Making Clean Energy And Beer  

Technology Review gets the opening slot tonight with an article about generating clean energy from brewery waste using microbial fuel cells.

Scientists and Australian beer maker Foster's are teaming up to generate clean energy from brewery waste water -- by using sugar-consuming bacteria. The experimental technology was unveiled Wednesday by scientists at Australia's University of Queensland, which was given a 140,000 Australian dollar state government grant to install a microbial fuel cell at a Foster's Group brewery near Brisbane, the capital of Queensland state.

The fuel cell is essentially a battery in which bacteria consume water-soluble brewing waste such as sugar, starch and alcohol. The battery produces electricity plus clean water, said Prof. Jurg Keller, the university's wastewater expert. The complex technology harnesses the chemical energy that the bacteria releases from the organic material, converting it into electrical energy.

The 2,500-liter (660-gallon) fuel cell will be 250 times bigger than a prototype that has been operating effectively at the university laboratory for three months, Keller said. ''Brewery waste water is a particularly good source because it is very biodegradable ... and is highly concentrated, which does help in improving the performance of the cell,'' Keller said.

He expected the brewery cell would produce 2 kilowatts of power -- enough to power a household -- and the technology would eventually be applied in other breweries and wineries owned by Foster's. The cell should be operating at the brewery by September. ''It's not going to make an enormous amount of power -- its primarily a waste water treatment that has the added benefit of creating electricity,'' Keller said.

The WSJ's Energy Roundup (who will be strange bedfellows for the inhabitants of The Sun, Tiser, Daily Terror and the like if Rupert gets his mits on them) points to a story on thin film solar cell research at UNSW.

Researchers at the University of New South Wales — working at the well-named ARC Photovoltaics Center of Excellence — say they have found a way to boost a solar cell’s light-trapping ability by up to 50%, according to a report in Australia’s The Advertiser (owned by that Murdoch fellow and thus perhaps a soon-to-be sister publication of The Wall Street Journal). The advance could make solar power much cheaper, making it possible to power an “average” house with just 10 square meters of solar panels, The Advertiser says.

“[T]he solar revolution is coming,” responds Lou Grinzo, who tipped Energy Roundup to the development on his Cost of Energy blog, adding “it will be the biggest game-changer in energy technology during the lifetime of anyone reading this. “Think that’s an exaggeration? Tell me what you think will happen when the cost of solar power gets cheap enough that in the mind of mainstream decision makers it goes from a ‘nice, but too expensive technology’ to a ‘no brainer,’” he adds.

The Australian reports that ANZ has joined the ranks of the carbon neutral, and are building a new green building for their head office in Melbourne's docklands.

ALMOST on cue, the wind picked up and the dust flew as ANZ boss John McFarlane turned the first sod yesterday for the nation's most environmentally sustainable office building, to be built on a barren stretch of Docklands real estate in Melbourne.

In three years' time, the same kind of stiff breeze will be powering six wind turbines perched on top of the gleaming, 10-storey ANZ tower, helping the bank generate 10,000kW hours of electricity a year. The turbines are part of an expected capital outlay of about $250 million on a series of environmental measures designed, among other things, to make ANZ carbon-neutral through the purchase of enough renewable energy to offset its greenhouse gas emissions. ANZ spent $16 million on electricity last year and emitted a total of 185,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

It is not, by any means, the first local corporate to promise carbon-neutrality. National Australia Bank said in March it would do the same by September 2010, following the lead of Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB operation in Britain. Then-Westpac chairman Leon Davis said at last year's annual meeting that the bank would become carbon-neutral, having already cut emissions by 45 per cent since 1996.

Mr McFarlane, who will retire before the end of the year, downplayed the competitive aspect. "Westpac has done some great things, and good luck to them," he said. "I don't think the environment is a competition; the right thing is that everyone does it." ...

