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  • Methanol and artificial photosynthesis

    Methanol and artificial photosynthesis


    Carbon dioxide generated by power stations can be converted into methanol and used to generate electricity or fuel cars





    Permanent underground storage is only one of the options for dealing with CO2 captured at a power station. One much-discussed alternative is to feed the gas to algae and turn the algae into biofuels. A less familiar but equally promising approach, advocated by the Polish environmentalist Marcin Gerwin, is to convert the CO2 into methanol fuel using a process called “artifical photosynthesis”.


     


    In this system, the first step is to dissolve the CO2 in water. The resulting solution is directed into tubes containing a catalyst that is activated by UV light and causes the dissolved CO2 to react with water (H2O) to form methanol (CH3OH). The methanol can then be burned for power generation, displacing coal use, or used as a vehicle fuel instead of oil.


    The basic conversion process for turning pure CO2 into methanol is proven, and research is now being carried out to assess the viability of using the technology on unprocessed gas from power-station flues.


    The profile of the CO2-to-methanol approach has been boosted by support from chemistry the Nobel Laureate George Olah.

  • India prays for rain as water wars break out

    India prays for rain as water wars break out


    The monsoon is late, the wells are running dry and in the teeming city of Bhopal, water supply is now a deadly issue. Gethin Chamberlain reports


     





    A young Indian man walks across Upper Lake

    A young man walks across Bhopal’s Upper Lake, which has shrunk to an eighth of its original area. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images


    It was a little after 8pm when the water started flowing through the pipe running beneath the dirt streets of Bhopal’s Sanjay Nagar slum. After days without a drop of water, the Malviya family were the first to reach the hole they had drilled in the pipe, filling what containers they had as quickly as they could. Within minutes, three of them were dead, hacked to death by angry neighbours who accused them of stealing water.


     


    In Bhopal, and across much of northern India, a late monsoon and the driest June for 83 years are exacerbating the effects of a widespread drought and setting neighbour against neighbour in a desperate fight for survival.


    India’s vast farming economy is on the verge of crisis. The lack of rain has hit northern areas most, but even in Mumbai, which has experienced heavy rainfall and flooding, authorities were forced to cut the water supply by 30% last week as levels in the lakes serving the city ran perilously low.


    Across the country, from Gujarat to Hyderabad, in Andhra Pradesh, the state that claims to be “the rice bowl of India”, special prayers have been held for more rain after cumulative monsoon season figures fell 43% below average.


    On Friday, India’s agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar, said the country was facing a drought-like situation that was a “matter for concern”, with serious problems developing in states such as Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.


    In Bhopal, which bills itself as the City of Lakes, patience is already at breaking point. The largest lake, the 1,000-year-old, man-made Upper Lake, had reduced in size from 38 sq km to 5 sq km by the start of last week.


    The population of 1.8 million has been rationed to 30 minutes of water supply every other day since October. That became one day in three as the monsoon failed to materialise. In nearby Indore the ration is half an hour’s supply every seven days.


    The UN has warned for many years that water shortages will become one of the most pressing problems on the planet over the coming decades, with one report estimating that four billion people will be affected by 2050. What is happening in India, which has too many people in places where there is not enough water, is a foretaste of what is to come.


    In Bhopal, where 100,000 people rely solely on the water tankers that shuttle across the city, fights break out regularly. In the Pushpa Nagar slum, the arrival of the first tanker for two days prompted a frantic scramble, with men jostling women and children in their determination to get to the precious liquid first.


    Young men scrambled on to the back of the tanker, jamming green plastic pipes through the hole on the top, passing them down to their wives or mothers waiting on the ground to siphon the water off into whatever they had managed to find: old cooking oil containers were popular, but even paint pots were pressed into service. A few children crawled beneath the tanker in the hope of catching the spillage.


    In the Durga Dham slum, where the tanker stops about 100 metres away from a giant water tower built to provide a supply for a more upmarket area nearby, Chand Miya, the local committee chairman, watched a similar scene. There was not enough water to go around, he said. “In the last six years it has been raining much less. The population has increased, but the water supply is the same.”


    Every family needed 100 litres a day for drinking, cooking and washing, he said, and people had no idea when the tanker would come again.


