EcoRadio

Category: Energy Matters

  • Shell must face Friends of the earth Nigeria claim in Netherlads

    Geert Ritsema, a spokesman for the Dutch environmentalist group, said: “For years, these people have been trying to get Shell to clean up its mess and stop polluting their habitat. However, again and again they have come away empty-handed.

    “That is why they are now trying to get justice in the Netherlands. The court decision is an initial victory for all Nigerians that have been fighting for years for a cleaner habitat and justice,” he added.

    Friends of the Earth claims the oil spills are not accidents but represent a pattern of systematic pollution and contempt for the rights of the local population that had been going on for decades, something denied by the oil group.

    Up until now compensation claims have been brought in Nigeria, but many have become bogged down in a congested court system.

    Alai Efanga, one of the plaintiffs in the Oruma case, said: “Our village was pleased with the [initial] decision of the Dutch court. We hope that Shell will now quickly clean up the oil pollution so that we can resume growing food and fishing.”

    The three other plaintiffs are all farmers and fishermen from the villages of Oruma, Goi and Ikot Ada Udo, all located in the oil-rich Niger Delta, which is one of Shell’s most important oil-producing areas. The substantive hearing of the first lawsuit is expected to be held in the spring of 2010 but Shell said it continued to believe that the case should not be heard in the Netherlands.

    A Shell spokesman said: “It is with disappointment that we learned of the district court ruling. We believe there are good arguments on the basis of which the district court could have concluded that it lacks jurisdiction in respect of SPDC [Shell Petroleum Development Corporation] in these purely Nigerian matters.”

    Friends of the Earth Netherlands said an important hurdle had been overcome paving the way for an appropriate court hearing. But oil industry sources said that Shell was being unfairly targeted, given that the oil spill had been caused in the first place by sabotage.

    Last June, the oil group agreed to pay $15.5m in settlement of a legal action in which it was accused of having collaborated in the execution of the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other leaders of the Ogoni tribe of southern Nigeria.

    The settlement, reached on the eve of the trial in a federal court in New York, was one of the largest payouts agreed by a multinational corporation charged with human rights violations.

    Shell has also been under heavy fire from environmentalists over allegations of unnecessary flaring of gas from oil wells, something that is regarded as a prime source of global warming.

  • Importing Solar Power with Biomass

     

    Another big biofuel order recently announced by Valero Energy could be worth up to $3.5 billion dollars. Mission New Energy, an Australian company, will deliver 60 million gallons per year of biodiesel oil from Jatropha crops in Malaysia. Jatropha is a drought-resistant bush with oily seeds that are easily converted to diesel fuel. It is not edible and thrives in tropical climates but requires manual labor for picking the seeds. The all-year growing season, tropical sun and availability of inexpensive labor provides a clean replacement for diesel fuel that can be shipped by the same tankers used for fossil fuel. Valero’s annual sales are $120 billion, so this is a serious order.

    Mission New Energy works with small farmers to encourage them to plant the bushes on unused and marginal land. They can press their own oil and sell it to the refinery.  Larger farmers can refine the oil themselves, as the refining process is very simple compared to petroleum refining.

    Jatropha can also be planted on depleted, marginal forestland to restore the land. Mission is careful to maintain a balance between food, fuel and forest so the development is a plus for the community. Unlike factory development, biomass makes it possible for people to remain on their ancestral lands and make money doing clean, outdoor farm work. With industrialization everybody moves to the city to work on dehumanizing production lines. Growing biomass can become a major source of income for the poor and undeveloped tropical countries of the world.

    Biomass feedstocks can be grown on soils that have no other uses. For example, Florida has 100,000 acres of phosphate clays that are not stable enough to build on and useless for growing food crops.  Leucaena is a bushy legume that grows nicely on these lands.  It can be harvested three times per year using standard harvesting machinery to chop it into chips and put it into a truck that follows the harvest machinery.  Yields of up to 25 dry tons/acre per year have been obtained but 15 tons is a reasonable average.  

    Moringa is another legume that has achieved even higher productivity and is tolerant of sulfate acid soils.  Legumes need no nitrogen fertilizer because they can fix nitrogen from the air. In semi-desert areas, specially adapted plants like Agave can be grown with no irrigation. Agave stores water in its leaves and heart so that it can continue growing through the long dry seasons that are common in the tropics.  

    Bamboo has been known to grow as much as 48 inches in a 24-hour period and has been observed growing 39 inches per hour for brief periods. The plants can grow to full height in 3-4 months but die naturally on a six-year cycle.