The ANZ building, coincidentally, will produce 60 per cent less greenhouse gas emissions compared to the average commercial building - equivalent to the removal of 3600 cars from the nation's roads each year. Mr McFarlane was careful to steer a non-contentious path yesterday when asked if he thought Australia should aspire to such a target by 2050, in line with Labor policy. "It's easy to design a new building for such a massive reduction but Australia already exists, and therefore to change the whole country is much, much harder," he said. "It's more a government matter than for me, but certainly the world is heading in that sort of direction."

Mark Gongloff at the WSJ is also reporting that Iraq's new oil law has been sent to parliament for approval (see background here, here and here).

Energy Roundup isn’t seeing this reported anywhere else, so please take it with a grain of salt. But Reuters is reporting that Iraq’s oil minister says the government has sent a draft oil law to parliament. Passage of the law, which would establish how Iraq’s oil riches will be divided up among its various factions, would be a big step toward political stability and would satisfy a key benchmark set by the U.S. government for progress there.

The oil minister said he hoped the oil bill would pass by the end of the month, according to Reuters — but given how contentious the issue has been so far, that might be a bit optimistic. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that “Iraqi officials have said they expect a prolonged parliamentary debate on the issue.”

Jeff Vail also has a look at the new oil law, and points out that while the Iraqi National Oil Company controls existing fields, "undiscovered" fields can be allocated by regional governments to foreign oil companies like Exxon and Chevron.

Salman Banaei recently published an analysis of Iraq’s draft Oil & Gas Law in the Association of International Petroleum Negotiator’s March issue of "Advisor" (also available via his Western Energy Blog). He shows how the draft law allocates control over production from “current” fields to the Iraqi National Oil Company, and that regional governments retain control over “undiscovered” fields. While regional governments can sign contracts with international oil & gas firms, the draft law ensures federal oversight by requiring approval of these contracts by Iraq’s Federal Oil & Gas Council (FOGC).

Recent events in Kurdistan, however, suggest that the Kurds may have other plans. UAE-based Dana Gas announced recently that they have agreed with the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) to develop the Kormor gasfield (see graphic). The Kormor Field clearly falls under the draft law’s envisioned federal control, as it is a “current” field, discovered in 1928. The contract has not received FOGC approval, and it breaks the KRG’s promise to avoid signing new contracts until the end of May, to give the federal government time to pass the Oil & Gas Law.

What does this signify? It seems that the KRG is not satisfied with the division of gas fields between federal control (“current” fields) and regional control (“undiscovered” fields). This “current” vs. “undiscovered” designation seems to have little basis in geological reality, but rather is the political gloss given to the apportionment of existing fields, which is detailed in an annex to the draft law. Petroleum Intelligence Weekly reports that the KRG will reject the law if this annex remains as is. The decision to contract for development of the Kormor Field with Dana Gas prior to the official vote on the law suggests that the KRG believes the annex will not be changed, and that the law will not pass the end-of-May vote.

While none of this should come as a shock—Iraq is a sham Nation-State where mutually exclusive minimum requirements by the component national groups will prevent cooperation—it does carry significance. The prospects for a military solution in Iraq are as slim today as ever, and this failure to bridge the competing demand of Iraq’s many nations suggests that a political solution is no more likely. This reality may not seriously deter oil & gas production in the Kurdish region, where there is relative unity and security, but it will likely present a geopolitical barrier to developing the highly theoretical reserves of Iraq’s Western Desert. Furthermore, while it may be possible for the KRG to produce from their oil & gas fields, their export market is highly limited—the pipeline through Syria is non-functional, and the Turkish government is unlikely to help their rival with a viable export channel. The most viable market for Kurdish oil & gas is Iraqi domestic consumption, but reaching this market requires relying on a handful of critical pipelines that are frequent targets of insurgent attacks. It may be impracticable to market any increase share of oil & gas that the KRG may be able to exploit. Will this fact alone be enough to force them to compromise on their short-term selfish interest to form a viable Iraqi state that will benefit them in the long term by way of a valid export route? Is a willingness by the Kurds to compromise enough to bring together the rest of Iraq’s disparate factions in a similar spirit? Probably not—and the Kurds have probably considered exactly these issues in arriving at their decision to go it alone with regional production. Probably a wise choice for the Kurds, but an ominous sign for the future of the figment of Colonial Cartography that we call Iraq.

