Green Tech

The world faces a surge in energy costs, as well as in planet-warming carbon emissions, unless it can swiftly agree a climate change deal, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday.

Arguing strongly for a global deal at the U.N. Climate Change summit in Copenhagen in December, the IEA said use of fossil fuels will increase quickly if policies remained unchanged.

Without an international agreement on climate change, the ratio of energy spending to gross domestic product for the largest consumer countries would double by 2030.

The world would have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions for each year it delayed implementing a deal on global warming, the IEA said in its annual World Energy Outlook.

"As the leading source of greenhouse-gas emissions, energy is at the heart of the problem and so must be integral to the solution. The time to act has arrived," it said.

IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol told Reuters in an interview the world needed to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million of CO2 equivalent.

"The world needs to go to the 450 parts per million target, not only because of climate change but because of growing problems within our energy system and its possible implications again on the economy," Birol said.

Global energy demand would rise by an average of 2.5 percent per year over the next five years if governments made no changes to their existing policies and measures.

Under these circumstances, which the IEA called its reference scenario, world primary energy demand would rise by an average of 1.5 percent per year over the next two decades.

Oil demand, excluding biofuels, would increase by 1 percent per year to 105 million barrels per day by 2030 from 85 million barrels per day in 2008. This was a slight decrease in its demand forecast, reflecting the impact of the global economic downturn.

Last year the agency, which advises 28 industrialized nations, forecast oil use would reach 106 million barrels per day by 2030.

But the IEA stressed the trend toward heavier use of hydrocarbons would be unabated without a climate change deal.

"Fossil fuels remain the dominant sources of primary energy worldwide in the reference scenario, accounting for more than three-quarters of the overall increase in energy use," it said.

A key driver of energy demand would be inexorable growth in power generation, it said, forecasting in its reference scenario world electricity demand would grow 2.5 percent a year to 2030.

Stressing the need to move away from dependence on fossil fuels, Birol said that without a climate change deal, the European Union's annual energy bill would more than double to $500 billion by 2030, up from $160 billion in the last 30 years.

Oil prices soared to a record of nearly $150 a barrel in July 2008. They then collapsed to less than $33 last December, but have since recovered to around $80.

The price collapse, combined with the credit crisis, choked off investment and the Paris-based IEA has warned the oil market could surge back, damaging still fragile economic growth.

Birol said the oil price was likely to reach $100 per barrel by 2015 and $190 by 2030: "This means that if we don't do anything to our energy system, we will be in difficulty."

Bank of Ireland analyst Paul Harris said the IEA had taken a "rather cautious approach" in the report.

"There's an emerging consensus that the demand and supply balance is really going to start to tighten by 2015 which should sound the death knell for cheap oil."

Story Copyright (c) 2010 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

Research on nuclear energy and hydrogen has yielded what backers say is a technology that could replace U.S. oil imports with biofuels made from agricultural by-products.

Scientists at Idaho National Laboratory have been working for the past year and a half on a process to convert biomass, such straw or crop residue, into liquid fuels at a far higher efficiency than existing cellulosic ethanol technologies.

A scarce resource for fuel?

(Credit: Idaho National Laboratory)

Rather than one single development, the technology--named bio-syntrolysis--ties together multiple processes, but it has electrolysis, or splitting water to make hydrogen, at is starting point. When combined with a carbon-free electricity source, the approach could deliver a carbon-neutral biofuel, according to models done at INL which has done research for decades in nuclear energy.

Bio-syntrolysis is one of a dizzying number of technologies being developed with the hopes of replacing gasoline, although none have successfully been done at scale. Researchers at INL recognize there remain technical barriers, but its recent computer models show that the technique has better potential than today's biofuel processes.

The key advantage is that bio-syntrolysis would extract far more energy from available biomass than existing methods, said research engineer Grant Hawkes. Using traditional ethanol-making techniques, about 35 percent of the carbon from wood chips or agricultural residue ends up in the liquid fuel. By contrast, the bio-syntrolysis method would convert more than 90 percent of that carbon into a fuel, he said.

"That means if you gather up a kilogram of biomass from a field, you're going to get two and half times the liquid fuel from bio-syntrolysis than you would from cellulosic ethanol. If biomass is a precious commodity, this way you'll get more out of it," Hawkes said.