    Clenergen has been growing a variety called Beema Bamboo in India for four years achieving a yield of over 60 tons/acre after four years of cultivation. The company has also been raising a tree called Paulownia for several years with a yield of 40 tons/acre. The company uses a process in which it gasifies the biomass to generate local electrical power but it has announced plans to use gas-to-liquids technology to make liquid fuels out of the syngas. Liquid fuels can be inexpensively shipped around the world by existing tankers.

    In fact, biomass can be converted into a wide range of energy carriers for economic shipping. Here are some possibilities and their volume energy density in Watt-hours per liter:

    Crude oil, biodiesel

    8800 watt-hr/liter

    LNG (Biomethane)

    7216 (must be stored at -268°F)

    Torrefied Wood Pellets 

    6500

    Ethanol                             

    6100

    Methanol                         

    4600

    Ammonia

    3100

    Wood Pellets

    2777

    Liquid Hydrogen 

    2600 (must be stored at -423°F)

    CNG 250 bar biomethane

    2500

    Wood chips

    1388

    Hydrogen, 150 bar

    405

    Lithium Ion Battery

    300    

    The technology for converting biomass to gas and liquid fuels is well known. Methanol, also known as “wood alcohol,” is readily produced from biomass through gasification and catalytic synthesis. Methanol fuel cells can convert it to electricity for efficient hybrid electric cars. Methanol has a big advantage because it can be reformed into hydrogen at 200 °C, about half the temperature of other fuels. This makes fast warm up times practical, greatly reducing battery size. During World War II methanol was used extensively in Europe to keep cars running in the face of gasoline shortages. 

    Methanol and other liquid fuels can be made efficiently on a small scale using microchannel technology, originally developed for the space program. Velosys and Oxford Catalyst have developed a working prototype of a biomass-to-FT-liquids plant that is just being installed in Güssing, Austria. The 5 ft diameter X 25 ft assembly of 10 microchannel reactors is connected to a biomass gasifier and will output 400 barrels per day of ultraclean synthetic crude oil. This output can be shipped just like crude oil and burned or converted to a full range of clean, carbon-neutral fuels by conventional oil refineries. The microchannel reactor is much more efficient than massive-scale gas-to-liquids plants.  The microchannel approach is much like a chemical microprocessor. This kind of small-scale upgrading technology will soon make it possible for tropical areas to convert their plentiful sunshine into easily shipped liquid and solid fuels. 

    Another approach to exporting solar power involves using electricity as the carrier. The Desertec scheme envisions building HVDC electrical transmission links under the Mediterranean Sea to connect the Sahara desert to the European grid. Massive solar thermal plants in the desert would then supply electricity to all of Europe. Similar concepts for Australia, India, and the USA have been worked out. It still remains to be seen if solar thermal with overnight storage can really be economical. Perhaps someday, but in the meantime, low-tech wood-pellet production is already working at prices almost competitive with coal.

    Desertec is like the supercomputer approach while biomass is more like distributed microcomputers.  An informal network of low tech, minimal investment biomass operations spread over the world and using existing transportation infrastructure could make a nice living for millions of small low-tech biomass entrepreneurs. Like the Internet, no central control is needed, just a free market that rewards innovation and efficiency. Ocean shipping compares very favorably with HVDC electrical transmission for efficiency. The energy wasted on a long ocean voyage is a tiny percent of the energy being transported.

    Already, in 2008 the worldwide pellet market had reached 10 million tons. About 25% of it is already exported to other countries and the market is growing at 25-30% per year. As equipment for upgrading energy density improves, the economics of this market will also improve dramatically. Some power plants in Europe are running entirely on wood pellets but the pellet’s lower density means that extensive modification of the power plant are needed. Torrefied pellets can be burned without modifying the power plant. They can be stored, pulverized and burned just like coal. With shipping costs halved, the economics are compelling.

    The southern United States has lots of sunshine and rain so it is an excellent biomass growing area. The most efficient model for biomass is to grow it locally in a small radius around a Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plant built where thermal heat is needed. Efficiencies of 90% are often attained because all heat that is normally wasted is used. A recent study showed that the southeastern U.S. could easily be energy self-sufficient. The U.S. government has done some detailed studies showing the dramatic environmental superiority of biomass power over fossil fuel plants. Even conventional farming techniques using fertilizers, insecticides and mechanization turn out to have an excellent energy efficiency factor of 20.5 under a detailed analysis that includes all energy inputs including the energy to make the farm machinery. With all of the energy inputs subtracted, the plantation analyzed yielded a net energy production of 125 MWh per acre per year.