I was rather startled when I watched Lateline last night to see Frank 'Nice Rug' luntz appear and make noises about wanting to move to Canberra and become a spin doctor. Isn't that a bit of a step down from Washington ? Is there going to be a vast exodus of untouchable ex-Republican strategists and lobbyists to the farthest reaches of the empire as the reign of the Bushies crumbles into dust ?

TONY JONES: Frank Luntz is a Republican Party pollster and political consultant. He's crafted many of the Republican Party's messages, using focus groups to test words and phrases that evoke a strong emotional response. A memo on the environment he wrote for the Party back in the late 1990s had a series of suggestions for how to play down the science of 'global warming' and he in fact advised politicians not to use that frightening term at all because it sounded permanent. Rather, they should use the more benign phrase 'climate change'.

But as you'll see, Mr Luntz is not proud of that memo. He says he's now crossed the scientific rubicon on global warming. I spoke to him in our Washington studio just a short time ago. ...

TONY JONES: That suggests that the President's words and phrases used today would have been very carefully workshopped in the sort of focus groups that you yourself used to run. Do you believe that they were?

FRANK LUNTZ: Well, I’ve got to tell you, if they were he would not have used the phrase 'surge', or the people in the Administration, in the Pentagon would not have used that word 'surge'. Because to most Americans the word 'surge' is merely synonymous for 'escalation' and that reminds everybody of Vietnam and that was a disaster. So if they really are focused on that kind of language, they're not doing such a great job. Now it is also true that they said quite publicly that this is a matter of principle to them and that for people who want presidents and Congress and elected officials to stand up for principles, rather than polls and surveys and public opinion, they are saying that even if the American people, in polls, feel one way, their responsibility is not to the short term, it's to the long term security of the country and they're going to stick by their principles.

TONY JONES: How about this phrase that he used virtually to sum up his statement today, "Without a war funding Bill we add to the uncertainty felt by our military families. Our troops and their families deserve better." How would that resonate? ...

TONY JONES: Now I know you are actually planning to come to Australia fairly soon. Are you looking for an opportunity or opportunities to do this kind of polling as you have done not only in the United States, but also in Britain, in Ireland?

FRANK LUNTZ: Well I'm blessed with the opportunity to have worked now in over 20 countries and I don't want to detract from the work that I do here in America, but it's a lot more interesting internationally than it is right now in the States. And I've always loved Australia. I've never been there before. But every Australian I've met, they live life more fully, they work harder, they play harder, they're incredibly friendly and I'd like to spend some time down there understanding the political process and getting to know the people of Australia much more closely.

TONY JONES: Don't you think it'll be a bit weird, an American coming here to assess what Australian public opinion actually is saying about an election?

FRANK LUNTZ: Well you're the only people who don't hate Americans these days. I've got to tell you I travelled through Europe and I feel like I just lost an Academy Award and nobody wants to talk to me. I'm told that Australians don't feel that negativity towards America and I'm praying that that is the case.

TONY JONES: It will be an interesting experiment anyway. Frank Luntz, let me come to another issue that may well be a defining issue in the 2008 US Presidential campaign and the elections, the congressional elections there, but also certainly will be in the Australian elections. That is the whole issue surrounding global warming. Have you crossed a sort of scientific rubicon here yourself?

FRANK LUNTZ: I have, and as have most people. When I started doing work on this issue about a decade ago, a majority, a clear majority of Americans, in fact all over the globe, did not buy the science at that point. But over the last 10 years the science has been much clearer. The results have been much more comprehensive and I, like millions of Americans, have changed my point of view and you will see across the globe that people now have come to accept that there is an issue here. The challenge and the answer, that's what people don't quite understand. What is the right policy? What's going to be the most effective? What is going to be the most efficient way to deal with it? That's where the debate will go over the coming months and years.

