GreatPoint Energy announced plans Thursday to build a plant to produce natural gas from biomass, coal and petroleum coke in its home state of Massachusetts.
The facility, which is expected to be finished in one year, will be located in Brayton Point at the research and development center of energy utility Dominion.
Massachusetts Gov. Duval Patrick was set to speak at a ceremony to announce the $25 million investment, which is benefiting from a state research grant.
This is a rendering of the planned biomass gasification plant to produce natural gas.
(Credit: GreatPoint Energy)GreatPoint has developed a technique for converting different feedstocks into methane, or natural gas, through a catalyst-based gasification process. It says it can create natural gas that costs less than current market prices.
It has attracted the attention of top-flight venture capitalists and other industrial companies. Last month, it announced an additional $100 million investment led by Dow Chemical, Suncor Energy, AES, and Citi division Sustainable Development Investments.
The plant in Massachusetts will use wood chips, corn stover, and switchgrass as a feedstock to make natural gas as well as coal and petroleum coke.
With its other plant projects, GreatPoint intends to place facilities near coal mines to make natural gas and sequester carbon dioxide generated during the gasification process underground.
The company also intends to build a gasification plant in Alberta, Canada, using petroleum coke, which is a byproduct of oil drilling in the tar sands there.
Ecotality is lending its hydrogen technology expertise to a municipal electricity project that aims to squeeze natural gas from coal without emitting carbon dioxide.
The company is partnering with the Arizona Public Service public utility company, which received $8.9 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy for its Advanced Hydrogasification Project (AHP), according to Ecotality.
Hydrogasification is a process in which natural gas is made from coal without releasing the pollutant carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
For the AHP project, Ecotality will contribute its so-called Hydrality technology, a process it developed in conjunction with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory that produces hydrogen from magnesium pellets and water, with water as the only byproduct. The company has previously used the Hydrality process as an inboard source of power for hydrogen-powered vehicles.
In this case, the Hydrality process will be examined to figure out reactor and storage dynamics for large-scale hydrogen production. The hydrogen will be used in a high-temperature and high-pressure reaction with coal to produce methane.
Ecotality has been expanding its interests beyond hydrogen fuel and electricity. In September, the company purchased Innergy, a San Diego, Calif.-based company that makes mobile solar power technology, and in June it bought the fuel cell retailer Fuel Cell Store.
Fuels giant BP has committed a minimum of $25 million over the next five years to fund research on low-carbon emitting fuels at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The partnership, announced on Tuesday, will focus on converting "low value" materials, such as petroleum coke and coal, into electricity, liquid fuels and chemicals. BP will also officially participate in MIT's universitywide Energy Initiative to develop greener energy technologies.
The work will focus on simulation technologies to speed up research on converting different feedstocks to fuels or electricity. Other research areas include gasification and synthetic gas technologies.
Renewable energies like solar and wind power are perhaps the cleanest, but conversion of biomass in various forms will likely be a big part of the energy picture of the future.
Coal, although a very dirty fuel, is abundant in many places around the world, notably the U.S. and China. Petroleum coke is a byproduct of fuel exploration, notably in tar sands of Alberta, Canada where oil is being extracted.
Technologies such as gasification--where high pressure and heat chemically change a feedstock--are being pursued in biofuels. Coal gasification is also considered a cleaner process than burning coal for electricity.
Forget biodiesel. To put a dent in global warming, we are going to have to stop using coal, said Ed Mazria, founder of Architecture 2030 at the West Coast Green conference taking place in San Francisco this week.
"The only fossil fuel that can fuel global warming is coal. If you stop coal, you stop global warming. End of story," he said. Architecture 2030 is a non-profit that encourages builders, suppliers and architects to move toward making carbon neutral buildings by 2030.
The problem with coal is two fold: it spews a lot of carbon dioxide, among other materials into the air, and the world has a lot of it, making it tempting to use. In the U.S. alone, there are 151 coal plants in the planning and construction phase.