An often-quoted Department of Agriculture and Department of Energy study (click for PDF) estimated that the U.S. produces enough biomass to meet 30 percent of the country's liquid fuel. INL researchers say the higher productivity of its technology would cover more like 60 percent, nearly as much as the oil that the U.S. imports.

"This is the only process available that will give us all the liquid fuel we currently need that's carbon neutral with the all the biomass that's available," he said.

Although it's a compelling vision, there are a number of technical hurdles to making bio-syntrolysis commercially viable and environmentally beneficial.

To reduce carbon emissions significantly over other biomass-to-liquid processes, the INL technology requires a lot of carbon-free electricity--1,000 megawatts of electricity would yield enough 25,000 barrels of fuel a day, enough for almost one million people, according to INL models. A full-size nuclear reactor could produce 1,000 megawatts, but even large-scale wind farms or solar plants are substantially smaller.

The approach also relies on tying together different technologies, some of which are relatively immature in terms of commercial deployment. Making familiar biofuel processes cost effective is hard enough: after years of research and pilot projects, ethanol from wood chips or grasses still isn't produced at commercial scale.

Innovation in integration
Hawkes coined the term bio-syntrolysis to represent the combination of technologies researchers have been working with. To make a liquid fuel, they are using biomass to make a synthetic fuel via electrolysis of water.

Here's how it would work: a high-temperature electrolyzer would split steam into oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen would be fed to a biomass gasifier, a machine that heats agriculture waste at high temperatures to produce synthesis gas, a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. That synthesis gas, along with the hydrogen from the electrolyzer, would be fed to a refiner to make liquid fuels that could replace gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel.

A schematic of how carbon-neutral biofuel can be produced using a combination of existing technologies.

(Credit: Idaho National Laboratory)

The biggest technology breakthrough in this design is the high-temperature electrolysis, which originally came from a program to study how nuclear reactors could be used to make hydrogen. But hydrogen-powered vehicles face a number of obstacles, including on-board storage and the infrastructure to cleanly produce and to distribute hydrogen.

By contrast, if the hydrogen was used to make hydrocarbon fuels, they could be distributed through the existing channels and be used with existing autos, including hybrid-electric vehicles.

The jump from hydrogen research to biofuels happened when Hawkes thought to make biomass the heat source for INL's high-temperature electrolysis, rather than the heat from a nuclear reactor. By making that switch, the electrolyzer can operate on biomass and electricity alone, rather than rely on a nuclear reactor.

"We feel each that each one of these technologies is individually proven but nobody has ever taken them and hooked them together to make one process," said Hawkes.

There are some commercially available biomass gasifiers and a few facilities turning synthesis gas into liquid fuel using coal as a feedstock. But coal-to-liquids has a high carbon footprint, even compared with gasoline, said Hawkes. If a renewable or carbon-free source, such as hydro power, can be used through bio-syntrolysis, the resulting fuel would have very low emissions, he said.

Storing hydrogen on plants
So far, INL researchers have done experiments using available commercial products and they have modeled the overall efficiency on computer. To build a high-temperature electrolyzer, they have purchased commercial fuels cells and modified them to work in reverse, so they produce hydrogen and oxygen from electricity.

"There is no need for any great discovery but there is a need for development of materials and electrolyzers and just the will the put all the different sources together," said Steve Herring, a research fellow at Idaho National Labs.

The projected cost of the fuel would be $2.50 a gallon to produce, which is not cheaper than today's gasoline. But the primary advantage is the fuel is domestically sourced, low-carbon, and available at a predictable price, Herring said. One of the rationales for the technology is that biomass to make fuel will become a scarce commodity, making techniques that can squeeze more energy from existing crops more compelling.

INL researchers imagine that a single location to collect biomass, run the gasifier and the electrolyzer. Fuel could be refined on site or shipped to existing facilities. The ash from the gasifier would contain many soil nutrients, such as potassium, that could be redistributed onto the fields that the biomass was collected from.

Why not simply use the hydrogen from the electrolyzer in fuel-cell vehicles? Hawkes and Herring said that the technical limits on hydrogen right now make this an approach that could be deployed without having to wait for technical breakthroughs in hydrogen vehicles.

"It's our observation that the best way to store hydrogen is to hook it onto a carbon atom from biomass now and make it a hydrocarbon fuel," said Hawkes.