TONY JONES: Frank Luntz, I mean, do you see an irony here? Because I've read all the transcripts of various interviews that you've done on this subject. But the point is that you wrote a memo, I think you said back in the mid 1990s, but it was used by the Bush Administration to set a course, to set the language on, on climate change, on global warming. In fact, it is said that you suggested in that memo that the words 'climate change' should be used instead of 'global warming' because global warming is too frightening for the American public, climate change more benign. Is that true?

FRANK LUNTZ: Well, you interviewed me during the contract with America. I'm sure that your positions have changed, that your ideas have changed, that your career has changed over the last 10 or 12 years. You learn. You get educated. You hopefully grow as a person. And that the same ideas that you had back 10 years ago are not the same ideas that you have today because times have changed and climate has changed and now you deal with the situation at hand.

TONY JONES: OK. But you know, because in 2002 that memo was revealed in the New York Times, that it appears to have been the template for the Bush Administration and certainly for example President Bush stopped using the term 'global warming' and started using the words 'climate change', apparently because in your advice was it was more benign.

FRANK LUNTZ: Well, I've got to tell you something, George W Bush wouldn't know me if I walked into a room. And, as they say about the President, in his mouth the English language goes to die. So I have no idea what language he chose to use. The document that you refer to was written about 10 years ago. It's interesting it took the New York Times five years to get a hold of a memo that had been written so much before that -

TONY JONES: It was, it was written for the Republicans and for the Republican politicians, wasn't it? I mean, for example, it stated the scientific debate remains open. Your advice to politicians was, "You need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."

FRANK LUNTZ: And - exactly in 1997, 10 years ago, the science was absolutely open. Those who believe that global warming is an issue will acknowledge that 10 years ago there was a wealth of information that said that this is not happening, but over the past 10 years, based on our developments and science and technology in research, in engineering, we've come to learn a lot more today than we knew in 1997. Look, you couldn't fly planes into buildings back 10 years ago and drop the tallest buildings in the world. You couldn't have Jihadists that would take down thousands of people in a single terrorist attack. Ten years ago in this country you didn't impeach presidents. Ten years ago, life was different. And you know that because it was different in Australia 10 years ago than it is today. So it's really unfair to judge the way that things are now based on the way things were back 10 years ago. Things change.

TONY JONES: So final question, does it disturb you to know that people and some politicians, even, are still using the template that you put out in that memo to put a political point across saying that climate change is not something to worry about? ...

Also on the ABC, tonight's "Catalyst" took a look at microgeneration - asking what would happen if everyone became a power station ?

Jonica Newby: Faced with the overwhelming magnitude of global warming, it's easy to feel powerless. But what would happen if enough of us took power literally into our own hands. What if we all became power stations.

Narration: On a hot hot day in 2006, one man began a local revolution when he was jolted into attempting exactly that.

Mathew Nott: I was on surf patrol at the Tathra surf life saving club, it was New years day so I was expecting it to be an extremely quiet day so I took along a book which just happened to be Tim Flannery's the Weather makers. About 10 O'clock in the morning a hot westerly wind hit the surf club. And it was profound, it was like standing in front of a hair dryer.

Narration: That day the thermometer reached 42 degrees - 4 degrees hotter than ever recorded on this southern NSW beach. It had a profound effect on local doctor, Mathew Nott.

Mathew Nott: I'm not a greenie or a radical or anything like that. I'm a very conservative consumer. Or at least I was until that New Years day last year. It's changed my life.

Narration: There's a word for what Dr Nott decided he had to do. It's called Microgeneration.

Nick Rowley: Microgeneration is a means whereby we as individuals through our homes and in other ways can actually generate energy which we use but also potentially sell that energy back to energy providors.

