Tawanai

There are some new techniques which help to tap into natural gas reserves but there is public concern about damage to environment. A mounting backlash against a technique used in natural-gas drilling is threatening to slow development of huge gas fields.

The U.S. energy industry says there is enough untapped domestic natural gas to last a century—but getting to that gas requires injecting millions of gallons of water into the ground to crack open the dense rocks holding the deposits. The process, known as hydraulic fracturing, has turned gas deposits in shale formations into an energy bonanza.

The industry’s success has triggered increasing debate over whether the drilling methods cause damage to the environment.

Today, the industry estimates that 90% of all new gas wells are fractured. Shale—a dense, nonporous gas-bearing rock—won’t release its gas unless it is cracked open, and other types of formations also produce more gas when fractured. Easier, more porous formations, which don’t require fracturing, were tapped in earlier decades and have largely dried up.

As the industry has honed its techniques, hydraulic-fracturing operations have become more complex, requiring far more water and chemicals—millions of gallons per well, rather than tens or hundreds of thousands of gallons in the past.

Environmentalists and some community activists fear hydraulic fracturing could contaminate drinking-water supplies. They point to recent incidents that they say are linked to fracturing, including a water-well explosion in Dimock, Pa., and a chemical spill here in Shreveport.

The industry says fracturing is safe and argues that there have been only a handful of incidents among the large number of wells that have been fractured over the past 50 years. “Hydraulic fracturing has been used since the 1940s in more than one million wells in the United States. It’s safe and effective,” says Exxon spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman.

Even if the industry can make its case, it still must deal with the public-relations and political fallout from some of the questionable incidents.

Via: Wall Street Journal

Consumers, Energy, Environment, Natural Gas

Vodafone Qatar and Alcatel-Lucent announced the deployment of the first hybrid powered Base Station in Qatar, using an integration of solar and wind energy. Vodafone and other companies intend to learn from these trial sites and plans to apply these techniques all over the world.

The wind turbine at the Qatar site has been mounted at the top of the existing mast to leverage higher winds. The energy controller brings intelligent control to simultaneously draw power from both the photovoltaic panels and wind turbine, based on solar intensity and wind speed, making the most – at every second – of the two sources’ fluctuating availability. The system also carefully monitors battery charging cycles and diesel generator maintenance runs so as to maximize their lifespan. A full monitoring system enables real-time tracking of all weather and energy parameters; a key component to enabling large scale deployments.

Conservation, Energy, Environment, Green, Infrastructure, Solar alcatel, telecom, vodafone

One way to wean ourselves from oil is to come up with renewable sources of transportation fuel. That means a new generation of biofuels made from nonfood crops.

Researchers are devising ways to turn lumber and crop wastes, garbage and inedible perennials like switchgrass into competitively priced fuels. But the most promising next-generation biofuel comes from algae.

Source: Saferenviroment

Algae grow by taking in CO2, solar energy and other nutrients. They produce an oil that can be extracted and added into existing refining plants to make diesel, gasoline substitutes and other products.

Algae grow fast, consume carbon dioxide and can generate more than 5,000 gallons a year per acre of biofuel, compared with 350 gallons a year for corn-based ethanol. Algae-based fuel can be added directly into existing refining and distribution systems; in theory, the U.S. could produce enough of it to meet all of the nation’s transportation needs.

But it’s early. Dozens of companies have begun pilot projects and small-scale production. But producing algae biofuels in quantity means finding reliable sources of inexpensive nutrients and water, managing pathogens that could reduce yield, and developing and cultivating the most productive algae strains.

Source WSJ

Clean Technology, Energy, Environment, Renewable Energy biofuels

Keeping coal as an abundant source of power means slashing the amount of carbon dioxide it produces. That could mean new, more efficient power plants. But trapping C02 from existing plants—about two billion tons a year—would be the real game-changer.

Source: Vattenfall

Carbon dioxide is removed from smokestack gases and compressed. It’s then pumped deep underground and stored in porous rock formations.

Techniques for modest-scale CO2 capture exist, but applying them to big power plants would reduce the plants’ output by a third and double the cost of producing power. So scientists are looking into experimental technologies that could cut emissions by 90% while limiting cost increases.

Nearly all are in the early stages, and it’s too early to tell which method will win out. One promising technique burns coal and purified oxygen in the form of a metal oxide, rather than air; this produces an easier-to-capture concentrated stream of CO2 with little loss of plant efficiency. The technology has been demonstrated in small-scale pilots, and will be tried in a one-megawatt test plant next year. But it might not be ready for commercial use until 2020.

Via WSJ

Clean Technology, Energy, Environment, Renewable Energy, coal, power

Fool’s gold, also called pyrite or iron sulfide, can be unearthed just about anywhere, from the hills of California to the villages of Yunnan Province in China. But instead of digging pyrite up, researcher Cyrus Wadia is making pure nano particles of the compound from iron and sulfur salts in his lab at the University of California, Berkeley. His ultimate goal is to turn fool’s gold into real treasure: an inexpensive solar cell.