    Not everyone gets a tanker delivery. The city has 380 registered slums, but there are numerous other shanties where people have to find their own methods. Some, like the Malviyas, tap into the main supply. Others cluster around the ventilation valves for the main pipelines that stick up out of the ground from place to place, trying to catch the small amounts of water leaking out. In the Balveer Nagar slum, 250 families have no supply at all. The women get up in the middle of the night to walk 2km to the nearest pumping station, where someone has removed a couple of bricks from the base to allow a steady flow of water to pour out.


    A few communities have received help from non-governmental organisations. In the Arjun Nagar slum, a borewell has been drilled down 115 metres by Water Aid to provide water for 100 families, each paying 40 rupees (50p) a month.


    Until the well was drilled, Shaheen Anjum, a mother of four, got up at 2.30am each day to fetch water, wheeling a bike with five or six containers strapped to it to the nearest public pipe in the hope of beating the queues. “Often we would get there and the water would not be running,” she said. “It was so tiring: the children were suffering and getting ill because they had to come too. The tankers used to come, but there were so many fights that the driver used to run away.”


    Water Aid is working in 17 of the city’s 380 registered slums, providing water and sanitation. “It’s not just Bhopal. This has been a drought year for many districts,” said Suresh Chandra Jaiswal, the technical officer. “Now it has reached a critical stage. We just don’t know any more how long the water will last.”


    Fifty years ago, Bhopal had a population of 100,000; today it is 1.8 million and rising. In a good year the city might get more than a metre of rain between July and September, but last year the figure was only 700mm.


    Neighbours of the Malviyas cluster around the hole in the street outside the house where Jeevan Malviya lived with his wife, Gyarasi, their son, Raju, 18, and their four other children. It was the evening of 13 May, said Sunita Bai, a female relative: a local man, Dinu, thought that the family had blocked the pipe to stop the water flowing further down the hill.


    He and a group of friends slapped Gyarasi, 35; Raju tried to stop him. Someone produced a sword and, a few minutes later, the Malviyas lay dying. “We were too afraid to do anything,” said a woman who gave her name as Shanno. “Dinu didn’t want them to take any water. He wanted it for himself.”


    Everyone stood around, looking down at the hole in the ground. The pipe is dry. “It is a terrible thing, that people should be fighting over water,” said Shanno.

  • Wild weather in the year ahead, scientists predict

    Wild weather in the year ahead, scientists predict


     





    Climate scientists have warned of wild weather in the year ahead as the start of the global “El Niño” phenomenon exacerbates the impact of global warming. As well as droughts, floods and other extreme events, the next few years are also likely to be the hottest on record, scientists say.


    In the UK, a Met Office spokesman said yesterday that the El Niño event was likely to cause a hot, dry summer following a warm June, but said it could have other unpredictable effects on weather in Britain and north-west Europe. “Much depends on how much the El Niño deepens in the next few months.”


     


    El Niño – “the child” in Spanish – was named by fishermen in Peru and Ecuador because the phenomenon arrives there at Christmas. It is part of a natural meteorological cycle that happens every 3-7 years and affects weather worldwide for a year or more. It is caused by changes in ocean temperatures, with the first sign being abnormal warming in the Pacific.


    Sea surface temperatures across an area of the Pacific almost the size of Europe have been increasing for six months and will trigger worldwide weather turbulence for the next year, said a spokesman for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).


    At this stage, both US and Australian climate scientists say this may be a medium-strength El Niño, but they have warned it could develop further.


    “Temperatures in the Pacific are around 1C above average, and sub-surface temperatures up to 4C warmer than normal, ” said a spokesman for Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology.


    The last major El Niño in 1998 killed more than 2,000 people and caused billions of dollars worth of damage to crops and infrastructure in Australia and Asia. It led to forest fires in south-east Asia, a collapse of fish stocks in South America and a drought threatening 700,000 people in Papua New Guinea.


    Strong El Niños often have long-lasting effects. The 1991-92 event led to droughts in Africa and food shortages that left 30 million people at risk of malnutrition and set back development for a decade.


    Oxfam has alerted teams globally. “This could be the hottest year in known history. Poverty and climate change is enough of a challenge: an El Niño will only make things harder,” said Steve Jennings, Oxfam’s disaster risk reduction manager.

