Green Tech

Royal Dutch Shell and Codexis have expanded their partnership to see if biofuels made from non-food sources can be commercially viable.

The deal, announced by the two companies announced this week, is an expansion of a pilot project Codexis was working on with Shell to improve biocatalysts in conjunction with Iogen Energy.

Biocatalysts are used in cellulosic ethanol production to break down the agricultural by-products into sugars so that they can then be fermented and distilled into biofuel.

Codexis, which signed a 5-year deal with the energy giant in 2007, is known for developing a "super enzyme" for its biocatalysts.

"In just over two years, our biofuels collaboration with Shell has grown from a pilot project to a significant multifaceted program to create commercial-scale biofuels from non-food sources," Alan Shaw, Codexis president and CEO, said in a statement.

As part of the deal, Shell increased its equity stake in Codexis, resulting in another board seat. Shell already had one board seat from the deal made in 2007.

Shell is certainly just one super-player with its eye on cellulosic ethanol.

Many companies are looking into "renewable petroleum" and research institutions have been looking at enzymes to speed up the cellulosic ethanol production process. General Motors is an investor inMascoma, and was one of the sponsors of a recent study that found cellulosic ethanol could compete with gas.

One start-up company, Sapphire Energy, is even looking at using algae as a non-food source.

Corrected July 9 at 6 p.m. PDT: This blog initially stated that CIS reached an efficiency of 20 percent. The studies showing that efficiency used a higher light concentration than the studies of CIGS efficiency. When comparing the two, CIS has a lower efficiency of around 15 percent.

Royal Dutch Shell subsidiary Showa Shell Sekiyu, Japan's fifth-largest oil refiner, plans to invest 100 billion yen, or about $938 million, in a solar-panel megaplant, according to AFP.

The planned factory will produce panels with the cumulative annual capacity to produce 1 gigawatt of power, equivalent to that of a small nuclear-power reactor.

The news breaks a month after Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda called for a tenfold increase in the country's use of solar power by 2020. The government is considering subsidies to boost the industry.

Showa came into the solar-power business last year, with its first 20-megawatt-capacity photovoltaic plant in the southern city of Miyazaki. In August, it announced plans to build a second factory, with a capacity to produce 60 megawatts.

The company produces its thin-film photovoltaics with copper, indium, and selenium (CIS). This differs from the combination of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium (CIGS) that companies such as Miasole, HelioVolt, Nanosolar, and Global Solar are using.

In 2005, CIS had reached a maximum efficiency in converting solar light to electricity of 15 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, NREL (PDF). That is less than the 19.9 percentage mark that CIGS cells achieved in March by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The reason Gallium is added into the CIS cell (to make it a CIGS cell) is to raise the band gap of the material. This enables the material to more efficiently absorb the solar spectrum and in turn increase the efficiency of the cell. But it also makes CIGS more complicated--and potentially more expensive--to manufacture than CIS thin film.

The location of the new plant remains undisclosed, but rumors say the company is considering areas of Japan, Europe, and the Middle East. Equally unknown is the financial source for the project.

BOSTON--Shell is preparing to open a fueling station in west Los Angeles later this month that will dispense gasoline or, for the right car, hydrogen.

Duncan Macleod, vice president of Shell Hydrogen, gave the keynote talk on Tuesday at the CTSI Clean Technology conference, where he said that the Santa Monica Boulevard station will be followed by a few more in the coming months.

The Los Angeles station will use an electrolyzer to manufacture hydrogen from electricity on site.

GM's fuel cell vehicle, the Chevy Equinox.

(Credit: GM)

The Los Angeles station was part of a U.S. Department of Energy hydrogen research program with Shell and General Motors. But Shell will build a few more stations in Los Angeles area on its own in coming months, Macleod said.

In his talk, Macleod argued that fuel cell vehicles will be mass-produced by 2020. To make that happen, "mini networks" of hydrogen filling stations in densely populated cities need to take root now.

Macleod said that fuel cell vehicles are at a pivotal point in development: With the proper government incentives and technology investments now, hydrogen can be produced in cleaner ways.

Options for making hydrogen
Hydrogen has been touted as the successor to gasoline for many years. Automakers believe that they could make money from fuel cell cars because there are fewer parts. Environmentally, the big advantage of fuel cells is that they emit only water. But making hydrogen requires an energy source--which, ironically, can be polluting fossil fuels.

