Archive for July, 2009

As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

In recent years, there’s been a major push for renewable fuels to reduce our need for petroleum as well as the carbon footprint associated with burning petroleum-based fuels.

The common thread of all of these renewable fuels has been the use of some sort of carbonaceous feedstock – typically biological organisms, until now agricultural crops like corn and soybean, and moving toward cellulosic wastes and algae – from which to produce a liquid fuel for vehicles. In other words, sunlight begets botanical growth begets fuel.

Now comes word of a company emerging from stealth mode called Joule Biotechnologies, based in Cambridge, Mass., and funded by Flagship Ventures, which has developed what the company is calling the “Helioculture” process for making fuels directly from the photosynthetic conversion of sunlight and CO2 – without requiring any biomass (nor any water, for that matter).

According to its press release, the company’s “SolarFuel” will satisfy current vehicle specifications. Although still a few years away from commercial production, Joule is projecting yields of more than 20,000 gallons per acre per year at long-run economics competitive with oil at $50/barrel.

Of course, entrepreneurs and inventors love to tout new ideas with great potential - potential that is often never achieved. But this idea at least has considerable intuitive appeal and is very out-of-the-box relative to much of the innovation being pursued in the transportation fuels arena, which makes Joule definitely worth watching in the coming years.

as posted to CleanTechBlog.com

As Secretary of the Department of Energy, Steven Chu is a breath of fresh air. As a recent profile in The Economist noted, “Wags used to say that the one essential qualification for being energy secretary was not to know anything about energy.” Well, that definitely doesn’t apply to Dr. Chu.

A winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for physics, and former Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Steven Chu is by far the most expert energy secretary the U.S. has had since the founding of the Department of Energy in 1977. (See the list of other predecessors.) 

Of course, in Washington, it’s not always the case that knowledge and experience begets success. But any failures that Chu might experience can’t be attributed to lack of resources.

Clearly, Secretary Chu has a lot of money to play with these days: in addition to annual budget of $26 billion (which is certain to increase substantially in coming years), over $38 billion was authorized to DOE as a result of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. So far, only about $7 billion of the ARRA monies has been awarded, and a measly $243 million has been actually spent, so Chu has a lot of “dry powder” left.

Let’s hope he puts it to good use, because the public sector is a notoriously poor selector of winners and losers — among technologies and among businesses. Chu is obviously a bright guy; let’s hope he’s smart enough to know what he doesn’t know.   (Of course, the last guy to notably discuss the concept of “unknown unknowns” — former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — was no dummy, and we all know how well his efforts panned out.)

As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

Although I pride myself a little bit on some of the titles for my posts (I was a headline writer for my high school newspaper), even I couldn’t make this one up.

Credit must be given where credit is due: Earlier this month, Fast Company hosted a research note by Ariel Schwartz about the development of an approach to produce hydrogen from urine that requires much less voltage than is necessary to electrolyze pure water.

Yes, that’s right: hydrogen produced cheaply from urine, one of the most renewable of all resources.

I’ve written previously about piss-poor cars, but someday in the future, we may be talking about piss-powered cars.

Thanks to Kristi Spears Tanner of the Ohio Business Development Coalition for making me aware of this development, via a link on her Facebook page. Always looking for good things to promote from Ohio, Kristi noted that it should be no surprise that this whizzy technical innovation was made by researcher Geraldine Botte at Ohio University.

So, to do your part to move us towards the hydrogen economy, all you may have to do is go down to your local pub and have a few. After all, you don’t ever actually buy beer, you just rent it.

As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

As virtually every reader of this blog probably knows, Congress has recently made more progress on climate change legislation than it has ever before achieved. The House has passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454), more commonly known as the Waxman-Markey bill.

The path forward for this bill is likely to be torturous. In the Senate, conventional wisdom is that passage is within reach if all Democratic senators vote for a bill (augmented perhaps by a few Republican votes). But there’s a significant swath of Democratic senators who are, at best, “on the fence” about supporting climate legislation.

Many of these swing votes reside in the Midwest, where a group of senators loosely called the “Gang of 16” has publicly raised concerns about the prospect of climate legislation.  As you might expect, their concerns largely stem from the potential economic harm that might be borne by Midwestern interests – through higher electricity prices and reduced global competitiveness in industrial markets – as a result of policies adopted by the U.S. to reduce carbon emissions.

Against this backdrop, over the past year, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs convened a task force comprised of regional thought leaders in the private, academic and nonprofit sectors, to consider the challenges facing the Midwest in moving to a carbon-constrained world. The goal: to make a public statement to elected officials from the Midwest on appropriate directions for climate policy.

In June, the task force released its report titled “Embracing the Future: The Midwest and a New National Energy Policy,” which represented a synthesis of the perspectives of the task force members (of which I was privileged to be one). 

The report is based on the presumption that human-induced climate change is occurring, and a national policy to mitigate emissions contributing to climate change is appropriate to put in place. The report offers no safe haven to those who believe climate change is bunk - or even if real, is not worth doing anything about. Rather, the question the report wrestles with is what kind of climate policy should be put in place that will maximize opportunities for Midwestern economic revitalization while minimizing the downsides to the Midwest, given the region’s inherited assets and liabilities.

The summary findings of the report contain little that is groundbreaking:

1. “The Midwest can and must turn the challenge of changing energy and climate policy to its economic advantage.”
2. “Prompt enactment of national climate change legislation is essential to the Midwest’s future prosperity and competitiveness.”
3. “Regional and local action [in the Midwest] is likewise essential.”
4. “Addressing carbon emissions will not be cheap.”

To the last point, the report emphasizes the urgency of capturing the full range of economically attractive energy efficiency opportunities – many of which are available at negative cost to society – or else the costs of climate policy are likely to be much higher. Ditto, the report advocates that emissions offsets be allowed in climate policy so as to enable economic sectors (e.g., agriculture) offering low-cost emission reduction possibilities to contribute to the overall solution at reduced societal cost.

Arguably, more important than what the report says is who the task force represents. The task force was co-chaired by John Rowe, chairman and CEO of Exelon, and included active participation by senior executives from such industrial stalwarts as Arcelor Mittal, Caterpillar, Duke Energy, Ford, and Johnson Controls.

Opponents of Waxman-Markey, or of any climate change legislation, will have difficulty claiming that these Midwestern industrial employers don’t accurately reflect the interests of old-line manufacturing concerns. If these companies are saying we can cost-effectively – and therefore should – do something to address climate change, it adds a lot of credibility to the position of taking definitive action.

Were it that more Midwestern companies had the type of visible and proactive leadership exhibited by Mr. Rowe. At an event publicizing the release of the report on June 8 in Chicago, he stated his strong support of Waxman-Markey (notwithstanding its imperfections), and urged those with close friends in D.C. to enlist more support. In the Senate, this means solidifying the positions of the Midwestern Gang of 16.

It will be an interesting summer here in the Midwest, the key battleground for the fate of climate change legislation.