Trouble brewing for carbon capture?

In all of the myriad discussions about what to do about climate change, the issue of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies has largely dominated the debate about what to do with existing sources of pollution. The fact is, we've unleashed so much CO2e into the atmosphere - and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future - that we've got to figure out ways to filter CO2 pollution from coal-fired power plants and the like and stave off the most dangerous consequences of unmitigated climate pollution.

There are a lot of ways to capture and sequester carbon dioxide, many of them familiar: for example, trees - when viewed through the climate lens - are small, distributed carbon sequestration vehicles that soak up CO2 and store it as wood. Other approaches include sprinkling iron in the ocean to cause algae blooms, turning agricultural and forestry wastes into biochar, or growing carbon-neutral biofuel crops (assuming there is such a thing).

But the biggest potential bang - and the biggest focus - has been on pumping CO2 directly underground from coal-fired power plants and similar industrial facilities. Sounded like a great idea, until today:

A stadium-size sinkhole that formed in south Texas's oil country this month is renewing questions about the effects of billions of barrels of saltwater injected into the ground each year as a byproduct of oil and gas drilling. ...

State regulators haven't yet decided what caused the sinkhole. But Donald Van Nieuwenhuise, director of the petroleum geosciences program at the University of Houston, believes the most likely cause is that waste water eroded an underground structure called a salt dome, a deposit of compressed salt, and caused the collapse.

As fate would have it, salt domes are the underground structures believed to be best-suited for carbon sequestration - they are (or were) believed to be impermeable, so pumping a lot of CO2 into them seemed like a safe bet. They also happen to be the home of a lot of the world's remaining oil, so the idea was by pumping CO2 into salt domes, you could max out your oil recovery while sequestering carbon.

I hope the geologists get a good look at this sinkhole. If salt domes can't be relied upon for CO2 storage, our problems just got a whole lot worse.

Peel & stick solar fulfills the need ... for speed!

(originally posted at Triple Pundit)

One of the major challenges facing the global energy sector is the amount of time it takes to develop new energy resources. Even if you didn't care about the negative externalities, environmental impacts or climate change contributions of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, it takes a long time (and billions of dollars) to drill deep holes, excavate or detonate massive mines, build pipelines and railways, construct power plants and high-voltage power lines ... as a famous recent American President and avowed fossil fuel aficionado likes to say, "It's hard work."

Which brings us to a major and under-appreciated advantage that most clean energy technologies have over traditional, "let's burn more rocks" resources like coal and oil: speed to market. Because there are no pollution concerns and related air quality permitting requirements, renewable energy projects can be developed with lightning speed - especially medium-sized commercial projects where the power will be used on-site.

Just how fast? Real fast. As in very, very fast. OK, maybe that's not clear enough for you - I'll admit, it's hard to describe exceptionally velocitous rapidity with mere adjectives. For a sample of speed, watch as two solar roofing engineers with California-based roofing contractor DRI Energy install 2.25 kilowatts' worth of their proprietary Lumeta PowerPly modules on a roof in San Leandro in just under 35 minutes:



The key innovation in the Lumeta PowerPly is the use of standard roofing adhesives to affix the modules to the roof, rather than traditional racking systems. There are two advantages here - one, roofers everywhere work with these adhesives, and so are familiar with their performance and how to use and install them; and two, by eliminating the drilling and bolts associated with a racking system, the contractor not only saves a ton of time (did I mention this installation went up fast?), but also saves the integrity of the roof system: the last thing you should want to pay for is to have someone go up on your roof and put a bunch of holes in it.

And this is just the beginning. The emergence of time-saving innovations in the clean energy industry is likely to step up in the coming years as demand for the services escalates along with concerns about global warming and energy costs. And the fossil industry moves about as fast as ... well, about as fast as a fossil. If the Lumeta PowerPly is any indication of what's to come, I'll bet that over the next few years, the clean energy sector will reach scale and start operating with a full head of steam. The fossil fuels fossils won't know what hit 'em.

A mighty big wind ... turbine

Carpenteria, California-based Clipper Windpower might not be a household name, but their depth in the wind industry is unrivaled. Back in the 1980's, a lot of the folks at Clipper were building a little powerhouse wind company called Zond Corporation - which should get the credit for not only inventing the U.S. wind power industry from whole cloth, but planting the seeds for its growth globally, as well.

As wind power has enjoyed record growth for the past decade, a lot of the attention has been focused on European wind companies like Vestas and Gamesa, and big, vertically-integrated companies like GE. But Clipper may be poised to jump back in the ring, big time.

Clipper already made waves a couple years ago when it launched production of its 2.5MW Liberty turbine - at the time, the largest turbine manufactured in the United States, and the only turbine made by an American, pure-play wind power company.

This week, the company announced that it had sold the world's largest wind turbine to the Crown Estate, one of England's largest landholders that also happens to control most of the country's offshore resources. The 7.5 megawatt (MW) Clipper Britannia Project will be built and tested at the New and Renewable Energy Center, a UK-government sponsored development agency, and deployed off the northeast coast of the United Kingdom, near Blyth.




To give a sense of just how big a 7.5 MW wind turbine is, Clipper figured out that its annual energy generation would be equivalent to a million barrels of oil - and the marketing folks came up with a catchy nickname, the "Britannia 7.5 MBE," for "million barrel equivalent."

Not to mention its 100-meter hub height and 150-meter bladespan. The thing is so big, you can't actually ship any of the large parts over land - it can only be deployed offshore. But that's the idea.

