech companies pursuing similar approaches include Planktos which is using iron as a fertilizer. It intends to fund the business by selling carbon credits, represented by the carbon dioxide sequestered by plankton growth.

Another company, called Climos, last month issued a call to create a code of ethics for ocean carbon experiments, which includes a permitting process and oversight over the environmental impact of these practices.

"Clearly, a market has emerged that can fund carbon mitigation activity. However, important questions of effectiveness, environmental impact and corporate conduct in all ocean fertilization projects need to be addressed as these projects move forward," Margaret Leinen, Climos' chief science officer, said in a statement.