Narration: It's a shift in thinking from the traditional model of big centralised power stations. But it's being taken very seriously in the UK, where Nick Rowley was formerly climate change advisor to the prime minister.

Nick Rowley: They think in the next 20 years decentralised energy, of which microgeneration is a part, could form a third of the energy needs of a city the size of London ...

Mathew Nott: We've come up with a community target for tackling climate change and that's 5050 by 2020. What that means is a 50% reduction in the consumption of energy and a 50% production of energy by renewable sources by the year 2020.

Narration: That's when the local microgeneration revolution really started to take off. First to fire up was the Tathra surf club - with solar panels and a mini wind turbine tastefully decorated in surf club colours

Mathew Nott: We've had calls from fire brigades ... the local schools ... the targets have been agreed to by the community of the Bega Valley shire and Eurobodalla.

Narration: If enough households and businesses sign on, eventually they could displace a small power plant. And there's another big advantage to mass microgeneration. To understand it, let's meet the real power network in our lives.... the grid.

Brad Shone: The grid is basically a network of poles and wires which connect generation with the areas of electricity demand which are the cities and towns and industrial areas.

Narration: The trouble is, to avoid blackouts, we have to build our networks big enough to cope when electricity demand is at its peak. And when is peak demand? Typically, hot summer afternoons when we all turn on our air conditioners. As it happens, that's right when solar panels produce most power ... reducing the need to spend on an ever expanding grid.

Brad Shone: Australia is committed to spending 24 billion dollars over the next 5 years for poles and wires. Its huge and it's the one thing that's hard to factor in to the equation at the moment because there's no way of capturing that benefit when you're trying to make the case for microgeneration. There's no financial way of capturing the avoided need for all this extra spending on infrastructure.

Narration: But if microgeneration is so wonderful, how come so few Australians have taken it up? Incredibly, just 4,000 homes are feeding into the grid.

Mathew Nott: the costs for installing solar PV's was about $17,000, and we got a $4,000 rebate to bring it down to $13,000. That's fine for me, I'm in a privileged position where I can afford the cost of PV cells. But not everyone can.

Narration: At the moment, individuals bear the brunt of microgeneration costs, and it takes more than 20 years to return the investment. So what would it take to spread the power from a community ... to a nation?

One option is to just pay for it. The federal governments impressive new Solar Cities program will get around 6,000 more homes feeding to the grid. But to replace a power station, you need a million.

How do you get there? Well, there is another way. In Germany, the government has adopted what's known as a feed in tariff. It works like this. ...

Tyler at Clean Break has a post on a University of Toronto study of wind energy storage as a grid stabiliser, using flow batteries. Clean break also has a post on plugin fever catching in Canada - the distributed energy storage option for the smart grid.

The Ontario government has contributed $3.4 million toward a five-year, $10.5 million project that aims to economically integrate wind and energy storage, making it possible to give an intermittent resource like wind more load-following and baseload characteristics. The project is being led by Dr, Reza Iravani, a professor at the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, and will include a team of six full-time engineers and 16 graduate students. "This funding will be used to investigate and finally develop a prototype system for integration of wind and energy storage," Iravani explained in an interview. "This requires significant interface development in terms of power electronics circuitry that interfaces the storage and wind with the rest of the power grid."

The team will be exploring the use of multi-megawatt flow batteries, such as the type manufacturered by Vancouver-based VRB Power, as well as sodium-sulphur (NAS) batteries. Iravani said Japan, which has years of experience with large-scale sodium-sulphur systems, is currently installing a 30-megawatt NAS battery system at a 100-megawatt wind park. He said the goal of the U of T project goes beyond simply smoothing out the intermittency of wind so the power is more dispatchable. "What we are going to do here is use the concept of energy storage as a stabilizing factor for the rest of the grid." The goal is to have a commercial product by the end of the five-year project.