Energias alternativas
Energía que se obtiene de fuentes naturales virtualmente inagotables, unas por la inmensa cantidad de energía que contienen, y otras porque son capaces de regenerarse por medios naturales.
Fuentes de noticias: Alternative Energy, Alternative Fuels, Biopact, DIY, Energy Policy, Renewable Energy Headlines, Renewable Energy World
As I write this piece, were in the midst of a (biodiesel) road trip to Washington, D.C., towing behind us an unwieldy piece of history: a solar panel off the roof of the Carter White House. Its decades old, though it still makes hot water just fine. In a sense, were traveling backwardwhich in another sense is what I think were going to have to do for a while in the U.S. climate movement.
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy found out a way to chemically enclose methane in cage-like ice crystals. This technology is much safer than current liquefied natural gas (LNG), which is transported at very low temperatures and high pressures.
The more affordable solar power becomes, the more people are going to use it. This is simple. Poll after poll has shown that people like solar energy and think we need to use it more, but many people are turned off by high, initial capital costs (even if they'll get their money back on those in a few years). An innovative solar start-up in Seattle, Washington, Clarian Power, seems to have come up with a good, breakthrough solution to help solve this issue.
Rather than $20,000-30,000 solar systems, Clarian offers plug-in solar energy for as low as $600-800 per panel. When you take into account the tax rebates you can get for installing solar power, this price can come down considerably more.
A new fuel cell being developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is set to take households a giant step closer to energy independence. MIT researchers envision an integrated system consisting of a solar installation and a fuel cell. During the day, the solar array produces electricity to power the household, and to charge batteries including electric vehicle batteries. At night, the system would shift to the fuel cell, which would produce additional electricity as well as clean drinking water.
The key is reducing the cost of fuel cells, which right now are expensive partly due to the use of platinum as a critical component. That's where the new research comes in. At the recent 240th national meeting of the American Chemical Society, the MIT team described a powerful new catalyst that could help make the solar-fuel cell integrated system more affordable.
(more)
In Europe, hybrid cars are not sold very well, compared to diesels. Toyota officials said that by the end of 2020, the company plans to add the hybrid option across its entire lineup.
I wrote a piece over a month ago on the possibility of getting a nationwide renewable energy standard (RES) passed despite the demise of comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation in the Senate. Since then, though, I thought the possibility of getting an RES through an almost nonfunctional Senate sort of faded into oblivion. Apparently not, according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
The first organic solar cell has come from Switzerland. It seems somehow normal that the first practical application and the first organic solar cell manufacturer to come from Germany - doesn't it?
Sharp has worked closely with the University of Tokyo, and aims breaking the record again with 45% by 2015 and even to reach 50% by 2025. The company says that at 45% the cost of solar will finally reach that of nuclear and thermal power plants.
Metropolitan cities around the world build more and more underground subway systems in order to minimize the number of vehicles on the roads. The industrial designers also though to help city authorities by redesigning the current systems, making them more efficient.
The Obama Administration wants to help the biofuel industry develop. The government is thus investing $8.9 million to award nine companies in seven states for improving their genetic breeding programs for creating plants better suited for biofuel.
The Vehicular Technology Conference, hosted in Ottawa, Canada, next week, will be the place where Zafer Sahinoglu at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues will present an innovation aimed to patch the issues electric cars and their limited battery range have: the mobile battery charger.
Sanyo Electric Co., in an initiative to reduce their carbon footprint and at the same time to save money, is experimenting with a system composed of cameras that assess how many persons are in a certain room and regulates air conditioning and lighting according to the results.
Hydrogen fuel cells are thought to be the best possible solution for our cars to run as clean as they can. Hydrogen, though, can only be stored in pressurized tanks, for the moment, and the mileage you get from a single fill is far from decent, or at least far from what we've been used to.
Korea will be the country where BMW will introduce its most eco-friendly conventional vehicle, the 320d EfficientDynamics Edition, by the end of next year. The German car maker has officially launched other two new hybrid electric vehicles.
Smartphones are looked upon as the most sophisticated and trendy devices there are on the market nowadays, since mostly everyone wants or uses one. Still, with the coming of Google's Android and the freedom from Microsoft's Windows Mobile, no big changes have been made to green up these devices, as their power consumption grows exponentially.
Researchers at the University of Twente have recently discovered one of the cheaply and efficiently method to convert biomass from agricultural and forestry waste into oil.
Graphene has a great potential to make electronic devices such as phones, radios and computers smaller and faster. The new graphene-based technology could play a key role in waste reduction and energy conservation.
Join the forum discussion on this post
Cracking Biomass
Back when I worked in a refinery, I used to spend a lot of time thinking about how biomass would behave in certain refining processes. A fluidized catalytic cracker (FCC), for instance, takes oil and subjects it to heat and a catalyst to fracture larger hydrocarbons into smaller ones that can serve as gasoline blending feedstock (among other things). Another refining unit is a delayed coker. Very heavy oil is subjected to even higher temperatures than in the cracker, and once again the hydrocarbon chains are cracked into smaller molecules useful for further processing into gasoline and diesel. Petroleum coke, similar in appearance to coal, is also produced.