    You may have heard that biomass is much less efficient than photovoltaic cells. Solar cells are typically rated around 10% efficiency but this rating ignores the fact that the average energy from the sun is only about 20% of peak. The real average efficiency then is .1 X .2 = 2%.  If we look at land use of some real projects now on the drawing boards we find that the latest photovoltaic, parabolic and tower projects all use about 5-6 acres per peak MW.

    The Saguaro 1-MW parabolic trough plant near Phoenix for example, generates 2000 MWh of electricity annually, using 15.8 acres. That’s 130 MWh per acre per year. The 125 MWh figure for the biomass plantation that I mentioned above is for heating value. Electricity generation can be 80% efficient if it is done where wasted thermal energy can be used as in CHP plants. So biomass is at least in the same ballpark as other solar technologies for land use but much cheaper to implement, store and transport than direct electrical generation. 

    Some terrible mistakes have been made in recent years when tropical rain forests and peat bogs were burned for agricultural development. Big trees should not be replaced by a succession of little trees. We must structure carbon trading so that such acts are taxed and only sound actions are rewarded. Clearing land by open-air burning is common today.  If simple, inexpensive equipment was available for upgrading biomass to shippable products, logging waste could be put to good use replacing coal power.

    Biomass can help keep the lights on while we build more renewable capacity. If we don’t use it, coal will certainly fill the gap. Sweden, Norway and Finland have been making heavy use of biomass for power for decades. They have structured their laws to encourage good stewardship of the land. We can do the same thing internationally by defining good rules for carbon trading.

    Download my free renewable energy book, Fuel Free: Living Well Without Fossil Fuels here.

  • LG Electronics to enter increasingly crowded solar market

     

    LG sees the solar business as a key area of growth, and claimed that it had been preparing to enter the market since 2004.

    The firm will manufacture large-area thin-film solar cells, as well as the more widespread crystalline solar cells.

    In July 2009, LG announced that the company had achieved the world’s most energy efficient large-area thin-film solar cells in a trial.

    LG’s solar operation will be administered by its air conditioning division, which it says has the necessary experience in managing energy resources and developing products efficiently.

    The solar market is estimated to be worth around $11bn in 2010, with crystalline solar cells expected to make up 80 per cent of the market, according to LG.

    The move will take the company into direct competiton with a raft of solar energy firms, as well as electronics rivals Sharp and Mitsubishi, both of which already operate large solar energy divisions.

  • Sun, wind and wave-powered: Europe unites to build renewable energy ‘supergrid’

  • Power to rich as poor pay for solar power in flawed plan

     

    Owners can now sell all the power they generate to their electricity retailer at 60c per kilowatt hour then buy it back at less than 20c/kwh. The scheme is twice as lucrative as those in South Australia and Queensland.

    The over-the-top payments do not come from the pockets of power companies – or the State Government. They are paid from a levy on all electricity users. In total the seven-year scheme could transfer up to $135 million from households without solar to 73,000 households with solar, a Government taskforce found.

    Related Coverage

    Businesses will have to pay for the other 70 per cent of the scheme – $315 million.

    Electricity users are already facing power price rises of up to 60 per cent over the next three years – on top of a 20 per cent rise last July.

    The head of the nation’s biggest solar panel company told The Daily Telegraph the NSW scheme was unsustainable, creating a short-term boom before a bust that could put 1000 people out of work. “I know it’s not a sustainable policy,” Solar Shop managing director Adrian Ferraretto said. “It’s way too generous.”

    The scheme also covers households which already have panels, even though the Government task force advised that “including existing solar PV owners would increase the cost of the scheme, whilst not increasing the benefits of the scheme”.

    About $30 million is likely to be paid to these households. This will not create a single job or further reduce carbon emissions. The scheme is not means tested, either, so the wealthy are most likely to take advantage of it.

    The Government taskforce received many submissions about inequity. In its report it acknowledged the “policy is a cross subsidy that imposes costs on all consumers but does not provide access to all due to the high capital costs of installations”.

    A solar PV systems costs a minimum of $12,500. But the Federal Government subsidises this, too.