The emissions from a single coal-fired power plant for one month will negate the efforts Wal-Mart is putting forth to curb its emissions. Wal-Mart wants to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent in seven years, he said.
Home Depot has announced it will plant 300,000 trees to offset is carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, those 300,000 trees will have to live 100 years before they offset the fumes from ten days from a coal-fired plant, he said. Replace every incandescent bulb in America with compact fluorescents? The benefits are eradicated by the carbon dioxide from two coal-fired plants over a year, he said.
"The silver bullet is no more coal," he said.
The coal question is the big question in the green industry. Coal plants do put a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but getting rid of them rapidly, say many, is economically unfeasible. Some have begun to advocate erecting more nuclear power plants to offset coal use. Several companies have also put forward ideas for cleaning up coal.
Of course, that won't be easy, but there are technologies and ideas that can help right now, said Mazria. Designing buildings to take advantage of passive cooling and natural lighting will cut energy use. Solar panels will reduce fossil fuels, he said. Architecture 2030's goal is to make the building sector carbon neutral by that year. According to stats from Oak Ridge National Laboratories, buildings consume approximately 48 percent of the energy in the U.S. (43 percent goes to operations, 8 percent goes to construction) and account for 43 percent of the greenhouse gases. 76 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. goes to operating buildings.
And the U.S. has conserved before. Energy use between 1973 and 1983 stayed relatively flat, according to stats from the Energy Information Agency, he said. But in that time period, 35 million new cars got on the road.
Mazria also showed off some very scary simulations of what will happen if sea levels rise to a meter or more. A lot of coastal Florida will vanish at 1 meter. Galveston, Texas goes under at 1.5 meters.
Climate change may become irreversible if the atmosphere hits 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide, he said, citing studies. Right now, the earth is at 385 parts per million and the figure is currently rising at 2.2 parts every year. Without changes, we will hit the 450 level by 2035, he asserted.
GreatPoint Energy, a company with technology that converts coal to natural gas, has secured $100 million to finance construction of commercial plants.
The third round of funding, first reported by CNET News.com, was led by new investors Dow Chemical, Suncor Energy, AES, and Citi division Sustainable Development Investments, Daniel Goldman, the executive vice president and chief financial officer of the Cambridge, Mass.-based company, said on Friday.
The natural gas will be transported through existing natural gas pipelines.
The company now has a test facility using coal in Des Plaines, Ill., and intends to use petroleum coke from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada as a feedstock to make methane.
With the financing, the company plans to build a large demonstration plant and begin construction of a large-scale manufacturing facility over the next few years.
"There are some natural synergies between all the (investor) companies either for power generation or for treating waste products from the tar sands in Canada," Goldman said.
The company's initial investors, which participated in the financing round, were venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Advanced Technology Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. In its first two rounds of funding, it raised $37 million.
GreatPoint Energy intends to construct methane plants near coal-mining areas and to take the carbon dioxide--a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming--created through its gasification process and sequester it underground. Or, the carbon dioxide can be used to aid oil and natural gas exploration.
Canada's General Fusion has received $1.2 million in venture funding to conduct further research on its fusion reactors, according to VentureWire.
The company's ultimate plan is to build small fusion reactors that can produce around 100 megawatts of power. The plants would cost around $50 million. That could allow the company to generate electricity at about 4 cents per kilowatt hour, relatively low. (By contrast, roughly $250 million was spent on a 64-megawatt solar thermal plant in Las Vegas recently.)
General Fusion has adopted the Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) model. In this scenario, an electric current is generated in a conductive cavity containing lithium and a plasma. The electric current produces a magnetic field and the cavity is collapsed, which results in a massive temperature spike.
The lithium breaks down into helium and tritium. Tritium, an unstable form of hydrogen, is separated and then mixed with deuterium, another form of hydrogen. The two fuse and make helium, a reaction that releases energy that can be harvested. So in short, lithium, a fairly inexpensive and plentiful metal, gets converted to helium in a reaction that generates lots of power and leaves only a harmless gas as a byproduct.