Given the extreme conditions of these units, either of them should be able to break biomass down into much smaller fragments. I wondered about this for several years, but then in 2007 I saw an interesting announcement that a Vinod Khosla-backed company called KiOR was actually working on this sort of approach:
Khosla Ventures and BIOeCON form KiOR to commercialize cellulosic ethanol
I had forgotten about the misleading title of that particular story. While I used to wonder about what would be formed if biomass was fed to a catalytic cracker, I knew one thing that wouldn't be formed: Cellulosic ethanol. This was a bit more of the marketing craze that caused all sorts of biomass conversion processes to be called cellulosic ethanol. Regardless of the misleading title, the story was intriguing. I blogged about it at the time:
After that, I continued to think a lot about the process itself, but didn't hear much more until this past week, when suddenly a number of people e-mailed to ask about this:
Kior lands state loan to make biocrude' from wood
Biofuel company Kior said on Monday it has secured a $75 million loan to build five plants in Mississippi that will convert wood chips into a petroleum replacement.
The Pasadena, Texas-based company expects to build three of five planned facilities over the next five years. The package from the state also includes state assistance on infrastructure and worker training.
Kior stands out from many biofuels companies in that it is making a petroleum replacement, rather than ethanol. That means its product, which it is now making at a demonstration plant in Texas, can be shipped in pipelines and treated in existing refineries to make gasoline or diesel equivalents.
So, they have decided they won't be making ethanol after all. Now, in fact, they are highlighting that point.
So what will they make, and what are the potential stumbling blocks? Let's dive into that.
Fast Pyrolysis
When biomass is heated up rapidly to 500 degrees C, fast pyrolysis occurs. The cellulose, lignin, and hemicellulose break down in seconds into a pyrolysis oil and char. The char can be burned to provide the heat for the process, which means the process could be run with little to no fossil fuel inputs.
The pyrolysis oil that is produced is distinct from hydrocarbons, such as those that make up crude oil. Whereas hydrocarbons are composed of just hydrogen and carbon (methane, the simplest hydrocarbon, is CH4; one carbon atom with four hydrogen atoms attached to it), the compounds of pyrolysis oil contain a lot of oxygen. These compounds include aldehydes, carboxylic acids (like acetic acid), ketones, alcohols, sugars, and pyrolytic lignin, and their volumetric energy content tends to be far lower than that of petroleum.
Pyrolysis oil has some characteristics that make it challenging to use as a fuel. Pyrolysis oil is quite acidic, with a pH ranging from 1.5 to 4. The oil also polymerizes over time unless it is stabilized. However, some companies have managed to overcome these challenges, and pyrolysis oil has some promise for electricity production. One company in Canada, Dynamotive, incorporated a 2.5 megawatt turbine to produce electricity from pyrolysis oil at a plant in Ontario, but it isn't clear whether that approach has been successful (Source).
Pyrolysis oil may also be upgraded into transportation fuel. The company UOP, which among other things licenses technology to refineries for upgrading crude oil, entered into a joint venture in 2008 with Ontario-based Ensyn Corp. (one of the leading pyrolysis companies) to upgrade pyrolysis oil to transportation fuel. The joint venture is called Envergent Technologies, and was selected as a recipient of a $25 million DOE grant to demonstrate pyrolysis oil upgrading technology at a Tesoro refinery outside of Honolulu. (See this press release).
Pyrolysis oil components tend to be relatively short, and when the oil is processed in a cracker the chains get even shorter. So about half of the oil is lost to carbon dioxide and water, another 15% to light gases, only about 30% is converted to gasoline, and another 8% to diesel (these are published results from UOP). Given that the biomass yield to pyrolysis oil is about 75%, that puts the biomass to gasoline yield at 22.5% (by mass) and that is with the addition of 5 weight percent hydrogen. Still, that is around 70 gallons per ton of biomass, which is comparable to several other biomass conversion technologies.
KiOR's process reportedly impregnates catalyst within the biomass, and when it is fed to the FCC it cracks the biomass and then partially upgrades the oxygenated components to hydrocarbons. So what they reportedly produce is not a conventional pyrolysis oil, but instead a pyrolysis oil that has at least been partially upgraded.
Questions for KiOR
In order to evaluate KiOR's technology, there are some specific questions to ask. First, what is the composition of the oil coming out of cracker? How does this compare to conventional pyrolysis oil? (KiOR's U.S. Patent Application number 20100105970 says that most, but not all, of the oxygen has been removed). What is the biomass cost assumption built into the model that says the oil is competitive with $70 crude oil?
How small do the particles need to be before feeding into the cracker? (The energy required to grind biomass to fine particles can be substantial; KiOR's U.S. Patent Application number 20100209965 mentions the use of circulating sand to reduce the size of the biomass). How is the catalyst impregnated into the biomass (feeding crude oil into an FCC is one thing; having to impregnate biomass and then feed it in will be more costly and time-consuming)?