  • Portable solar for African villages

    Solartech International from Luxembourg has released a Portable Solar panel
    designed for use in sub saharan Africa, which it claims can free
    villagers from the tyranny of darkness or reliance on dirty and
    increasingly expensive kerosene. The unit is the size of a shipping
    container and will power a village of 1,500 inhabitants.

    The unit stores enough energy to deliver power evenly over a 24 hour
    period regardless of the weather.

    By delivering the solar power station as a complete unit designed for a
    small community, the system avoids the infrastructure cost of
    building an electricity grid. Individual units can be attached to
    high energy use buildings like hospitals and backed up by other forms
    of generation.

    There
    are a number of companies in Europe under the brand SolarTec. Solar
    Tec AG in Germany     uses solar concentrating technology, such as that
    pioneered by Green and Gold Energy in Australia. Green and GoldEnergy won the ABC television program New Inventors in 2005 for their original suncube and were featured on the first ever Generator here on Bay FM. 

    The
    concentrator focuses the sun on a smaller area, making more efficient
    use of the photovoltaic cells that convert the sun’s energy into
    electricity and reducing costs. By using fresnel lenses, similar to
    the plastic lenses available for rear windows of cars, the unit can
    be manufactured very cheaply.

    It
    does not appear that this technology is being used in the portable unit being shipped to African villages.

    A
    range of portable solar solutions are now available, ranging from
    units designed for camping and other traveling applications, through
    to semi-permanent installations that need to be able to be moved when
    necessary.

    The
    Generator’s own Malcolm McKenzie has developed one such solution
    using thin film panels that fold up into a flat pack that can fit
    into a car boot.

    Www.solartec.lu

    Www.portasolar.com.au

    www.solartec-ag.com

    www.greenandgoldenergy.com.au

  • Gilbert school ‘green’ in more ways than 1

    Gilbert school ‘green’ in more ways than 1


    Hayley Ringle, Tribune


    July 10, 2009 – 7:06P 



    Having it's own water chilling system on campus allows Gilbert's Campo Verde High School to keep their air conditioning system cooler and cheaper.

    Having it’s own water chilling system on campus allows Gilbert’s Campo Verde High School to keep their air conditioning system cooler and cheaper.


    Darryl Webb, Tribune




    Although the Campo Verde High School name was not chosen for the “green” elements found throughout the Gilbert campus, it’s even more fitting that the school has green in its name because of all the energy-saving details.


    Former Gilbert Unified School District governing board member Elaine Morrison said she chose Campo Verde, which means “green field” in Spanish, because of the area’s farming and cultural history.


    When freshmen and sophomores start at their new school on Aug. 10, they’ll walk under green, patina-coated metal walkways throughout the campus, which provides shade for them and keeps the buildings cooler, said Dave Tucker, the project manager with CORE Construction, the company building the school. CORE is a member of the United States Green Building Council.


     


    The exterior windows have 1-inch-thick, insulated glass, and those not shaded by the walkways have green, patina-coated aluminum shades, which reduces cooling and heating costs. The windows also have interior window blinds, and students will notice more windows in their classroom to let in more natural light.


    As students walk into their new classrooms, the motion-detector lights will turn on; when they leave, the lights will turn off.


    A campuswide lighting control system will give school staff an opportunity to easily turn off various lights around campus to reduce energy costs, Tucker said.


    Gilbert governing board member Helen Hollands said she is “thrilled” the board chose to put “green” elements into the district’s fifth and final high school on the northwest corner of Germann Road and Quartz Street, just west of Val Vista Drive off the Santan Freeway stretch of Loop 202.


    Hollands was board president in February 2008 when the board approved the $1.4 million in “green” elements.


    The school cost about $52.8 million to build, with an additional $4.7 million for nearby road improvements.


    “I think it’s important that we are conscious protectors of our environment,” Hollands said. “Personally, I wish we could have gone further, but we have to balance it with the money we have available.”


    The green grass on the football field is made of synthetic turf, which requires little maintenance. There’s no need for fertilizer, mowing, and repainting the lines on the field since the yard markers are actually sewn into the turf, Tucker said.


