News Blog

It's a water-based molecule that repels water.

That's Hycrete's business in a nutshell, according to CEO David Rosenberg. The company has a molecule--which consists of a water molecule with a long hydrocarbon attached--that links up to metallic ions in whatever it's mixed into. In the right circumstances, the molecule behaves like an oil and pushes water away.

The company currently sells its material to concrete manufacturers and contractors who use it to replace the bound-to-fail plastic membranes employed to keep water out of building foundations and freeway pilings. With Hycrete's molecules mixed into the cement, water can't get into corrode rebars or start wicking into the foundation where it can create long-term problems.

"One of the fundamental problems with concrete is that it is a hard sponge," he said. "Through capillary action it sucks water in."

So far, contractors have mixed the substance into 53 major projects, including sound barriers on a freeway in New Jersey. In the future, the company may mix its material into drywall to prevent moisture seepage. You could also mix it into roofing material and then put a green roof--rooftop lawns are getting bigger in urban environments like Tokyo--on top of your house without worrying about trickle down.

Grandpa's invention
Hycrete is something of a family affair. Rosenberg's grandfather, Michael Rhodes, actually invented the material about twelve years ago. A serial inventor, Rhodes worked on a number of projects for NASA, including a solid rocket fuel.

With the growth of the clean tech market, concrete is suddenly hot again. (It hasn't been this way since the Roman Empire.) Building contractors are vying to green up their projects by installing environmentally friendly HVAC systems and carpets. Concrete, which invariably goes into every project, is a natural extension of that.

A couple of building supply companies already sell concrete made of fly ash, a leftover byproduct of coal-burning power plants. Putting in concrete cuts down on the pollution utilities would have to otherwise dispose.

Hycrete allows contractors to not use plastic membranes, which in turn lets the builders earn points under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards. The more LEED points you get, the greener your building is.

More importantly, though, it can cut down costs and risks. In the building world, no one likes the waterproofing contractor. The membranes often fail and the end result is legal disputes.

"A lot of people get into this big fingerpointing game with the waterproofing contractor," he said. By using Hycrete's additive, the membrane is eliminated. The company also promises to warrant its performance. Hycrete, in fact, sticks around for about 90 days after the building is complete to make sure things worked out properly.

Traditional waterproofing also takes time. One builder estimated that construction time was reduced two months by using the additive.

Serious Materials plans to build a big, multimillion dollar factory that's going to be powered by solar panels.

The company is currently scouting out a site for a factory that will be capable of churning out 400 million square feet of drywall a year, said CEO Kevin Surace. The factory, however, will only require a 100-kilowatt solar system to provide its power. The relatively low power requirements come from how Serious makes drywall.

One hundred kilowatts is enough to power about 33 homes. For industrial manufacturing, that's not a low of power. Google put a solar system in its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters that generates 1,600 kilowatts and Applied Materials has one that will cook up 1,900 kilowatts at its headquarters.

Most manufacturers have to cook gypsum at high temperatures and then dry it. By contrast, Serious has devised materials that, when mixed together, congeal into drywall on their own through chemical reactions. In a sense, it's the Jello instant pudding of building materials. (You can get more from this story, one of the first on the company, from earlier in the year.)

Greenhouse gases are cut because little carbon dioxide gets generated in the manufacturing process. And building materials generate a fair amount of gases. The big four materials--cement, drywall, glass and metal--account for 12 percent of all carbon dioxide generated in the world. That's as much as all of the light cars and trucks on the road.

"Building materials are used in such large quantities that it adds up," he said.

The company makes samples now but won't get into volume manufacturing for commercial sale until next year. However, it already sells QuietRock, a soundproof drywall, so it has an existing sales channel. SnoopDogg bought some for his house.

Surace wouldn't comment on financing but he told VentureWire late last month that the company is trying to raise $40 to $50 million and that Serious has about half of the amount locked up.

Surace will be one of the speakers at the Going Green conference taking place this week in Davis, Calif.

Carbon footprint, energy use, green tech: some phrases that won't be going away. From gasoline prices to global warming, we're likely to become more aware of what energy we burn up, just as most of us now have some sense of whether we're eating wisely (or not).

Front page of carbon calculator

(Credit: earthlab)

Just today the Live Earth concert folks e-mailed me a link to their carbon calculator. This one walks you through several pages of simple questions about how you live, and especially how you travel. This calculator was built by Earthlab.org. They want to know the size of your dwelling, your car if you own one, energy bills, airplane and daily travel. After going through their process, I can't imagine how bad an airline pilot would look, environmentally speaking.

My score on the Earthlab quiz: 301, and 11 tons of carbon. So I'm clearly doing my bit to warm the planet. Live Earth folks say they'll post overall test scores and more information on 7-7-07.

