Earth and Industry » Innovation

Can Solar Energy Lower the Cost of Carbon Capture?

Timothy Hurst — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:20:51 +0000

Researchers at the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi chart a promising course toward cheaper carbon capture

Looming above a test plot full of mirrors like some kind of Transformer-inspired arachnid, the tower at the center of Masdar City's concentrating solar power plant is almost menacing at first glimpse.

Although still only one year into the R&D phase, the 100 kW Beam-Down Solar Thermal Concentrator at Masdar City, the emerging renewable energy research hub located 15 miles from downtown Abu Dhabi, has the potential to generate 75-85 megawatt-hours of renewable energy annually.

But as Masdar City Director Alan Frost tells a small group of journalists as we approach the plant on a recent January afternoon, "the Beam Down project is a different kind of concentrating solar plant."

Whereas most concentrating solar power (CSP) plants employing tower technology gather sunlight aimed at them from the mirror arrays below, the CSP tower at Masdar City goes one step further and directs the solar rays back downward and onto a receiver at the base of the tower, thereby eliminating the need for energy to pump the fluid up the tower.

Masdar City's Frost says the pilot project is "quite experimental," but he is also quick to point out that it is "the kind of thing we should certainly do."

The Beam Down at Masdar City is only a pilot project, but Dr. Matteo Chiesa, the head of the Laboratory of Energy and Nano Sciences (LENS) at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, says that substantially greater efficiencies could be found if the project was scaled up.

"The possibility of employing a multi-towers concept we have proposed (due to the fact of a simpler tower structure) can provide a way to optimize the overall energy outcome of the solar field," Chiesa said in an email.

By directing certain heliostats to different towers during the day, says Chiesa, "We have shown that one can reduce the energy losses due to cosine effect."

Solar-assisted carbon capture

But an even more important discovery made by Dr. Chiesa and his team of graduate students, though "not directly and exclusively related to the beam down," is the viability of a hybrid carbon capture process that uses solar thermal energy to assist the capture of carbon dioxide from power plant flue gases.

"Solvent-based Post-combustion Carbon Capture (PCC) is one of the promising technologies for reducing CO2 emissions from existing fossil-fuel power plants due to ease of retrofitting," writes one of Dr. Chiesa's students, Masdar Institute's Marwan Mokhtar, the lead author in a forthcoming paper published in the journal Applied Energy (available online Sept., 2011).

While experts agree that the most promising PCC processes in development around the world use absorption (pdf), these technologies are still incredibly expensive because of the energy intensive CO2 separation process.

According to the research team at Masdar, however, solvent regeneration requires thermal energy of lower quality, which can be provided cost-effectively by a solar thermal plant, leaving the higher quality for use in electricity generation at the plant.
To test their hypothesis, Mokhtar, et al modeled the performance of the process on a 300MWe pulverized coal power plant in New South Wales, Australia, using actual weather and wholesale electricity price data from the area. The New South Wales location was chosen because sunny regions with long summers, substantial air-conditioning demand and a reliance on coal-fired power plants would be the most promising candidates for the implementation of this solar-assisted carbon capture technology. Given those conditions, the results of the test were favorable.

"It is shown that the proposed technology can be economically viable for solar collector costs of US$100/m2 at current retail electricity prices and optimal Solar load-Fraction of 22%," the authors write (Solar load-Fraction is the portion of solvent regeneration energy provided by solar energy).

Furthermore, the authors write, reducing the need for heat energy during the daytime coincides with peaks in wholesale electricity prices "thus increasing the revenue stream for a solar-assisted PCC plant."

And though a solar-assisted PCC plant has yet to be built, the economics are likely to become even more favorable as electricity prices continue to climb and solar collector prices decrease.

(Check out this short video of how the Beam Down's heliostats can move to track the movements of the sun and optimize efficiency.)