Offshore wind development is likely to be the next big frontier for windpower, as you can build the wind parks near major load centers; most humans live near coastlines. But the constraints have been both economic and environmental: it's expensive to build a lot of platforms and power lines out at sea to support wind turbine development, and when you build a lot of platforms out at sea, you invariably disturb some of the critters and creatures that got there first.

At 7.5 MW - twice as big as the competition, which clocks in at an average of around 3.5 MW - the Britannia achieves the economy of scale that offsets the extra cost of offshore development, while simultaneously reducing the number of platforms you need. Which means, paradoxically, that with a larger wind turbine, you leave a smaller environmental footprint (hey Bobby Kennedy Jr., are you listening?) In fact, Clipper calculated that Britannia 7.5 MBE is the precise size needed to achieve both of these objectives.

The UK, for its part, is looking to offshore wind resources to help meet its ambitious national goal of 20 percent renewable energy by 2020. The country's economic development authorities kicked in a sizable portion of the initial investment for the Britannia, which also got a lot of support from the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Lab.

Now let's hope that Mr. Kennedy gets the message.

(originally posted at Triple Pundit)

OPEC: "Half the world's financial assets"

This is pretty stunning.

We're all familiar with the toll high oil prices has taken on our economy, particularly among those with the least disposable income (disclosure: I don't own a car, so I don't have first-hand experience, but most of my friends drive).

But how much of a toll has $100 oil really taken? The Institute for the Analysis of Global Security took a good, hard look at the numbers, and recently published a report (warning: PDF) with its findings. The question is ... Do we really want to know the answer?

At $100 a barrel OPEC's market capitalization stands on roughly $92 trillion, almost half of the world's total financial assets and nearly twice the market capitalization of all the companies traded in the world's 27 top stock markets.

So ... what does that mean in terms of OPEC's market power? The numbers are truly horrifying:

As an illustration, at current oil prices it would take OPEC three years to buy 20 percent voting block in every S&P 500 company. Luft claims that it would be hard to see how such buying power would not upset the West's economic and political sovereignty.

(emphasis added)

You'd think this type of information would be enough to sway Congress to support better fuel economy standards for American-made cars, but then, within a few years, America's car companies could be owned by Venezuela and Nigeria, so perhaps it's academic.

Found on the internets

A lot happening in the past week - too much to write about all of it with any kind of substance. But here's a quick take on cleantech, energy policy and some unrelated developments in the media landscape worth tracking:

• The earth shook last week. This is where transportation technology is headed ... watch this space.
  
• Arno Harris and I apparently agree on the notion that the Big Solar deal announced last week by SoCalEd is a mixed bag. The key hurdle: they've got to raise rates to pay the capital cost of the solar projects, and the "hosts" get none of the benefits - just higher electricity rates. Good for RPS compliance; bad for consumers.
  
• The New Yorker has an excellent piece on the state of the news biz. The nut graph:

  Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago.

• Tam Hunt in Santa Barbara wrote a great summary of the solar boom in California - and makes a key observation about how unlikely it is that most of the "projects" will be built:

  However, there are literally 50,000 MW of large-scale solar projects proposed in Southern California, consisting of trough, dish and power tower concentrating solar power projects as well as some truly massive PV projects. The entire installed capacity for all of California is less than 70,000 MW, so the magnitude of new solar projects proposed is incredible. Many of these projects may, however, turn out to be “vaporware” – more aspiration than reality.

• The WSJ's Enviro Blog continues its awesome roundup with news on EU carbon fumbling, technical challenges facing the wind industry and a recent IMF study of the cost of greenhouse gas abatement. Oh yeah, and their editorial page is still written by aliens on a remote Mars outpost.
• The renewables tax credit two-step dance craze continues apace.
• Minnesota schools are getting ready to boost their bottom lines by getting into the energy business and selling wind power. Huh. Maybe cities ought to be considering the same thing?
  

A guide to Green Buildings in SF

I stumbled upon this great map of the "green" and LEED Certified buildings in the city of San Francisco today - looks like the map's creator, Miriam Landman, did her homework. Kudos to you, Miriam.


View Larger Map

I'll have to put a visit to a few of these on the calendar. A fun project for a rainy day.

The whole kit & kaboodle

Surfed through the New York Times' letters page today, and stumbled upon what might be the smartest and most accurate explanation I've yet seen of the major remaining impediment to deploying clean energy, scaling up investments in energy efficiency and slaying the carbon dragon:

To the Editor:

Proponents of coal-fired power argue falsely that coal is cheap. Coal is a cheap fuel. But who cares? Coal can’t run an iPod. And electricity from coal — which also includes fuel, maintenance and capital recovery costs — is expensive.

Indeed, no one is building coal plants without first securing regulatory guarantees of equity recovery. But when we guarantee that equity, we commit to significant electric rate increases — in the name of cheap coal.

We have cheaper and cleaner options: Co-generation and energy recycling have the potential to generate 40 percent of our nation’s electricity, slashing power costs and greenhouse gas emissions.

But our regulations, which reward monopoly utilities for investing capital, but provide no reward should they find ways to generate cheaper power, are blind to these opportunities.

Worse, they impose barriers to entrepreneurs who would otherwise build these projects with private capital. We can do better. And we don’t need dirty, expensive power.

We need to confront the elephant in the room: a regulatory model that is hostile to efficient power generation.

Sean Casten
President, Recycled Energy Development

Bingo. This is a message that should be repeated across the intertubes, and should be the rallying cry for the entire cleantech and clean energy industry to wake up and smell their local Public Utilities Commission. Without access to markets, cleantech is a hobby. The next step on the evolution of cleantech is scale, and this letter writer nails the key hurdle. Pass it on.