    Water is only used to cool and clean off the $500,000 field, which is another savings. Eight water cannons on the perimeter of the field can spray water onto the field to cool it off for the Campo Verde Coyotes, the school’s mascot.


    The turf will last 15 years, Tucker said, and sits next to the six baseball and softball fields, six tennis courts and three basketball courts.


    “It certainly is an absolutely beautiful facility, and I understand from a maintenance standpoint we will realize quite a bit of savings,” Hollands said. “Yes, from a capital standpoint it’s more expensive, but long term we don’t have those maintenance and operations expenses.”


    Besides the “green” aspects of the turf, since the field is not real grass, it can be used year-round for practice, band and soccer, and even after rain, without tearing up the field. This also eliminated the need for two practice fields, Tucker said.


    Students eating outside under the dining canopy will be cooled by solar-powered fans.


    “I like that the students will be able to see it in action,” Hollands said.


    Desert landscaping replaced several lawn areas throughout the campus, although there is still lots of green grass for the students.


    A “state of the art” central air conditioning plant is in a large room in back of the cafeteria and is the “most energy efficient” to cool the campus, Tucker said.


    The fields and landscape are irrigated with nonpotable water, and faculty bathrooms have two-stage flushing.


    Students will also have a “very cutting-edge technology” educational tool with the opportunity to see the electrical consumption the school is using by accessing a Web site, Tucker said.


    A 400-kilowatt solar panel array could also be placed on top of the cafeteria and an adjacent classroom building to tie into the power grid and save even more money for the school. The school board is still considering the extra costs for the solar panels.


    “This is the first high school we’re (CORE Construction) building with synthetic turf and sonar panels,” Tucker said. “As the technology improves and items become more affordable, ‘green’ elements will become more common.”


    The 60-acre, 250,000-square-foot school also has an amphitheater with seating capacity for 725 people, a main gym with three basketball and three volleyball courts, and a practice gym with an additional basketball and volleyball court.


    The school also has a dance room with mirrors covering three walls of the room, a weight room next door, and several rooms for orchestra, band and choir.


    To continue the greenness of the school, students chose copper and dark green as the school colors.

  • Concentrated power Technology


    Concentrated solar power technology

    Zenith Solar, based in Nes Ziona a suburb of Tel Aviv, is a pioneer in a new type of solar energy that uses mirrors and lenses to focus and intensify the sun’s light, producing far more electricity at lower cost. Compared with traditional flat photovoltaic panels made of silicon, this so-called concentrated solar power technology has proved in tests to be up to five times more efficient. That puts it on the verge of being competitive with oil and natural gas, even without government subsidies.

    Since it was founded in 2006, the startup has raised $5 million from private investors in Israel and the U.S. Now it’s trying to raise an additional $10 million to $15 million to cover the cost of commercializing its technology.

    Zenith bought the rights to the solar technology from Ben-Gurion University and Germanys Fraunhofer Institute. A joint Israeli-German research team from the two organizations designed a working prototype, which consists of a 10-sq.-meter dish lined with curved mirrors made from composite materials. The mirrors focus the sun’s radiation onto a 15.5-sq.-in.) generator that converts light to electricity. The generator also gives off intense heat, which is captured via a water-cooling system for residential or industry hot-water uses.

    Tested over the past few years at Israel’s National Solar Center in the Negev desert, the prototype achieved astounding results: A concentration of solar energy that was more than 1,000 times greater than standard flat panels. One of the biggest advantages of Zenith Solar’s approach, especially in today’s market, is its limited use of polysilicon. Skyrocketing global demand for traditional photovoltaic panels has led to a worldwide shortage of the material and lifted prices tenfold in the past four years.

    After further refining the technology, Zenith plans in the coming months to take its first major steps toward commercialization. Two large-scale test installations are planned for this summer at a kibbutz and a factory. The company will put 86 of its 7-meter-high dishes on an acre of land at Kibbutz Yavne to provide the community of 250 families with more than a quarter of their energy needs. The second project will replace fuel oil used to produce heat at a large chemical plant in central Israel. Once these projects are operational, Zenith plans to begin commercial sales in Israel in 2009 and then overseas, says CEO Segev.