The electrolyzer used in hydrogen stations can run on electricity from renewable sources, as Shell is doing with wind power in the Netherlands and geothermal power in Iceland.

But electrolyzers cannot scale to serve thousands of passengers, Macleod said. That means that hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles in the short and medium term will be made at petrochemical plants that make hydrogen as part of their industrial process.

"We can make hydrogen from anything," Macleod said, but the input into a petrochemical plant or refinery is either oil or gas. "That means you are making hydrogen from hydrocarbons, which isn't a long-term sensible way of doing things."

There are also several technical challenges, not the least of which is making hydrogen cost-effectively.

To get to cleaner sources, Shell Hydrogen envisions the manufacture of hydrogen from fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage. That would mean natural gas would have hydrogen split off from it to be used as a fuel (or generate power with a turbine), while the carbon dioxide would be pumped underground.

Farther out, Shell is doing research on making hydrogen from renewable bio-feedstocks or even municipal solid waste.

Macleod said he anticipates that hydrogen will become one option among several power sources, including electricity, biofuel, and gasoline.

"I don't now think that hydrogen is the ultimate fuel, but it is part of the answer," he said. "It's not the energy companies that decide. It's the governments and the consumers."

The team from Mater Dei High School poses with its two gas-sipping entries in the Shell Eco-Marathon Americas. The grand prize winner (left) logged 2,843.4 miles per gallon.

(Credit: PRNewsFoto/Shell)

Correction, 2:50 PM PDT: Due to incorrect information provided by the company, this post misstated the name of one of the fuels used in the Eco-marathon. The entry from Schurr High School ran off liquified petroleum gas (LPG).

The team from Mater Dei High School might be only months (or less) removed from driver's ed, but it pulled off a nifty feat of driving over the weekend. One of its entries in the Shell Eco-marathon Americas won the grand prize for motoring to a record 2,843.4 miles per gallon.

Its other entry proved none too shabby as well, logging 2,383.8 mpg for a strong third-place finish. The second-place vehicle (2,752.3 mpg) was from last year's victor, California State Polytechnic.

All three broke last year's record, set by Cal Poly, of 1,902.7 mpg. The grand prize purse is $10,000.

Mater Dei has been entering the Shell-sponsored event, which took place at the California Speedway in Fontana, Calif., for about five years. How did the Evansville, Ind., team come up with its winning airfoil-meets-teardrop design and beat out its largely collegiate competitors? "It comes from trial and error, seeing what works and what doesn't," an unidentified student and team member told a local newscaster Friday.

Those top three vehicles, like most in the competition (25 out of 33 total), used internal combustion engines. The goal for all entrants was to travel as far as possible using as little fuel as possible. Vehicles--sans driver--couldn't weigh more than 160 kilograms (352 pounds), while drivers had to weigh at least 50 kilograms.

The Pulsar vehicle from Purdue University was the top solar finisher; it got credited with a fuel economy rating of 2,861.8 mpg.

(Credit: Courtesy of Purdue University's Eco-marathon team)

The lone diesel entry, from The College of the Redwoods in Eureka, Calif., achieved 304.5 mpg. The one vehicle to use liquified petroleum gas (LPG), from Schurr High School of Montebello, Calif., hit 163.5 mpg.

Of the four vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells, the top finisher was Penn State's HFV Team, 1,668.3 mpg. The best of the two solar-powered entries came from Purdue University, whose Pulsar vehicle reached the equivalent of 2,861.8 mpg. (Solar vehicles weren't eligible for the grand prize.)

On the Fontana racetrack, the challenges included winds that gusted up to 50 miles per hour. Even before the race, though, the team from Universite Laval in Quebec faced its own last-minute challenges--it had to wait two days for its vehicle to clear customs, then had to race through the setup and inspection on the last day of competition. Still, the Laval team finished fifth (1,810.8 mpg), behind another Canadian team, the University of British Columbia (1,864.9).

Rounding out the top 10 in the internal combustion field were Cedarville University (1,151.1 and 1,056.3 mpg for its two Supermileage entries), Grand Rapids Technical High School (754.8 mpg), Colorado School of Mines (679.4 mpg), and Lamar University (572.8 mpg).

Shell is filling cable channels with commercials for GTL, or gas-to-liquids, and someone asked me about it, so here's your answer:

GTL is a type of liquid fuel produced from natural gas. It isn't classic liquefied natural gas, which is natural gas cooled to the point where it turns into a fluid. Instead, methane from underground is cracked by catalysts and heat, turned into synthetic gases, and then transformed into a liquid similar to diesel. The process resembles the coal-to-liquid Fischer-Tropsch process devised in the 1920s.