Disclosure: Tim Hurst's travel to Abu Dhabi was covered by Masdar.
All photos: CC licensed by Tim Hurst

US Physicist Snags Zayed Future Energy Prize

Timothy Hurst — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:32:47 +0000

Winnings to address 'biggest mass poisoning in history of mankind'

US physicist Dr. Ashok Gadgil was recognized with the Lifetime Achievement award last night at the Zayed Future Energy Prize in Abu Dhabi for his humanitarian work in Darfur and pioneering efforts to develop a safer and more efficient cooking stove. Gadgil has also made strides in developing a technology to inexpensively disinfect drinking water in developing countries.

Dr. Gadgil, who received $500,000 for the prize heads up the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

"We have never been in this place before," Dr. Gadgil said in a post-awards interview with Earth & Industry, referring to the climbing global population of over 5 billion people and its associated energy demand,

"We are on a collision course and we cannot continue in the old way otherwise we are toast," Gadgil said.

Gadgil's comment during the ceremony that "We are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment," was particularly striking considering the broader business context of the World Future Energy Summit going on this week in Abu Dhabi, an event also sponsored by the Abu Dhabi government, the backers of the Zayed Future Energy Prize.

Gadgil, who didn't even know he had been nominated for the prize until he was contacted by the selection committee in 2011.

"Just to be part of the finalists group is such a distinction," Dr. Gadgil said, "but I am overwhelmed to be selected as the winner."

When asked if he had any plans for the prize money, Gadgil did not even pause to blink, saying that the money would go directly to two projects.

Citing the one million annual deaths attributed to unsafe indoor cookstoves, Gadgil said the money would be invested back into the clean cookstoves project. Traditional cookstoves, he explained, which burn biomass and animal dung not only pose a major health threat, particularly to the women and children closest to the stoves as they burn indoors, in the case of wood, they also pose a major threat to the health of global forests. In Ethiopia, for example, forest cover has gone from 50 percent to 5 percent in the last half century and 80 percent of the population is still burning wood for cooking heat.

The second project Gadgil will use the prize money for addresses the problem of arsenic in drinking water. In what the physicist called "the largest mass poisoning in the history of mankind," huge numbers of people in Bangladesh are drinking arsenic-laced water "because they have no other choice."

Gadgil's lab has developed a process which removes arsenic from drinking water at a cost of roughly 4 cents per liter.

Other winners on Tuesday included the French energy management technology firm, Schneider Electric, in the corporate category. The UK-based Carbon Disclosure Project, which works with business and communities to reduce water and energy use, won in the NGO category.

“These are people that had the foresight to recognize that investing in the future is based on long term vision and the ability to innovate the technologies that the world so urgently needs,” added Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, Director General of the Zayed Future Energy Prize.

The $3.5 million Zayed Future Energy Prize recognizes and rewards innovation, leadership and longterm vision in renewable energy and sustainability.

You can learn more about Dr. Gadgil's projects at www.darfurstoves.org and www.arsenic.lbl.gov
Disclosure: Tim Hurst's travel expenses to Abu Dhabi were covered by summit host, Masdar.

2012 Detroit Auto Show: Green Car Trends

Timothy Hurst — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 08:50:39 +0000

From the show-stealing 2013 Ford Fusion (pictured above) to the all-new Toyota Prius c, several cars were revealed at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this week that will give consumers looking for fuel efficient vehicles some very exciting new options. On press day I had a chance to catch up with Nick Chambers, the resident green car expert at AutoTrader.com, and get his take on the latest trends, developments, surprises and letdowns in the world of green cars. Simply put, there are few people covering developments in sustainable mobility as knowledgeable and passionate about their subject matter than Nick.

Follow Nick Chambers on Twitter at @ecochambers.

Disclaimer: My travel to the 2012 NAIAS was provided by Ford Motor Co. but all opinions expressed here are my own. Nick Chambers' travel was not provided by Ford.