In theory. Conducting those reactions isn't easy. MTF has an advantage over other fusion techniques in that the plasma only has to stay at thermonuclear temperatures (150 million degrees Celsius) for a microsecond for a reaction to occur, according to the General Fusion's Web site.
But research is still ongoing. Los Alamos National Labs is currently conducting research.
Millions have been invested in fusion and nuclear projects over the last decade. Recently, Tri-Alpha Energy, out of the University of California Irvine, landed $40 million in VC funds.
Remember those fairy tales about trolls in the forest with magic potions that could make the hero invisible or someone fall in love? That's sort of what it is like to cover the clean tech world some days.
A number of start-ups have emerged promising a molecule that can simulate photosynthesis, a way to turn wood chips into ethanol, or materials for converting much more of the sun's energy into electricity.
Naturally, they never tell you what it is. Take GreatPoint Energy. The Cambridge-based company has come up with a catalyst that can convert coal, one of the dirtiest fuels out there, into clean-burning natural gas fairly efficiently and cheaply. The process is 65 percent efficient, says co-founder Aaron Mandell. So what's the secret? A catalyst, and he doesn't say much beyond that.
EE Stor, based outside of Austin, Texas, has a battery that many claim can revolutionize how power is stored. Good luck in trying to figure out the formula. They won't talk.
It's the Rumplestiltskin business model. (Ron Epstein, a principal at IPotential, came up with that metaphor first, to describe some patent companies.)
Some of these ideas will succeed and many will fail. Over the years, the basic formulas will likely emerge. But right now, the companies all have the same line. Believe me, it's magically delicious.
Ethanol from coal? If it works, it could solve three major problems for the energy industry.
Researchers at Louisiana State University, along with colleagues from Clemson University and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, are trying to develop catalysts and processes that would allow energy companies to convert coal into a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, and then convert those gases into ethanol.
The ethanol could then be used as a liquid fuel additive or, alternatively, shipped as a liquid and then be converted into hydrogen for hydrogen fuel cells, said LSU's James Spivey, who is heading up the project.
Right now, ethanol is primarily made out of corn or sugarcane. It's expensive and time-consuming to make, a problem. A gallon of ethanol derived from plant matter also only has around two-thirds of the energy content of a gallon of gas. A gallon of ethanol derived from coal-created synthetic gases could provide more energy.
"You could avoid an energy penalty" with coal ethanol, Spivey said.
The U.S. is also sitting on massive reserves of coal that dwarf even the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. Coal-fired power plants, however, are a major source of pollution. Using coal (in tightly controlled factory situations) to make ethanol would solve the issue of how to exploit the domestic coal supply in a way that doesn't harm the environment drastically, problem number two.
Problem number three, of course, is the hydrogen transportation problem. Hydrogen corrodes pipelines and the extremely small size of hydrogen molecules makes it tough to come up with pipelines that don't leak. Transporting it as a liquid helps solve that.
Now they just have to find the catalysts.
The Department of Energy and ConocoPhillips are underwriting the $2.9 million cost of the project.
Meanwhile, others such as Silverado Green Fuel, are looking at ways of making liquid fuels with coal particles.
American coal experts want more information. And they want the U.S. government to pay for it. Today the National Research Council issued a call for more federal money to find and assess America's coal deposits.
Currently over half of the U.S. electricity is generated by burning coal. But there is uncertainty about future use and availability of coal. And there is the issue of CO2 emissions and other pollution from coal-burning power plants. Plus the U.S. must now compete with China and other nations for use of the world's coal.
In short, says the Council's statement, "federal policymakers need accurate estimates of the amount, location and quality of mineable coal...mitigating dangers from explosions and fires should also be a research priority, as should improving mine ventilation..." There is a real question about the oft-quoted saw that the U.S. has enough coal for 250 years. Truthiness perhaps, but perhaps not the truth, says the Council.
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.