Today, most solar cells are made of silicon, but they are expensive: though silicon is abundant, turning it into photovoltaics requires extensive, energy-intensive processing. Materials such as cadmium telluride and copper indium gallium diselenide are simpler to process, yielding thin-film cells that cost less to produce. But the elements needed to make these compounds, such as tellurium and gallium, are too rare to meet global energy demands.

So Wadia did a study of possible solar-cell materials, examining not only their chemistry and physics but also their availability. One of the standouts was fool’s gold: it is abundant and cheap, and it has optical properties that allow it to efficiently convert sunlight into electricity. “The theoretical efficiency of iron sulfide is 31 percent. That’s as good as silicon,” says Wadia. What’s more, 20 nanometers of pyrite can absorb as much light as 300 micro meters of silicon. Because it absorbs so much more light, it can be made into thinner cells, which require less raw material.

Via Technology Review

Clean Technology, Energy, Environment, Innovation, Solar

Could this new technology lead the way to a new and cleaner coal? Here’s Technology Review’s article about this.

The industrial boomtown of Dongguan in southeast China’s Pearl River Delta could soon host one of the country’s most sophisticated power plants, one that uses an unconventional coal-gasification technology to make the dirtiest coal behave like clean-burning natural gas. Its developers, Atlanta-based utility Southern Company and Houston-based engineering firmKBR, announced the licensing deal with Dongguan Power and Chemical Company this month.

Dongguan Power plans to implement the gasification scheme at an existing 120-megawatt natural-gas-fired power plant, turning it into an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plant that uses cheap, moisture-laden lignite coal. The retrofit should be operating in 2011. That will provide its developers with a demonstration to determine whether technology will work in larger IGCC plants and whether it is a process suitable to integrate carbon capture and storage technology, according to John Thompson, director of the Coal Transition Program for the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit environmental consulting firm based in Boston. “They want to show that this works,” says Thompson.

Southern and KBR’s gasification design can use dirty coal because, compared to other gasification reactors, it uses a relatively slow, low-temperature process. Conventional gasifiers, such as General Electric’s and Shell’s, rely on temperatures around 1,500 ºC to turn finely ground coal into a combustible mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen known as syngas. Unfortunately, such temperatures melt ash and other mineral contaminants in the coal, forming a glassy slag that eventually eats through the ceramic tiles that protect the reactors’ steel walls. Even reactors using high-quality coal have to be taken out of service for installation of new tiles at least every three years. They are thus ill-adapted for lower-quality coals that would produce several times more slag.

Clean Technology, Environment, Infrastructure, Innovation, coal

The September issue of the Harvard Business Review presents a well researched yet simple study on sustainability and green for companies wanting to save money and be green.

Here is an excerpt…

There’s no alternative to sustainable development.Even so, many companies are convinced that the more environment-friendly they become, the more the effort will erode their competitiveness. They believe it will add to costs and will not deliver immediate financial benefits. Talk long enough to CEOs, particularly in the United States or Europe, and their concerns will pour out: Making our operations sustainable and developing “green” products places us at a disadvantage vis-à-vis rivals in developing countries that don’t face the same pressures. Suppliers can’t provide green inputs or transparency; sustainable manufacturing will demand new equipment and processes; and customers will not pay more for eco-friendly products during a recession. That’s why most executives treat the need to become sustainable as a corporate social responsibility, divorced from business objectives…..

Please leave a comment if you want the full report.

Environment, Green, Innovation

The history and politics of oil is often the topic of books and articles. WSJ reviews a recent book Crude World.

Just as there was the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, there is now the Oil Age, and we are living through its last waning decades. Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, a former Venezuelan oil minister who came up with the idea for a cartel in the 1960s, called oil the “devil’s excrement.” Peter Maass, in “Crude World,” a spare, engaging work of reporting and travel writing, calls oil “black oxygen.” It is a neat phrase because, as Mr. Maass demonstrates, oil is almost as essential to our lives as the air we breathe, yet its effect on the countries that produce it, and on the super-alpha males who run the oil industry, is quite sinister. This is a dark book, though not because Mr. Maass is a pessimist—he isn’t. It’s just that his itinerary (Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Russia, and other benighted locales) lends itself to deep foreboding about the human condition.

Oil corrupts, Mr. Maass says, because it is an “extractive” industry. The computer business and other industries actually design and produce something, but oil is simply taken out of the ground. Thus power lies in the hands of the king, dictator or prime minister who controls the real estate and with whom all sorts of unsavory deals can be struck. Extractive industries “do most of their business in compromise-inducing countries,” Mr. Maass explains. “The problem is not that extractive industries have lower principles than other industries. The problem is that they must have better principles”—something that shareholders do not necessarily encourage. Because the number of oil fields on the planet is finite, and the oil in many of them is difficult to extract, the industry is governed by a zero-sum and aggressive realism of the bleakest sort.

