Turning Japanese  

New WorldChanging columnist Blaine Brownell (of TransMaterial fame) has a look at Japan and how it is managing to prosper within the limits to growth. There are also a few peak oil bloggers operating from Japan - Bill Totten being the best of them, though I don't get to read up on what he has been posting often enough.

Since my introduction to the culture nearly thirty years ago, much has been published regarding Japanese design, crafts, and technology, but some fundamental mysteries still remain. For example, how has such a small country been so successful and influential on the world stage? How has a nation faced with extreme geophysical and resource limitations been able to maintain a first-world quality of life? How has a culture often regarded as an emulator of all things Western become an international leader in the fields of design and technology?

It is with these and other questions in mind that I sought to travel to Japan in order to find some answers. My strategy has been to approach Japanese design through the lens of my own career in architecture, sustainable building methods, and materials research, while remaining open to fresh and unconventional insights. As a foreigner, I know that there will always be cultural overtones and subtleties beyond my grasp, but my idea is to glean and communicate information which could be useful to other countries and cultures.

After all, we are faced with some big challenges ahead, as one can see from the many intelligent assessments that appear throughout this website. Resource depletion, energy regime change, global emissions, and urban population explosions are just a few of the problems that all nations now face, and I am intrigued by how Japan is responding to these issues. It should come as no surprise that Japan does not have an impeccable environmental track record, but then again, no nation does. My hypothesis is that Japan has become a global innovator because of the tremendous limitations she has faced throughout her tumultuous process of modernization, and that she will therefore be one of the first nations to respond to new environmental challenges. We would do well, therefore, to learn from Japan’s current innovations as we begin to come up against limitations that are global in scale.

Science Daily has an article on bioplastics - Plastics Made From Corn And Soy Proteins.

He scrunched the model's folding pieces into a ball. That's about the shape of a soy or corn protein, said Grewell, an Iowa State University assistant professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering. Then he unfolded the model into a long, straight loop. That's what happens when researchers add some glycerin -- a byproduct of biodiesel production -- and some water to the molecule. And that's how biorenewable, biodegradable plastics can be made from the proteins in Iowa crops.

But those aren't the strongest plastics. So Grewell is working with a team of Iowa State researchers to reinforce the plastics with nanoclays, pieces of clay that are just 10 to 20 billionths of a meter thick.

After my mini-rant on myths about the limits to growth I was pleased to see this issue mentioned in an article on Energy Bulletin called "The Oil Crisis Started 30 Years Ago".

n 1973 the main industrial nations ended the practice of fixed exchange rates for their currencies; this innovation was supposed to create greater stability among the world's currencies, but actually the opposite happened. George Soros, the billionaire head of Soros Fund Management, describes the swing of exchange rates as more like a wrecking ball than a pendulum. Money-market investors - like investors of any other sort - are generally short-sighted, and they are possessed of herd mentality: when a currency starts to gain value, it then becomes attractive to those investors who have not previously bought it, and the result is an even greater increase in value. The same is true of a currency that starts to fall: as soon as the decline becomes a matter of public knowledge, a panic ensues, everyone tries to get out, and the small loss turns into a major collapse.

All of these problems could have been averted with proper leadership, if that is not begging the question. As E.F. Schumacher points out, the only problem with The Limits to Growth, first published in 1972, is that the authors should have focused more on the loss of petroleum. But all the problems stated in that book have been largely obliterated from human memory by widespread denial of their existence: a gentle but persistent flurry of skepticism, of not-quite-deliberate misinformation, appears on the back pages of newspapers and magazines. The reports were exaggerated, we are told, or the predictions never came true. Or we are reminded obliquely of Adam Smith's "invisible hand": control of the economy is, in some sense, unnatural, and if we would only allow market forces to have free play, all the temporary anomalies would be sorted out. The economy is something like God, in a Deistic sense, and we should have respect for all those gears and pulleys and levers that are beyond our comprehension.

Many economic forces were coming together in the early 1970s: oil decline, income disparity, wage arbitrage, currency speculation. There was a synergy at work: all four problems resulted in the erosion of the U.S. economy. Everything tangible was disappearing: the natural resources, the manufacturing base, the hard currency. The present image of the United States is that of someone waving a credit card that merchants are starting to dislike, knowing that the owner's debts are both "astrological" - to use our earlier metaphor - and "astronomical."