Wind Energy Returns to Its Watery Roots

Timothy Hurst — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 12:29:37 +0000

For nearly as long as people have harnessed wind to perform work, it has been used to move water from one place to another. Whether used for agricultural irrigation, wetlands drainage or pumping water from wells, wind machines have long been a relatively cheap and easy way to pump water, particularly in off-grid applications where electric alternatives are impractical or impossible. And while a handful of companies still make windpumps, little has changed in the underlying technology for nearly a century — until now. A Massachusetts company announced last week it had sold its first wind-powered water pump system in Colorado.

Worcester, Massachusetts-based Mass Megawatts has developed a wind-powered water pumping unit that it says provides a lower-cost solution when compared to traditional water pumping systems, including those powered by diesel generators.

Mass Megawatts' wind-powered water pump uses the company's patented MMW wind augmenter technology to increase the wind velocity directed at the wind turbine. By funneling the wind into narrow channels where it speeds up, the augmenter is responsible for increasing power to its turbines by an average of 70 percent.

According to the company, over three times as much power is generated by its augmenter technology compared to the production wind turbines of an equal power rating in an "un-augmented" air stream. And the technology, according to company documents, does not require the same high-demand components used in other wind turbine technologies, thereby keeping costs down.

The technology is also not limited to use as a windpump. The company is developing wind machines that generate electricity which can be stored in on-site battery banks.

The company says its technology is scalable from smaller 10 kW 'home and farm' systems to multi-megawatt utility installations and provides solutions to the two major wind project stumbling blocks: tower height and lower wind resource. But while the system may have a lower profile than many turbine technologies, the bulky framework required by the wind augmenter may still make it unpopular with some.

Mass Megawatts (OTCBB: MMMW), which began building its turbine arrays and MMW wind augmenters at a Colorado plant in late 2011, is a publicly-traded company with less than twelve million shares issued and outstanding.

Company First to Make Nylon Precursor Without Petrochemicals

Timothy Hurst — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:20:40 +0000

Every year, about 2.5 billion kilograms of a little known white chrystalline powder known as adipic acid are produced worldwide, most of which is used to make nylon 6-6, a precursor to the ubiquitous modern textile, nylon. But currently, the vast majority of that adipic acid is produced using petrochemicals which produce fairly significant amounts of greenhouse gases, a substantial portion of which in the form of are nitrous oxides.

But a company called Verdezyne, which just opened a pilot plant in Carlsbad, California, has developed a fermentation process to make adipic acid from renewable sources like non-food based vegetable oils. The plant is the first-ever to produce bio-based adipic acid at scale from a non-petroleum source. And according to the company CEO, they can do so cheaper and with fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional methods of production.

"When we look at a lifecycle analysis," Verdezyne president and CEO Dr. E. William Radany said in a recent phone call, "we will save approximately 2 tons of carbon dioxide per ton of adipic acid over incumbent process."

Current petrochemical processes for the production of adipic acid generate as much as 4 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions per ton of adipic acid produced.

But Verdezyne's platform allows the microorganism to utilize sugar, plant-based oils or alkanes from a variety of feedstocks, free from shocks to production costs from future energy volatility.

"Customers want a nylon that is not petroleum-based," Radany said.

Verdezyne hopes to meet demand in smaller market sectors and capture opportunities with carpet, apparel and engineered plastics.

With financial backing provided by venture partners including BP Alternative Energy, the company continues to work on developing strategic partnerships for its bio-based adipic acid

For now, Verdezyne expects to produce about 5 to 15 kilograms of the bio-adipic acid per week, just a tiny sliver of the nearly 5 million gallons of adipic acid produced every week using petrochemicals.

"Our scale up is working as planned and we are in discussions with a number of companies to form partnerships for commercialization," Radany says, underscoring that technical challenges are first and foremost.

"The main challenge is getting the organism to do something it has never done before and conceptualize a metabolic pathway to do something valuable."

The company hopes to move into commercial production of its bio-based adipic acid in 18 months.

