Green Tech

(Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory )

Carbon nanotech has been applied to everything from boat construction to windshields and now, with a licensing agreement from Livermore Lab, a Hayward, Calif., company will apply it to water desalination and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The National Nuclear Security Administration's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has licensed a new carbon nanotube technology to its spinoff company Porifera. The company will develop permeable membranes for CO2 sequestration, water desalination, and other liquid-based separations based on discoveries made at Livermore.

The technology integrates carbon nanotubes into polymer membranes, increasing the flux of carbon dioxide capture by two orders of magnitude thanks to the material's unique "nanofluidic" properties. This technique could enable a less expensive method of capturing carbon from coal plants, according to the Livermore. Sequestering CO2, a greenhouse gas emission, is one strategy for curbing global warming, although this particular process has yet to prove out on a industrial scale.

"The technology is very exciting," said Olgica Bakajin, former Livermore scientist and now chief technology officer at Porifera. "The reason it makes sense to do it is because of the unique nanofluidic properties of carbon nanotube pores. It's at the right place to take it to the marketplace."

Nanotubes are graphitic layers wrapped into cylinders a few nanometers in diameter, (approximately 1/50,000th the width of a human hair) and up to several millimeters long. Their extraordinary strength and unique electrical and thermal conductive properties make them attractive for many applications.

Porifera is funding the carbon capture project with a $1 million-plus grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency. It's pursuing the water purification angle with a $3.3 million DARPA grant to develop small, portable self-cleaning desalination systems.

(Credit: TARDEC)

The U.S. Army is testing a new diesel hybrid vehicle called the Clandestine Extended Range Vehicle (CERV) designed for quick-paced special operations-type missions such as reconnaissance, surveillance, and targeting--all the while conserving fuel.

The vehicle was developed jointly by Quantum Fuel Systems Technologies Worldwide and the U.S. Army's Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) National Automotive Center, with funding support through the U.S. Special Operations Command.

The CERV pairs the Quantum's new "Q-Force" advanced all-wheel-drive diesel hybrid electric power train with a light-weight chassis to produce a torque rating that exceeds 5,000 foot-pounds. The unit can maintain speeds of 80 miles per hour and climb 60 percent grades--all while reducing fuel consumption by up to 25 percent compared to a conventional alternative, according to the company. The CERV is fitted with a distinctive weapons ring that allows gunners to deliver a high rate of fire while traveling at high speeds through rough terrain (PDF).

"In keeping with the nation's interest in pursuing an agenda that promotes energy security while increasing fuel efficiency and use of alternate sources of power, TARDEC is fully engaged in ambitious programs that push development of hybrid electric vehicles for U.S. military use," according to Army product literature.

Quantum may be best known for its gasoline plug-in hybrid, called the Q-Drive, and the Fisker Karma four-door sports sedan, developed by Fisker Automotive, a company co-founded by Quantum and Henrik Fisker.

I am excited about our "new military special operations vehicle that is well-positioned to create another highly fuel-efficient and powerful platform that improves the military's tactical capabilities," said Quantum CEO and President Alan P. Niedzwiecki. "We believe that the CERV program offers innovative solutions to meet the mission of the national defense effort, while reducing the fuel logistic burden."

Lithium ion batteries used as energy storage for utilities will be a $1 billion industry by 2018, according to a report released Wednesday by Pike Research called "Energy Storage Technology Markets."

Much of the lithium ion battery development has been geared toward perfecting the batteries as power sources for electronics, and in recent years, cars. But the alternative energy industry is going to benefit from that research, too. Once that happens, there will be a surge in the sales of industrial-scale lithium ion batteries for power utilities, according to Pike research.

"Utilities will be the downstream beneficiaries of innovation and investment in lithium ion batteries for the transportation sector," Pike Research analyst David Link said in a statement.

The energy storage industry in general is poised to grow as more private and public organizations embrace wind and solar energy worldwide. Because wind and solar systems provide energy in bursts and their cycles are not usually in sync with local peak energy usage hours, power storage when using wind or solar will become an obvious necessity for utilities, according to Pike Research.

Out of eleven methods of energy storage, Pike Research found that lithium ion batteries for utility use will be the fastest growing segment of the storage industry.

Sodium Sulfur (NAS) batteries and kinetic storage systems like pumped hydro and Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) were seen as the next likely leading utility energy storage solutions.

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.

So far in 2009, battery companies have received over $600 million in venture capital funding, compared with $478 million garnered for 2008, according to research analyst Lux Research.

The investment isn't without reason. In a report released Tuesday, Lux predicted that the energy storage market will grow to become a $60 billion industry by 2013.

But for now, it's hard for even the experts to predict who will emerge as the victorious innovators. Instead of a few key players, there's a plethora of both established and start-up companies developing a wide range of approaches to power storage for things like cars, utilities, and gadgets, according to Lux.

A123 Systems' battery platform is being used for tools, transportation, and power grid energy storage.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)

A123Systems, of which GE is an investor, and NGK Insulators are seen as leaders in power grid energy storage.

And Lux sees Johnson Controls-Saft and Compact Power as leaders in developing lithium ion batteries for electric hybrid cars.

But when it comes to batteries for products like power tools, electric bikes, and portables, the space is wide open. That space is open not only to emerging companies, but also as to which type of battery technology will succeed, according to Lux.