    Mr Ferraretto – whose company installs one in four systems in Australia – said consumers could now “double-dip” on the Federal and State schemes. He argued that the NSW Government should reduce the pay rate from 60c/kwh.

    “That rate is very generous given we have the (Federal Government’s) solar credits working in tandem with it.
    “Most countries have one or the other, not both,” he said.

    The consequence of the NSW policy would be to create up to 1000 jobs for installers in 2010, Mr Ferraretto said. But the scheme’s 50 megawatt-hour cap would probably be hit the following year.

    “In 12 or 18 months’ time there won’t be any business for those skilled workers,” Mr Ferraretto said.

    The scheme has also been criticised for the effect it will have on other eco-friendly power projects. It will significant increase the number of Renewable Energy Certificates on the market. This pushes REC prices down.

    A low REC price makes wind farms, for instance, less economically viable.

    A spokeswoman for Energy Minister John Robertson said the Government received feedback welcoming the changes. And it would only cost a household $7.50 a year, she said. It would be reviewed in 2011 or when the cap was reached — whichever occurred first.

    John and Madeline Forbes of Pymble had panels installed a month ago. Mr Forbes said he expected to sell about $2800 of solar power to his electricity provider and buy only $1100.

    “They should send us a cheque for $1700,” Mr Forbes said.

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  • US Offshore Wind Project Updates

     

    Project Updates

    But just which project will get that first turbine in the water is still a matter of speculation. In total there are four companies with more than 10 projects in different states of development. Each company — Cape Wind, Bluewater Wind, Fisherman’s Energy and Deepwater Wind — is developing projects on the East Coast.

    The most well-publicized and possibly controversial offshore wind project in the U.S. is Cape Wind. The project, which has spend eight years in development, would put turbines in Massachusetts’ Nantucket Sound. The project had a lot of opposition to overcome, first from residents in towns on the sound worried it would ruin their views and lead to higher electricity prices, and later from environmental groups concerned with the wildlife impact. These issues have since been addressed.

    More recently, a group of Native Americans have said the project would obscure the view from an ancient burial ground, this issue is working its way through the regulatory process and is expected to be resolved by the end of 2009.

    Not all of the news about Cape Wind has been negative however. The project was given a favorable Environmental Impact Statement from the U.S. Minerals Management Service, its grid connection in Barnstable, Massachusetts was approved by the Massachusetts Citing Board and National Grid has said that it will negotiate a power purchase agreement for the electricity the project might one day produce.

    Jim Gordon, president of Cape Wind said that he thinks the U.S. will see an offshore wind project realized sooner rather later and its one of the keys to fighting the effects of climate change, especially for East Coast cities like Boston where trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure could be damaged or destroyed by rising seas and stronger storms that would be a result of climate change and an economy that needs to put people back to work to grow.

    “Right now if Cape Wind was operating we would be producing 422 megawatts of clean renewable energy. That’s 422 megawatts of emissions free power that blows off our coast that will be harnessed by workers from this region,” Gordon said. “The Natural Resources Defense Council has said that Cape Wind represents one of the largest single greenhouse gas reduction initiatives in the United States. We’ve missed out these many years on mitigating many tons of greenhouse gases, but I believe and I hope that the American offshore wind industry is no going to emerge and reach its full potential.”

    While Massachusetts has been the first stand of sorts for offshore wind, Delaware might be the spot of the industry’s first major victory. Bluewater Wind, formerly owned by Babcock and Brown, and now a subsidiary of NRG Energy, has leases in place and is set to deploy a series of meteorological (met) towers to determine the best sites for turbines in 2010.

    The company also has one 200-MW PPA in place with Delmarva Power and has been selected to provide 55 MW of power to the state of Maryland under a PPA. Bluewater CEO Peter Mandelstam said that the company has interconnection agreements in place and also begun the federal permitting process.  He said the process is easier now as a result of the Obama Administration’s renewable energy goals.

    “The most important investor, the most important advocate and the most important public official for offshore wind is President Barack Obama. This industry was dead, but the restructuring of the tax credit, the loan guarantees, the various stimulus provisions and the new regulatory regime totally revived us. We can’t say enough good things about President Barack Obama. He mentioned our Delaware project on Earth Day and going into Copenhagen, he talked about offshore as one of his six pillars to mitigating climate change,” Mandelstam said.

    Two other development companies, Fishermen’s Energy and Deepwater Wind are taking different approaches to developing offshore wind projects.