Then there's this site, which gives you the really bad news--how many planets humanity would need to supply energy if everybody lived as you do. My score: 6.3 planets. I think that translates into a couple more solar systems 'cause I don't get the sense there's a whole lot of oil, coal or biofuels to be had out beyond Venus. I could probably do nicely with a tiny sun, however.

Then the Yahoo folks have built a carbon dioxide emissions calculator. My score was pretty much the same as what I got from Earthlab...until I added in my infrequent air travel. From a few plane trips: 21.8 tons of carbon dioxide. Where are the calls for solar planes? Or goose-powered, or human-paddled balloons, or something? How about those Star Trek transponders that would beam you up? Could they be energy efficient? No crappy airline "food" either.

Altogether these sites are: depressing, educational, geared to getting you to do something about your consumption patterns. Turn off your work computer when you are done for the day (or night). Carry your own shopping bags. Use alternative energy when possible. Use efficient bulbs and appliances. Walk more. Freak out over air travel. All good advice. And aimed at making each of us less of a carbon bigfoot.

Dense smog over Beijing, November, 2005

(Credit: NASA satellite image)

China is now No. 1. Not just in population. Nor just in economic growth among major nations. Not just in construction cranes or the building of coal-burning power plants. It's now the reigning champ of CO2 emissions. Despite the best efforts of numerous American utility companies and widespread use of air conditioning, SUVs and our own splurge in coal-burning, the United States has sunk to No. 2 in the CO2 derby.

The first to declare China the CO2 champ is the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. Its estimates today show China put out 6,200 million tons of CO2 last year. The U.S. could only manage 5,800 tons. China's huge population gives it the CO2 lead because it still only produces 25 percent as much CO2 per capita as the U.S. This means continued economic growth for China will bring even more CO2.

The build-up of pollution from China has been foreseen, but topping the U.S. was expected to take a few more years. Back in 2005 air pollution over Beijing reached maximum measured levels. People were told to stay inside. NASA also reports China has high rates of respiratory disease and acid rain.

American efforts to produce more electricity and thus burn more coal remain prodigious. More than 100 new coal-burning plants are being proposed in the U.S. Even that'll not be enough to regain our CO2 emission lead.

The reason we care is not just daily health, or acid rain. CO2 is the leading greenhouse gas and worsens the global warming of the atmosphere.

MENLO PARK, Calif.--Carbon dioxide: It's the cause of global warming, and it could also become the cure.

Sandia National Laboratories is tinkering with ways to convert CO2 into liquid fuels or precursors to useful fuels, said Ron Stoltz, government relations manager for the lab, speaking here at a showcase for the 2007 California Clean Tech Open on Monday. At the event, organizations like Sandia, Lawrence Berkeley Lab and UC Davis showed off a few ideas percolating in their labs for alternative energy.

The idea is to heat carbon dioxide to about 1200 degrees Celsius with excess energy from nuclear power plants (or the excess heat from utility-scale solar power plants) and mix it with water or other substances. Some have proposed making hydrogen in this manner.

"You can make a lot of useful things out of CO2 and H2 or water," Stoltz said.

Making gas out of carbon dioxide is preferable to burying it underground, as many are proposing, he said, adding that Sandia knows a few things about burying poisonous substances. It oversees nuclear waste disposal.

Stoltz also said that the lab continues to work with LiveFuels and other start-ups on algae-based biodiesel. The difficulty is in getting the water out of the algae.

Like most alt fuels, developing algae fuels that can compete with ordinary gas or diesel economically won't be easy.

"It's hard to beat gas as an ideal liquid fuel," he said.

Another idea at the event: simplified daylight harvesting at UC Davis. The university has come up with a way to harvest sunlight to light offices. A lot of companies do this, but Davis has combined a harvesting system with dimmers and occupancy sensors so that the system efficiently spreads the light around to the offices where needed. In many of the sunlight systems, you don't get this level of fine-tuning. All of the offices get light, or none of them do. The amount of light fed to the building is controlled by moving the solar receptor, a disk, away from the sun.

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday called for Congress to enact mandatory restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions by year's end.

At a news conference in Washington D.C. alongside Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, Pelosi said that as part of a "Fourth of July energy independence package" of legislation, she said it is "absolutely essential" for the House to pass a European-style "cap-and-trade" proposal related to carbon dioxide. The compound, a greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere when fossil fuels like coal and petroleum are burned, is considered a major contributor to global warming.

In a cap-and-trade system, which Europe began adopting in January 2005 as part of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, potential polluters must purchase credits on carbon-trading markets if their operations emit more than an allocated limit. The United States has already employed such an approach to combat sulfur dioxide emissions, which contribute to the phenomenon known as "acid rain."