"Nickel-metal hydride (NiMH), nickel-zinc (NiZn) and even lithium-sulfur (Li-S) and lithium-air (Li-air) batteries are all pitching themselves as lower-cost alternatives," according to the report.

At least one company is already poised to make money off the uncertainty. Lux is offering a service to manufacturers and investors interested in the market. It's dubbed the Lux Innovation Grid, a chart that plots the variables for evaluating companies' battery tech and business models.

Seeking out a better auto battery, Nissan Motor and EnerDel said Thursday that they will team up in support of research into a better conductive material for batteries.

The pact calls for the two companies to co-fund research at the Argonne National Laboratory to develop a new electrolyte made of a slurry liquid. The work is being done specifically for electric and hybrid vehicle batteries.

EnerDel lithium ion car battery.

(Credit: EnerDel)

EnerDel, which makes lithium ion batteries, has agreements to supply Think Global's city car and Fisker Automotive's luxury plug-in electric vehicle, both of which are expected to be available in the next year. Nissan, meanwhile, plans to unveil an all-electric sedan next week, which it plans to make available next year.

Lithium ion batteries will power a generation of electric cars slated to come to market in the next two years, replacing the nickel metal hydride batteries used in today's hybrids.

Lithium batteries, which are also used in consumer electronics, are relatively light and allow for higher energy density. But researchers have been looking at novel approaches to improve performance and cost, including different electrolytes.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Donald Sadoway and his student David Bradwell earlier this year built a prototype of "liquid battery" that uses three layers of molten metals--two for the battery's electrodes and an electrolyte liquid in the middle.

The advantage of this method is that the liquids allow for fast charging and discharging. Batteries built this way promise to be cheaper and last longer as well.

Updated at 7:00 a.m. PT with added information on MIT battery research. Updated at 11:45 PT on October 26 with correct first name of professor Sadoway.

Energy efficiency--it's not just the low-hanging fruit, it's the fruit that's lying on the ground, Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently quipped. Now McKinsey has put a number on the potential savings: $1.2 trillion on an investment of $520 billion over 10 years.

The consulting firm on Wednesday released a follow-up report to its often-cited economic analysis for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Cost analysis: measures below the baseline on the left will have the quickest return on up-front investment.

(Credit: McKinsey)

While there are countless proposals to generate energy in cleaner ways, the McKinsey study concluded that using existing products and practices, such as weatherizing homes or installing combined heat and power systems, could yield vast savings by 2020.

However, there are number of barriers, including the up-front cost, a fragmented array of products covering hundreds of thousands of buildings and billions of devices, and a lack of awareness that efficiency exists as a "fuel source" itself, McKinsey consultants said during a press conference Wednesday.

"If we do nothing, we will waste $1.2 trillion of energy," McKinsey partner Ken Ostrowski said. "Over a decade, (the up-front investment) would be $50 billion a year, which is about five times what we invest today. That investment pays back--it's one of the few that generate environmental benefits and economic cost returns."

The study examined the potential for efficiency in stationary sources, so it does not include transportation. The demand for power could be decreased 23 percent by 2020, which is equivalent to the nontransportation energy consumption of Canada or removing the entire U.S. passenger fleet from the road.

Individual homes and businesses could save about 28 percent off their current energy spending, while the industrial sector could save 20 percent. Within people's homes, electronic devices are quickly becoming a larger portion of monthly electric bills.

When surveyed, the average American estimates that "plug loads" represent 13 percent of energy consumption, but the number is more like 35 percent and growing, Ostrowski said.

Standby power alone, sometimes referred to a home's parasitic or vampire load, is 6 percent to 8 percent of the total. Putting in place efficiency standards to cut standby power could result in energy savings equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of the Netherlands, Ostrowski said.

"These things are significant but fragmented. The awareness levels are not there today, and that's one of the barriers we have to overcome," he said.

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.

Re-revving your engine: Waste heat is a terrible thing to waste.

(Credit: Idaho National Laboratories)

General Electric and the Idaho National Laboratory are plumbing engines for a cheap source of energy: waste heat.

The two organizations said Tuesday that they have received a $2 million Department of Energy grant to further develop GE technology that converts the heat from industrial engines into electricity. That technology could make engines 20 percent to 40 percent more efficient and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The engines that run factories, mills and power plants are often only 35 percent efficient. That means the rest of the available energy from fossil fuels goes unused.

GE researchers in Germany and New York have been working to improve the Organic Rankine Cycle, a process that's been understood for over 100 years but has been expensive in practice. The research will seek to build a prototype of a more efficient and cost-effective ORC which will convert heat from a gas turbine.

Rather than use a working fluid to capture and transfer the waste heat, GE has developed a new evaporator to transfer it. The new design means that ORCs can be used to convert relatively low-temperature heat (under 500 degrees Celsius) into electricity on a wide range of power sources, including the equipment in coal power plants and small gas turbines, said Thomas Fry, a researcher in GE's Munich offices.

There are already waste-heat recovery systems operating in large industrial facilities that produce steam from smokestacks to turn an electricity turbine. Another technology that's being pursued, although is still expensive, is thermoelectrics, materials that create a current from heat.

One company called ElectraTherm has developed a on-site generator, which uses an Organic Rankine Cycle to make electricity at facilities such as offices or hospitals.