(Credit: David Gardiner & Associates/NRDC)

The effects that fluctuating oil prices have had on the average American vary widely by state, according to a report released Wednesday by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

"Fighting Oil Addiction: Ranking States' Oil Vulnerability and Solutions for Change," a report (PDF) prepared for the NRDC by David Gardiner & Associates, ranks U.S. states in two major ways. One list ranks U.S. states by their dependence on oil, taking in factors like gas prices. The other ranks states' efforts to reduce oil dependence, taking into account public transportation funding, state fleet efficiency, hybrid car purchasing incentives, emissions standards, and clean-energy projects.

In 2008, Mississippi, Montana, South Carolina, and Oklahoma residents were the hardest hit by oil prices with their drivers spending a larger percentage of their income on gasoline than other Americans. The NRDC's official ranking is by both percentage of income and actual dollar amount spent on gas. So while Mississippi ranked worst for drivers spending the largest percentage of their income on gas, Oklahoma drivers actually spent the most, spending on average $2,766.65 in 2008.

There were some surprises in the report.

A state that you might not normally associate with clean energy (or clean air) seems to have reinvented itself. New Jersey, who just recently announced a major solar effort for its leading power utility, was ranked seventh for states doing the most to promote clean-energy technology and reduce oil dependency in 2008. Not surprisingly, California, which has also been buying big into solar power for utilities amid a plethora of other green initiatives throughout the state, was ranked first.

The states doing the most to wean residents off oil, according to the NRDC report:

1. California
2. Massachusetts
3. Washington
4. New Mexico
5. Connecticut
6. New York
7. New Jersey
8. Pennsylvania
9. Oregon
10. Florida

Ten states were also singled out by the NRDC for exerting the least amount of effort to wean themselves off oil in the organization's eyes.

"The failure of the 10 worst states to take meaningful action to reduce oil dependence exacerbates the national security and environmental harms associated with our current transportation habits. These and other states need to be drivers of change," the NRDC said in its report.

The 10 states making the least amount of effort to reduce oil dependence, according to the NRDC report:

1. West Virginia
2. Idaho
3. Wyoming
4. Mississippi
5. South Dakota
6. Oklahoma
7. Alabama
8. Arkansas
9. North Dakota
10. Alaska

If changing the U.S. energy supply to be more secure and sustainable is like steering a massive ship, then the direction we set it on today won't be fully felt for 10 or 20 years.

The National Research Council, the operating arm of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, on Monday released a report called "America's Energy Future" that seeks to focus the country's discussion on energy and draw attention to the most promising technologies.

One of the messages from the report is that long-term problems require sustained strategies and a break from business as usual. Technology has a big role to play, but none of the academic and business experts who authored the study expects a single fix.

"One of the committee's conclusions is that there is no technological 'silver bullet' at present that could transform the U.S. energy system through a substantial new source of clean and reasonably priced domestic energy. Instead, the transformation will require a balanced portfolio of existing (though perhaps modified) technologies, multiple new energy technologies, and new energy-efficiency and energy-use patterns," wrote Harold T. Shapiro, the chair of the committee on America's Energy Future.

Carbon-heavy: the source for energy in the U.S. The pie chart breaks out sources of electricity generation.

(Credit: Energy Information Administration, 2008.)

Although there isn't one solution, certain technologies deserve more research than others, both in electricity and in transportation. Successful development and deployment of them can reduce greenhouse gases substantially in both sectors in the next 30 years using a portfolio approach.

In the short term, the study's authors concluded that efficiency is the easiest and lowest-cost option for "moderating" national demand for energy in the next decade.

Adopting existing building-efficiency products alone could potentially eliminate the need to build any new power plants, although some may be needed to address regional supply imbalances or upgrade existing power plants. Broadly applied in transportation, buildings, and industry, efficiency technologies could reduce energy use by 15 percent in 2020 and 30 percent by 2030, compared to the Energy Information Administration's "business as usual" reference scenario.

The U.S. has a number of good options for diversifying power generation as well but developing the products to do this will likely raise the price of electricity.

Because the U.S. has good resources, renewable energy from wind, solar, and geothermal could provide an additional 500 terawatt-hours per year by 2020 and 1,100 terawatt-hours per year by 2035. Total U.S. electricity consumption is now about 4,000 terawatt-hours per year.

Coal power plants with carbon capture and storage technology, where carbon dioxide would be stored underground, could replace the entire coal fleet by 2035 through retrofits or new construction. "Evolutionary nuclear technologies" could supply up to 850 terawatt-hours of electricity by 2035 by modifying existing plants and building new ones.