Pelosi said she hopes a new bill will be introduced in June, although it was unclear what it would look like. Markey said politicians are still mulling the target percentage and timeframe by which the emissions must be reduced. (Europe, for instance, is aiming for a 20 percent carbon reduction by the year 2020.)

The politicians were fresh off a trip with a congressional delegation to England, Germany and Belgium to meet with foreign leaders about climate change issues and to learn from Greenland natives about the toll global warming has taken on their livelihood.

They also criticized President Bush for failing to endorse a mandatory cap in his announcement one day earlier about U.S. climate change policy. The G8 is scheduled to discuss mandatory caps as part of its summit in Germany next week.

In a speech Thursday, the president pledged that the United States would play a major role in global environmental policy and come up with a plan to reduce emissions by the end of 2008. He said the nation needs to focus on continued investments in alternative energy technologies, such as hydrogen-powered and electric vehicles.

"Yes, he says now he believes that global warming is happening and he accepts the science that it is," Pelosi said. "But if that were so, if he truly understood that, he could not have come up with a proposal that is aspirational."

Markey went a step further, calling the plan not just aspirational but "procrastinational."

(Credit: U.S. Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center)

The 21st century is already setting records. Wall Street stock prices keep rising, and so does the amount of carbon dioxide we're putting into Earth's atmosphere. It's apparently going to get more uncomfortable for those folks clinging to the theory that global warming is a hoax.

Data released Monday by the Carnegie Institution shows we are now producing near three times as much carbon dioxide as we were during the 1990s.

The global carbon emission study was done by the Carnegie scientists using readily available data from public sources. One source was the Department of Energy's obscure but scary Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center. They provided that impressive uphill chart at the top of this blog. The Carnegie study says our carbon dioxide emissions are now increasing at more than 3 percent annually; the last decade we averaged just over 1 percent.

Tropical deforestation

(Credit: CSIRO)

Carbon dioxide is known to be one of the greenhouse gases that can cause the Earth's atmosphere to retain heat. Today, two new scientific studies have been released that offer more insight into carbon and its dispersal into the air as carbon dioxide.

First, from Australia's CSIRO, the national science agency, comes a study on carbon contained within tropical forests that is thus not available to be released as CO2. This study says the current deforestation rate in the tropics releases 1.5 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere annually--about one-fifth of all carbon emissions caused by human activity.

Another study describes the fate of CO2 trapped within the Pacific Ocean. This study, released by Kent State University, found that there had been massive prehistoric releases of carbon dioxide. Two of these occurred at the end of the last Ice Age, triggered by changes in ocean currents. Right now, the scientists say, carbon dioxide levels in the Earth's atmosphere are the highest they've been in 650,000 years. That's even before the invention of the radio and phonograph if you're following on a timeline.

Oceans have absorbed about half the carbon we humans have pumped into the air in the past 300 years. But if current climate change alters ocean currents enough, there could be another massive release of carbon dioxide now trapped within the ocean. That would only accelerate the warming of the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, one company is working on trying to increase the amount of carbon now trapped by the oceans. Their plan is to use some friendly plankton to capture carbon. I just hope we humans haven't totally alienated every other organism on the planet.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued two dire reports this year on global warming and now the third comes on May 4, and it discusses technologies for adapting to climate change.

Adaptation to some level of warming is inevitable, according to experts. Even if every nation in the world decided go green tomorrow, conversion to clean forms of energy will take years. Thus, greenhouse gases will continue to get into the atmosphere and heat up the globe.

The IPCC is expected to state that mitigation or adaptation won't be as costly as some have claimed. Delegates to the IPCC, who have arrived in Bangkok for a week-long conference, earlier said that stabilizing greenhouse gases could cost as much as three percent of the world's gross domestic product, according to reports from the opening press conference.

Some of the more promising techniques for adapting to climate change involve coming up with alternatives to coal to generate electricity or to run cars on batteries. Many have also touted things like CO2 sequestration, better energy efficiency, and desalination (to replace the water that won't be in glaciers.)

Some of the costs in adaptation could also be offset, possibly, by lower healthcare costs.

The U.S. and China, who have voiced concerns about the earlier report, have already complained, via the Associated Press.

The organization in the first two reports this year outlined problems that may occur if actions are not taken to curb global warming. Around 20 to 30 percent of the animal and plant species will experience significant risks to extinction while droughts will hit southern Europe and large swaths of Africa.

The IPCC earlier this year in its first reports stated that human activity is the primary cause of greenhouse gases and hence global warming. The increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere primarily derives from fossil fuels while nitrous oxide and methane have increased primarily because of agriculture.

Right now, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 400 parts per million. If it goes to 600 parts per million, global average temperatures could rise 1.8 to 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2100. If CO2 rises to 1500 parts per million, it could rise to between 2.4 and 6.4 degrees Celsius.