    Fishermen’s Energy is taking what it calls a community-based approach to offshore wind. The company was founded by leading Northeast commercial fishing companies so that they could be part of and benefit from the emerging offshore renewable energy industry. The company’s CEO Dan Cohen said that commercial fishing executives knew there was a need for workers to do the construction, operations and maintenance for offshore wind projects, jobs uniquely suited to commercial fishermen who already work offshore and the know waters.

    Fisherman’s is involved in two projects: the first is a 350-MW project that the company plans to work on in conjunction with Bluewater Wind and Deepwater Wind. The second is demonstration project located in the waters just off the coast of Atlantic City, New Jersey. This 20-MW project is expected to be built by 2012 and rules for the build out of this project are currently drafted by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.

    Deepwater Wind plans to do exactly what’s implied by its name, namely build projects 15-20 miles offshore, minimizing the impact of not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) protests and taking advantage of the stronger wind regimes in those waters. The company has been awarded met tower leases and plans to put them in the water in the next year.

    Deepwater, which is part of a consortium developing a project in the waters off Long Island, expects that its first project in the water will be the 30-MW Block Island project off the coast of Rhode Island, which is still pending federal approval. In conjunction with this project, the company is also working to develop Quonset Point, a former U.S. Navy base, into a dedicated offshore wind development hub for the Southern New England area.

    Hurdles Still to Overcome

    Some challenges remain however. First and foremost is the lack of the vessels needed to install these projects. There are currently no vessels in the U.S. equipped to install these turbines, and while a number of them exist in Europe they cannot simply be brought across the Atlantic Ocean and put to work.

    The Jones Act precludes any European based specialty vessel from taking part in commerce in U.S. waters, including the installation of offshore energy projects. While many have suggested that ships used by the oil industry could simply be converted, the cost would likely be prohibitive and U.S. ship builders will have to build wind specific vessels, which Mandelstam said will create thousands of jobs for ports and ship builders that take advantage of the need.

    “Seven thousand seven hundred green jobs would be created by building three turbine installation vessels,” he said. “As chairman of the offshore group in the U.S., I participated during the Bush Administration to analyze how we’d get to 20% wind, including 54,000 MW of offshore wind. The choke point is vessels. The Obama Administration has put up a TIGER Grant and the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority has applied and we may gain access to those vessels if there’s an announcement in February 2010.”

    Like any other renewable energy or conventional generating assets, in order for offshore wind projects to be built they will need transmission lines and utilities willing to buy the electricity they carry. In some ways this is where the U.S. industry is putting the cart before the horse.

    Transmission plans are already underway within the ISO New England region to bring tens of gigawatts of wind power online and the ISO has produced a report for New England’s Governors Association presenting them with a number of scenarios that would bring offshore wind energy to residents of New England.

    Even though this transmission capacity is still in the planning stage, utilities are lining up to buy the power once its online. Delmarva Power, National Grid, the state of Maryland and the Long Island Power Authority have already signed power purchase agreements (PPAs) with developers. The biggest advantage that utilities and ISO New England are looking at is the location of offshore wind resources. Who pays for it however remains the big question.

    Gordon van Welie, president of ISO New England said that while his company has made a number of transmission investments onshore, they need to wait for a national renewable energy and transmission plan to be in place before a scenario from their report to governors, most likely costing around $6 billion, is chosen and invested in.

    “The rhinoceros in the room is the transmission cost allocation,” Welie said, referring to the fact that who pays for the $6 billion in transmission will depend on who is thought to be getting the most benefit from its installation and costs are likely to be split between project developers, grid operators and utilities.

    Possibly the largest challenge facing U.S. offshore wind energy developers however is the lack of a stable policy and incentive regime that would bring more players into the industry, from all sides. No matter the policy, be it feed-in tariff, production tax credit, cash grants or renewable energy credits, developers, financiers, utilities and grid operators are calling for more stable incentives and policies.

    Long term policy surety would give banks more confidence investing in infrastructure, transmission, construction operations and maintenance vessels as well as generating equipment. Rhode Island Governor Donand Carcieri, who serves as vice chairman of the Governors’ Wind Energy Coalition said that while the states are leading the way, a federal standard is needed to move forward.

    “Offshore wind power is one of the most reliable and sustainable sources of energy in the United States, and we are on the path to develop this nation’s first deep water, offshore wind project,” Governor Carcieri said. “The impact of offshore wind is tremendous, from spurring economic development and new jobs to providing stable energy costs, and will move our country towards energy independence.”