Shell already makes token amounts of GTL in a plant in Indonesia; much of that fuel gets mixed into the diesel Shell sells in Europe. The next big step comes when the company opens the Pearl facility in Qatar in 2010. (Shell showed us the first fully GTL car at a conference in Qatar in late 2005.) That plant will produce 140,000 barrels of GTL and 120,000 barrels of other byproducts daily. While tiny from a global perspective, that much fuel can keep a lot of cabs on the road.

While GTL results in fewer greenhouse gases than conventional diesel, it ain't cheap. Shell, in fact, is getting its natural gas to make GTL in an area where it's impractical to build pipelines for selling regular natural gas. GTL will be sold into megacities in the emerging world like New Delhi that are struggling to contain emissions.

Oh, and you can drink it. It doesn't taste great, but you won't end up in the hospital. Biodiesel is drinkable, too.

Jeroen van der Veer, the CEO of oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, sees easy oil coming to an end and a potential worldwide "scramble" to mitigate climate change.

Van der Veer outlined to potential scenarios for energy usage and extraction over the coming century in a speech published Friday on the company's Web site.

Regardless of whether countries "scramble" or take in a more orderly approach to adopting low-carbon fuels and renewable energies, getting oil and gasoline will not be as easy as it once was, he said.

"We are experiencing a step-change in the growth rate of energy demand due to rising population and economic development," he said in the speech.

"After 2015, easily accessible supplies of oil and gas probably will no longer keep up with demand."

There is an ongoing "peak oil" debate in which some people argue that global oil reserves has reached its pinnacle and will start declining. Van der Veer holds the view that oil will be more certainly be more difficult and expensive to extract in the future, a case outlined in this recent Wall Street Journal article.

In Shell's "blueprint" scenario in which government policies favor low-carbon technologies, there will be widespread use of carbon capture at coal-fired power plants--90 percent by 2050. Currently, there are only a handful of experimental sites.

In this scenario, carbon cap and trade regulations also are adopted worldwide, and there is a sharp uptick in the use of home-grown biofuels and local coal.

Like many others, van der Veer compares the quest for low-carbon energy technologies to the sense of mission attached to putting humans on the moon.

"The world faces a long voyage before it reaches a low-carbon energy system. Companies can suggest possible routes to get there, but governments are in the driver's seat. And governments will determine whether we should prepare for bitter competition or a true team effort," he concluded.

There is a divergence among the giant global oil companies and their commitment to funding alternatives to oil.

Shell has already diversified into biofuels including investments in cellulosic ethanol ventures. It is also partnered with small technology companies to make by a diesel from algae and other nonfood sources.

Research company New Energy Finance has released a report echoing van der Veer's view that the pace of investments in energy efficiency and low-carbon energy technology needs to increase.

New Energy Finance said Friday in a press release that investments will need to triple in the next five years if climate change abatement targets are to be met. Last week, the European Union set out targets for 20 percent of the energy in its 27 member states to come from renewable sources by 2020.

More discussion of Shell and peak oil are available at the Oil Drum.

Things are looking up for lowly sea algae.

Fuels giant Royal Dutch Shell and HR Biopetroleum on Wednesday announced the creation of a joint venture called Cellana to make biodiesel from algae in Hawaii.

The plans call for growing algae in ponds of seawater using strains of algae that are native to Hawaii. It will be placed near other industrial sites that produce algae for the pharmaceutical and nutrition industries.

The joint venture will grow algae in ponds of seawater.

(Credit: Cellana)

Cellana said that algae can produce 15 times more oil per hectare than rape, palm soya, or jatropha plants.

Algae growth also has been proposed as a way to absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The Cellana demonstration facility will use bottled carbon dioxide to explore the technique of capture carbon in plants as they metabolize. Its experiments will include participation from different universities.

Producing biodiesel from algae is being pursued by a number of companies, including Imperium Renewables and GreenFuel Technologies, but they are still in the research and development phase.

At the United Nations conference on climate change in Bali, Indonesia, a group of scientists on Monday proposed stepping up research on capturing carbon dioxide from sea algae. Other companies have proposed stimulating large-scale algae blooms to consume and capture carbon dioxide.