However, to take advantage of more renewable energy and run the system more efficiently will require modernizing the electricity system with smart-grid technologies, which the study says is "urgently needed."

Planning ahead
In assessing the transportation sector, the study's authors concluded that petroleum will continue to fuel the country's cars and trucks in the next three decades, although maintaining domestic petroleum production will be challenging. Once again, the best near-term option to cutting oil consumption is better vehicle efficiency.

Making liquid fuels from biomass, such as wood chips, and from coal with carbon capture and storage could replace about 15 percent of today's fuel consumption. But both approaches still have significant technical barriers. Also, there are potential environmental problems from using large amounts of land for biofuels and coal-to-liquid fuels would increase emissions without carbon capture and storage, according to the study.

Where your BTUs come from. This graphic shows the delivery of energy from primary fuel sources shown on the left.

(Credit: Lawrence Livermore Lab, Department of Energy)

Meanwhile, making large numbers of electric light-duty vehicles will require advances in battery performance and fuel cells as well as smart-grid technologies to manage the demand.

The authors of "America's Future Energy" said that emerging technologies need to go through pilot tests in the next five years to demonstrate that they can be commercially viable and done at large scale 10 years from now.

The report said the most high-priority "demonstration stage" technologies are carbon capture and storage, evolutionary nuclear, cellulosic ethanol, and advanced light-duty vehicles. Long-term research and development is required for producing liquid fuels from renewable resources, advanced batteries and fuel cells, large-scale electricity storage, enhanced geothermal, and advanced solar photovoltaics.

To overcome technical and other barriers, the study said that policies and regulations and other incentives need to put in place.

"Actions taken between now and 2020 to develop and demonstrate several key technologies will largely determine options for many decades to come. Therefore, it is imperative that the technology development and demonstration activities identified in this report be started soon, even though some will be expensive and not all will be successful: some may fail, prove uneconomic, or be overtaken by better technologies," according to the report.

If you think the lack of technology is the reason we don't have more wind and solar power, think again.

The National Research Council on Monday published a report that finds that renewable energy sources--wind, solar, geothermal, wave, tidal, and biomass--could supply 10 percent of U.S. electricity supply in 2020 with existing technology. Today, renewable energies excluding hydro power are about 2.5 percent of the U.S. electricity mix.

Getting to 20 percent of U.S. electricity by 2035 is possible with sustained policies and investment, it said. To achieve more than 50 percent of electricity generation from renewable sources, excluding hydro power, beyond 2035 would require new scientific advances and dramatic changes in the power-generating industry, the report concludes.

The primary barriers to deeper penetration in the near and medium term are cost, policy, and insufficient transmission lines, the report finds.

More solar power in the cards?

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)

The study, called "Electricity from Renewable Resources, Status, Prospects, and Impediments," was done to inform politicians on energy policy, which is in a crucial period. The House and Senate are considering bills to mandate more renewable energy and efficiency. The House bill includes regulations to cap greenhouse gas emissions. The National Research Council is the main operating agency of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

Of the technologies available, wind and solar offer the most potential in the U.S., which has good resources for both in different regions. Conventional geothermal and biomass resources are also ready for deployment. Enhanced geothermal--which involves fracturing rock underground and injecting water to heat it--and wave and tidal power are still not commercially available.

On-land wind farms could provide 10 percent to 20 percent of current electricity demand. The only technological improvements in the short term revolve around optimizing performance of components and better integrating wind into the grid.

Solar energy--both photovoltaic panels and concentrating solar power systems--"is capable, in principle, of providing enormous amounts of electricity without stress to the resource base."

To increase the penetration of renewable energy beyond 20 percent, the report says that energy storage technologies are required. Smart-grid technology to better manage the flow of energy from variable resources like the sun and wind is also necessary.

Technology, policy, capital
Costs for solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources are going down but are still more expensive than fossil fuel-derived electricity.

The report says that consistent policies, such as renewable portfolio standards, are required to attract investment in renewable energy, which should improve the technology and bring down costs. Attaching a price for releasing large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere through carbon regulations will make cleaner forms of energy generation than fossil fuels more cost-competitive, it said.

"Currently, use of renewable resources for electricity generation generally incurs higher direct costs than those currently seen for fossil-based electricity generation, whose price does not now include the costs associated with carbon emissions and other unpriced externalities. Some form of market intervention or combination of incentives is thus required to enable renewable resources to contribute substantially to the national electrical energy generation mix," according to the report.