Photo credit: Superplus at de.wikipedia

Why the Wind Industry Needs More Electric Cars

Timothy Hurst — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 04:01:21 +0000

It is no secret that wind energy is inherently intermittent. And when the wind is blowing the hardest — often at night when demand is at its lowest — there is no guarantee there will be demand for the electricity, or a place to store it when there is.

In fact, the two biggest technological hurdles to making windpower a reliable contributor to the electric grid are intermittency and storage. And although various storage systems have been proposed, tested or developed — ranging from giant batteries made of molten salt to the practice of pressurizing underground wells with compressed air or pumping water above hydropower stations where it can be released from reservoirs during peak demand — they all have enormous price tags and painfully long construction timelines.

If only there was a way the cost and development timelines for renewables storage could be shrunken. Or that the "storage paradigm" could make some room for the "smart paradigm."

Enter electric vehicles.

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a system that tells an electric vehicle's battery when to start and stop re-charging based upon existing stress in the grid. The scientists detail the system and its implications for wind energy in the Northwest in a new study (pdf).

Unlike the systems being developed by companies including Mitsubishi, Nissan and Toyota which enable electric cars to put juice back on the grid or provide backup home power, so-called "Grid Friendly" technologies recognize grid conditions and constantly vary the rate at which the battery is charged instead.

"We don't need to wait for vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, services, which would require that the electricity would be released back into the grid," said Michael Kintner-Meyer, PNNL staff scientist and study co-author.

"We could perform grid-friendly charging now that would provide valuable services to the grid for integrating wind energy," Kintner-Meyer said.

How does the symbiotic link between more wind energy and more electric vehicles work out? According to the PNNL study, in the Pacific Northwest, the relationship is thus:

"2.1 million light-duty electric vehicles with a 33-mile electric range would be needed in the Northwest to provide the on-again, off-again balancing requirements for integrating 10 Gigawatts of additional wind technology in the region. That means about 13 percent of the existing light-duty vehicle stock in the Northwest would need to go electric."

So, two million electric cars could stabilize the grid for the introduction of 10 Gigawatts of new wind energy capacity? Not only does that seem doable, the fact that the cost would be borne by two million happy owners of shiny new electric cars makes the system even more attractive.

Now if only manufacturers could step up the production of electric vehicles... and that people could afford to buy them.

Photos credits: Some rights reserved by PNNL at flickr and rasmithuk at flickr

Spotted: Recyclable Plastic Six-Pack Holder

Timothy Hurst — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 15:02:51 +0000

In the 1980s, at the apex of the 'Save the Whales' movement, the ubiquitous plastic six-pack holders were fast becoming symbols of a new type of environmentalism — consumer environmentalism. New attention was being given to waste, recycling and the lifecycle of the many consumer products and product packages entering the market and/or waste stream. I'm not even where I first heard it, but all of a sudden those flimsy white-gray plastic six-pack holders were getting a bad rap because birds were reportedly getting caught in them or snagged by them. I'm not even sure I remember the story, but it emerged as such a widely held belief that it soon became fairly common to see someone pull apart those plastic rings before throwing plastic bird-tangler-killers away. You might still do it. But the other day I came across an even better option.

Yes, the six-pack holders pictured above from Avery Brewing in Colorado have even more plastic than their flimsy predecessors but they are also 100% recyclable. And since they are HDPE #2 plastic, they can be recycled most anywhere, along with the cans they carry, obviously. Making more things out of plastic isn't on its face a good thing. But if these catch on, and recycling rates remain nearly as high for the plastic as they are for the cans, less paper and cardboard will be needed in packaging and less plastic six-pack holders (broken down and not) will end up in landfills.

The word on the street is that other small breweries are also using the new beefier recyclable six-pack holders but this is the first and only beer I've seen using the new system.

What do you think about the new packaging? Have you seen any of your favorite local brews using them? If so, please tell us about it in the comments.