Some case studies are included as well.

Then there is Nigeria, which has earned $400 billion from oil profits in recent decades; yet, as Mr. Maass tells us, “nine out of ten citizens live on less than $2 a day, and one out of five children dies before his fifth birthday.” Senegal, which exports fish and nuts, beats Nigeria in per capita income. According to the World Bank, 1% of the Nigerian population—presidents, generals, executives, middlemen and so on—have grabbed 80% of the country’s oil wealth. This is how an extractive industry operates in a politically fractured land of weak and nonexistent institutions.

Whether Mr. Maass is in the primeval, environmentally ruined Niger Delta region of southern Nigeria, or in a Venezuelan slum where “even the jobless are mugged,” or in a menacing and soulless Moscow high-rise, or among wayward, spoiled-brat Saudi youth, he shows how the trail of oil leads a traveler to either grim poverty or repulsive wealth. Oil, he seems to say, exaggerates the worst human tendencies.

Iraq is also part of the author’s itinerary. Mr. Maass acknowledges that the idea of the Iraq war being waged for oil is largely a conspiracy theory. But he suggests that behind the established motives of the Bush administration—finding weapons of mass destruction, instilling democracy, ridding the world of one of its worst dictators—the war in Iraq, on a deeper geopolitical and historical level, was indeed about oil. And I agree with him; for without oil, the importance of Iraq greatly diminishes. Without oil, there could not have been a WMD program, real or imagined, in the first place. It was oil wealth that gave Saddam Hussein such sway over the Arab masses. It was oil that held out the promise of a prosperous and democratic Iraq in the minds of those who favored regime change.

Environment, Investment, Oil, Policy curde world, politics

It seems strange but in developed countries, there is resistance to solar and wind projects. Why? Because of the way these infrastructure impact the current lifestyle – noise, views etc. WSJ ran this story recently.

Technology changes, but human nature doesn’t. Environmentally friendly energy projects are running into the same cries of “not in my backyard” that stymied a previous generation of alternative-power efforts.

Even as Americans tell pollsters they are eager for alternatives to fossil fuel, some are fighting proposals for solar and wind projects and for the thousands of miles of transmission lines that would be needed to carry the cleaner energy to market. The protests echo grass-roots opposition that has blocked nuclear plants and energy-producing trash incinerators for decades.

The new backlash is fueled by worries that renewable-energy projects would occupy vast amounts of land to produce significant amounts of power. Either renewable projects would have to be centralized and sprawling, covering many square miles apiece, or they would need to be distributed in pieces across millions of rooftops and lawns.

Renewable-energy projects would reduce pollution and combat climate change. The trade-off is that many more people would have to see wind turbines, solar panels and other energy infrastructure near their homes in order to diminish the need for coal mines and other fossil-fuel facilities.

In California, which is considering a goal of producing a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, some residents are fighting proposals to build vast solar-energy plants in the Mojave Desert, one of the most remote and reliably sunny spots in the U.S. Up and down the East Coast, meanwhile, residents are opposing plans for wind farms, fearing they will mar views and lower property values.

Clean Technology, Consumers, Environment, Solar, Wind

Came across a paper from McKinsey which talks about how IT can cut its carbon footrpint.

The rapidly growing carbon footprint associated with information and communications technologies, including laptops and PCs, data centers and computing networks, mobile phones, and telecommunications networks, could make them among the biggest greenhouse gas emitters by 2020. However, our research also suggests that there are opportunities to use these technologies to make the world economy more energy and carbon efficient. An analysis of five groups of abatement opportunities finds that such technologies could help to eliminate 7.8 metric gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions annually by 2020 equivalent to 15 percent of global emissions today and five times more than our estimate of the emissions from these technologies in 2020.

About the role of ICT in cutting emissions:

Information and communications technologies can help abate far more emissions in the general economy their own production and use generates. We estimated this abatement potential by studying all known opportunities to optimize energy productivity in four sectors—buildings, power, transport, and manufacturing. Then we calculated the specific energy savings and the associated abatement potential for one significant group of opportunities in each of the sectors. We also looked at a set of opportunities that cut across sectors:

telecommuting and other technological substitutions for emission-producing activities. In just these five areas, we identified annual reductions of 7.8 metric gigatons of carbon emissions by 2020. Because we did not review all prominent opportunities to reduce them—for example, we excluded satellite surveillance to monitor deforestation and herding, two of the largest contributors to climate change—the full impact of information and communications technologies could be much greater.

The full paper is available at McKinsey site or leave a comment.

Environment, Green, IT