Another key challenge related to cost is industrial scale. Without an increase in manufacturing capacity for energy products, it will be difficult for renewable energy to move beyond single-digit contributions, the study said.

For example, a Department of Energy report calculated that to increase wind power to 20 percent of U.S. electricity would require construction of 100,000 wind turbines, an additional $100 billion of capital, and 140,000 workers in manufacturing and transmission upgrades.

On an environmental level, a significant barrier to wind and solar is conflict over how land is used for power plants and new transmissions lines.

The report says that investments in research and development are needed now to improve costs and for enabling technologies, such as storage and grid management. "Overall, technological developments and consistent policy will need to be coordinated with manufacturing capacity and access to capital in order to accelerate deployment of renewable electricity."

National Semiconductor on Thursday announced that it has delved deeper into its energy efficiency efforts with the acquisition of Act Solar.

National Semi, which expanded into the solar business last year, plans to use the privately held company's technology for monitoring solar arrays with its SolarMagic product line.

Under the deal, whose financial terms were not disclosed, Act Solar's business for monitoring technology, which is designed to improve the efficiency of solar panels by balancing, or recirculating energy, will be folded into National Semi's SolarMagic business.

Power efficiency is an issue with electronic devices, given that it effects the life of powering a device and the amount of heat a device can generate. And the output of solar panels can be affected by shade, debris, different panel styles, and aging panels.

"Now with Act Solar, we can further improve the performance and efficiency of solar systems, at the same time providing monitoring capabilities not available before," said Mike Polacek, senior vice president of National's Key Market Segments. "This will make solar installations more efficient and ultimately reduce the cost of solar energy for everyone."

Rent-a-car(bon offset)

With green issues dominating the headlines at this week's Detroit auto show, you may find yourself wondering how much it costs to assuage the gas-guzzling guilt you feel when picking up your next rental car. The convenient answer is $1.25 (plus applicable taxes). That is the price at which Enterprise, National, and Alamo are selling carbon offsets to their customers in a carbon-offset program launching today. According to the companies, the $1.25 offset charge represents the cost of offsetting the CO2 impact of the average rental vehicle operating in the company's fleet. TerraPass, the company responsible for delivering the offsets through planting trees and other carbon-reduction projects, claims that 13,500 metrics tons of CO2 will be offset for every 100,000 customers that participate in the scheme. The three rental companies, which describe the program as a "simple but meaningful way to address the environmental impact of renting a car," have also pledged to match up $1 million of offset purchases.

However, amid all the green intentions and backslapping, the environmental benefits of carbon offsetting have come under increasing scrutiny as the market for offsetting expands. With more than $54 million spent in 2007 on CO2 offsets on everything from airplane tickets to laptop computers, the FTC is starting to look into green marketing claims made by companies that are suspected of trying to "greenwash" their images. Don't get me wrong--I'm all for any initiative that makes some impact on CO2 reduction. But turning down your free upgrade to a Chevy Suburban next time you're in a rental car center might be just as environmentally beneficial.

The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a high-profile collection of 33 corporations and environmental nonprofits, pledged Monday to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent by 2050, and demanded that no new coal power plants be built.

The only problem with that announcement was that it was a lie.

The story, picked up by the Dallas Morning News and other media outlets, originated from a phony press release issued by environmental activists Rising Tide North America. The trick was timed to coincide with the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Bali, Indonesia.

The exploit aimed to throw egg on the face of USCAP for attempting to seem green without making radical changes. Members of the coalition include BP America, General Electric, and Xerox, as well as the National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Nature Conservancy.

The responsible Rising Tide activists, calling themselves Greenwash Guerillas, built a fake Web site for a public relations company and another site impersonating that of USCAP to complete the illusion. In October they infiltrated the Point Carbon conference to oppose carbon-trading schemes.

These are the latest in a series of digital disinformation pranks that could be a nightmare for reporters on a tight deadline. Not many writers were fooled in this case, however, maybe because media releases about corporate-greening efforts are piling so high in editorial inboxes lately.

In June, Yes Men impostors used videos with 3D animation at Canada's biggest oil convention to unveil Vivoleum, a fake new Exxon oil product made from human flesh.

In January, Greenpeace concocted a video of its own fake Steve Jobs pledging to make Apple products more eco-friendly. That tongue-in-cheek campaign was meant to embarrass Apple without fooling reporters. By May, the real Jobs announced that his company would phase out the use of some toxic chemicals.