New Scientist has an article on research into a "clean green hydrogen-making machine" that sounds interesting (no mention of end-to-end EROEI unfortunately).

An efficient, super-fast new method of turning waste biomass into hydrogen has been developed by scientists in Minnesota, US. The researchers say it could help significantly reduce many nations' dependence on fossil fuels.

Hydrogen represents a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels but is both costly and dangerous to transport, leading many to argue that it must be generated in distributed fashion, rather than in centralised facilities. Anything that could lead to smaller and more portable hydrogen generation is likely to be welcomed by proponents of green energy.

The new process, developed by Lanny Schmidt, Brandon Dreyer and colleagues at the University of Minnesota's Department of Chemical Engineering and Material Science, is known as "flash volatilisation".

It relies on a simple but highly reactive chemical catalyst to break down biomass, such as agricultural waste, with heat. Not only does the process avoid the need to expend extra energy generating the heat needed, it also takes place up to 100 times more rapidly than existing techniques allow, the researchers claim.
Chemical trick

Droplets of oil and sugar taken from biomass are sprayed into a small chamber containing a foam catalyst of rhodium and cerium. As the droplets hit the foam, volatile compounds within them oxidise (combust) to produce heat. This breaks down larger non-volatile compounds into a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide – a synthesis gas, or "syngas".

The deceptively simple process relies on a complex chemical trick. Normally, when a volatile droplet hits a hot surface it vaporises so rapidly that an insulating layer of gas emerges between itself and the surface, preventing it from being heated. Here, however, the porous nature of the foam used causes heat to be transferred to the droplets, while also drawing syngas down through the catalyst.

Syngas can then either be used to make fuels like gasoline, or its hydrogen can be separated in order to power fuel cells. The biomass required can come from anything from cooking oil to glucose-rich cornstalks, Schmidt says.

The Energy Blog has a post on an Israeli company that is claiming to generate ocean (wave) power at remarkably low cost (substantially cheaper than coal). A promising sign for one of the big 3 renewable energy sources (along with wind and solar). There is a similar post at TreeHugger.

SDE Energy Ltd. is a Tel Aviv, Israel manufacturer and marketer of Sea Wave Power Plants - utilizing sea wave energy to produce electricity economically, and in an environmentally-friendly manner claiming that their system an generate electricity for 2 cents.

SDE describes their system as follows: a method of using sea wave motion to generate hydraulic pressure, which is then transformed into electricity. The system takes advantage of the wave's speed, height, depth, rise and fall, and the flow beneath the approaching wave, thus producing energy more efficiently and cheaper than both other sea-wave and conventional technologies which require vast amounts of land space. The system has a potential to produce a net of 38kWh per meter of beachfront occupied (worldwide average). Manufacturing cost for a 1MW system is from US$ 650K and production cost is the lowest in the market. The erection cost of a 1MW S.D.E. station is from $650,000 while a comparable station costs $1,500,000 from coal, $900,000 from natural gas, $1,500,000 from solar sources, and $3,000,000 from wind. Using S.D.E. technology, production of electricity is 2 cents, compared to 3 cents from coal, 3.5 cents from natural gas, 12 cents from solar energy, and 3.6 cents from wind.

Shmuel Ovadia, Managing Director of SDE Energy, said: "Our system is built on one side of wave gatherers, which can also serve as breakers. It is composed of a system of channels of hydraulic oil, whereby the rise of the pistons creates pressure on the hydraulic oil. The hydraulic oil is accumulated in a pressurized container and is then directed toward a hydraulic motor. This energy turns an electrical generator, which produces electricity."

According to Tree Hugger, SDE is set to build the first wave energy harvesting power plant of its kind in Sri Lanka. According to a company press release, S.D.E. recently began talks with Sri Lankan officials to construct and install a 200 MW power plant at an estimated cost of $130 million. If negotiations are successful, they say, the plant will be the first of its kind to produce electricity at a commercial quantity from sea waves.

The World Energy Council estimates that 2TW of energy could be harvested from the world’s oceans, the equivalent of twice the world’s electricity production.

Just a short post tonight - there are a few more tidbits in the link bucket.