Green Options

Total, a French oil company, recently agreed to give the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) $4 million for a 5-year research project to develop stationary batteries that can more efficiently store solar energy.

More efficient energy storage has been a difficult issue for scientists to crack. It is a major issue preventing more widespread use of renewable energy, and solar energy in particular.

Is this project, one funded by a true oil giant, the one that will make it happen?

Veteran solar installer Parkson Corporation is lending its expertise to a new wastewater treatment plant upgrade for the town of Berlin near the Maryland coast.  When it’s finished, the new plant will almost eliminate the use of fossil fuels for drying and converting biosolids, also known as sludge, into a lightweight Class A soil amendment or sustainable fuel.  The process is pushed along by a stainless steel “Electric Mole” that automaticaly mixes, aerates, and granulates the sludge as it dries.

The $16 million upgrade project is funded by ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act).  Parkson’s Thermo-System Active Solar Sludge Drying Chambers will enable the sludge conversion process to operate under more than 90% solar power rather than using gas or oil.  For disposing sludge in landfills, that translates into a significant savings in preparation and transportation costs.  Even better, it makes sludge products more cost-competitive with conventional soil amendments and fossil fuels, effectively taking the “waste” out of wastewater.

My previous post retraced the precipitous decline in the reputation of biofuels that occurred between 2006 and today.  In this post I’m going to talk about just a few of the activities going on for “second generation” biofuels (beyond corn, soy and palm oil, wheat…).  One of the key features of these initiatives is that they reduce the competition with food crops - something which will only become a more significant issue in the future.  I’ll be talking about several Universities and companies who have hung in there through the ups and downs of oil prices and the “trendiness” and “rejection” of biofuels.  I think that these folks are going to make significant long-term contributions. If you have been soured in the past on the biofuel concept, please consider these alternatives.

Algae

There was a recent Wall Street Journal article about “5 Technologies that could change everything.”  One they included was biofuels from Algae.  People have been working on this for a long time including a very long government effort.  The great thing about algae is that you can grow it in places and with water sources that are completely unsuitable for farming.  Algae can be extremely productive.  The problem is that the low capital investment systems are less productive and the highly productive, “bio-reactor” approach has a huge capital cost.  The good news is that there are enough companies working away on this that sooner or later there might be a break-through.  I won’t pretend to be an expert on how this is going, but I have a hunch it will eventually become significant.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about China’s new policy to focus on buying (almost entirely) “China-grown” wind turbines and wind turbine technologies with Chinese patents. That policy wasn’t a big hit internationally and China is back-tracking.

However, is it changing its stance out of international moral pressure or a major financial incentive (recent deal) in the US? And who is to benefit the most from this shift?

Researchers at Rice University have announced the discovery of a new breakthrough method for producing carbon nanotubes in bulk fluids.  Rice’s new nanotube “stew” could spur the inexpensive mass production of carbon nanotube-based products, much like the plastics industry employed bulk loads of melted polymers as a cheap base for making everything from medical equipment to polyester shirts to plastic bags, and countless other things in between.

Rice’s nanotube research was sponsored in party by U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy.  Aside from their military application, carbon nanotubes have a practically unlimited potential for sustainable civilian products because of their strength, light weight, and electrical conductivity among other properties. Lightweight nanomaterials could boost the gas mileage in cars and airplanes, make thinner and more flexible solar cells, increase the efficiency of lithium-ion batteries (in combination with another new high tech material, graphene), and be used in artificial photosynthesis to generate hydrogen fuel.

An ecologist and an engineer at Michigan State University are working together to create robot fish that can better monitor various factors in aquatic environments.

Combining the brilliance of nature with some top-notch engineering, these two scientists are on to something and getting the funding for it.

The researchers are breaking ground with this and looking to raise water monitoring to another level.

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Pittsburgh has been laying the groundwork for a high tech green jobs renaissance ever since its mighty steel mills shut their doors 30 years ago.  Now the payoff is coming.  FLABEG, the global specialty glass manufacturer, has just opened a solar mirror factory by Pittsburgh International Airport that will bring an estimated 200 jobs to the region, and perhaps as many as 300.

The new $30 million facility will initially focus on its core production line of parabolic curved solar mirrors.  Months before the plant opened it already received 700,000 orders, and FLABEG expects to reach a capacity of 1 million mirrors annually.

Catch the Wind Ltd. of Virginia has just announced that its new Vindicator laser wind sensor has been deployed on a specialized buoy for a field test off Race Rocks Island in British Columbia.   If successful, the laser sensor would be part of the world’s first buoy-based wind power assessment system, which could shave millions off the cost of assessing conditions at potential sites for offshore wind turbines.

Conventional site assessments for large scale wind farms are done through the construction of a permanent offshore tower, which can cost up to $10 million.  Catch the Wind’s movable buoy-based system, called the WindSentinel, could virtually eliminate that expense and help open up sustainable offshore wind power to small communities, military bases, and other modestly scaled projects.

California-based company Cereplast has revealed that it is developing breakthrough technology to transform algae into bioplastics, and predicts that it could replace 50% or more of the petroleum content used in traditional plastic resins.

Cereplast already makes plastic from renewable material such as corn starch, tapioca, wheat and potatoes, but is keen to trumpet the advantages of the new approach.

According to Frederic Scheer, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Cereplast, “Algae-based resins represent an outstanding opportunity for companies across the plastic supply chain to become more environmentally sustainable and reduce the industry’s reliance on oil.”

In the comment streams on my blog posts there is a recurrent theme from one segment of the respondents - they have a deep distrust in the large companies that are involved in modern agricultural technology.  They don’t believe these companies will behave ethically because they are for profit entities “only answerable to their shareholders.”   

I’d like to speak directly to this as a long-time Ag industry insider whose experience does not support these suspicions. I know that some will dismiss this perspective assuming I am biased, but one has to balance potential for bias with actually having first-hand experience from which to speak.  Over the last 32 years I’ve work for or with most of the companies, large and small, that provide agricultural technologies.  Fourteen of those years have been as an independent consultant so I get to know what is going on inside of many companies in a given year.  I have still only had direct knowledge of a subset of what happens, but in all of that exposure I’ve never witnessed an unethical decision or action - not even the consideration of one.  I’ve seen certain decisions that were short-sighted.  I’ve sometimes seen decision-making processes that are more driven by fear than by opportunity.  I’ve seen missed opportunities because vision was lacking.  I’ve occasionally seen failures to take advantage of synergies that could have been realized between divisions of large organizations. I’ve seen problems, but I believe that some level of dysfunction is inevitable in any organization involving people.  Still, unethical behavior isn’t something I’ve seen so I disagree that it is automatically likely just because of the characteristics of the company.  

On balance I’ve also seen these organizations, large and small, frequently make important contributions to society in terms of the productivity and safety of our food supply.  I’ve seen these companies continue to do that in an environment of constant activist attack and very limited public understanding because so few people farm.

SOLARIG, a company based in Spain that incorporated about four years ago, just began construction of eight photovoltaic parks in Italy this month. The parks will provide 8 MW of energy in total. Over the next few months, it plans to construct photovoltaic projects producing 30 MW throughout different regions of Italy.

But this is just the beginning. SOLARIG has a more global vision.