One potential issue is the need to transport the oil from the FCC to a refinery. In a conventional oil refinery, the product that comes out of the cracker goes right into the other process units. I think that's the model that KiOR would like to adopt, because if they have to ship the oil off-site for processing, that will seriously hurt the economics of the process.
Misinformation
I have also seen a great deal of misinformation in various press releases about KiOR's process. For instance, I came across Publicado el sábado 5º de septiembre a las 9:28am
Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation recently excerpted an article that argues patents might not be the clear-cut technology promotion tool they are hyped up to be. The article itself, by Boldrin, Levine and Nuvolari makes the case that improvements in steam engine technology during the time between 1772 and 1852 show that the protection afforded by patents is not associated with vigorous technological development. Their article is titled
Do Patents Encourage or Hinder Innovation? The Case of the Steam Engine
and it was published in The Freeman.
Image is of "the green steam engine" found on PESWiki
Excerpting from Boldrin's introduction into the patent controversy:
"Today one of the most controversial issues in economic policy is that of patent law. Is a patent just an extension of property rights to the realm of ideas? Or is it an unwarranted interference by the government into the rights of individuals who have purchased goods and services to use them as they see fit? Should the Western system of patents be extended worldwide? Or should we get rid of patents entirely? Is the patent system responsible for modern miracle drugs? Or is it to blame for the millions dying of HIV in Africa? Do patents lead to greater innovation and economic growth? Or do they kill the goose that lays the golden egg?"
"The issue of whether patents are genuine property rights or unwarranted government interference cannot of course easily be answered by a natural experiment. We will leave that discussion to philosophers. The impact of patents on innovation does have an objective answer. In this case history instead of nature has been kind enough to provide us with a wonderful natural experiment. This experiment took place in the county of Cornwall, England, between 1772 and 1852. It was there, in the extreme southwest of England, in the wet depths of the Cornish copper and tin mines, far removed from the supply of coal in Wales, that the steam engine was pioneered."
I recommend reading the full article and, if you're interested, also the comments which give a diversity of views.
Some of you may know that I have written on the subject of patents a good 20 years ago. The article is available on my 'historical' site www.hasslberger.com and is the first one in the Technology and Patents category. In introducing The Inventor and Society, I wrote "Patents are, at times, a block to technological progress, acting to discourage inventors who have found ways to circumvent the dearly held "natural laws" of thermodynamics and of conservation of energy. Why not use a different system that ensures protection of the inventor but does not require him to provide a theory for his invention to register it."
A team of researchers at UCLA has developed a new way to make super-fast graphene transistors that are comparable to transistors that use more expensive (and toxic) materials. If successful commercially, the new graphene based technology could play a key role in energy conservation and waste reduction related to the rising tide of electronic devices in the world.
Like it or not, electronics are here to stay and to grow into new markets as the developing world catches up with industrialized countries. By reducing their size, making them more energy efficient, and cutting or outright eliminating the use of hazardous substances in their manufacture, it is possible to engineer a more sustainable path to a global electronic future.
In a truly staggering breakthrough in LED intensity that will have wide ramifications on electricity use worldwide, the Finnish LED producer Obelux has developed by far the most powerful white flashing LED of all time.
In response to aviation industry requests, Obelux created a flashing High Intensity LED that delivers 200,000 candelas. Current technology delivers just 10 candelas. This marks an incredible 20,000-fold improvement on the old Xenon technology.
These will be installed on over 150 meter tall buildings and masts, replacing the flashing red aviation obstacle lights that are currently in place on masts and tall buildings to warn airplanes. Boosting brightness even further, they will be in groups of three, so that each can deliver 600,000 candelas.
Energy consumption? Just 350 watts! (more)
Zinc oxide-based solar cells have just received an innovation from an Indian scientist, Ram Mehra of Sharda University in Greater Noida, India. He claims boosting the capacity of zinc oxide fuel cells and making them capture more of the incident light by using a blended mixture of common dyes, regularly used in food and medical industries.
Put this one in the category of every cloud has a silver lining: E. coli, the bacteria notorious for contaminating food products from lettuce to ground beef, could also play a key role in developing the next generation of biofuels. A team of scientists from Rutgers University is working with computer modeling to tweak the pesky little bug into overproduce fatty acids, which can then be processed into biodiesel.
If the research is successful, chalk up another win for producing biofuels from sustainable, non-food sources that can be grown without competing for land with food crops. The growing list includes weedy plants, woody plants, algae and various microorganisms.
(more)
Researchers at the University of California have developed a smart phone chip that could spur a new generation of more efficient mobile electronic devices. In turn, a more energy efficient device would enable the more widespread use of solar energy and other forms of renewable energy for battery recharging.
The new chip is based on the use of dark silicon. Dark silicon is shorthand for the growing portion of silicon on transistors that is underused because there is not enough power available to run them all of the transistors at once. The new chip, called GreenDroid, is designed to use about 11 times less energy than a typical processor.
(more)