Oil From Wood Waste  

Technology Review has an article on startup company Kior which has developed a process for creating "biocrude" directly from biomass.

Dutch biofuels startup Bioecon and Khosla Ventures have launched a joint venture called Kior, which will commercialize Bioecon's process for converting agricultural waste directly into "biocrude," a mixture of small hydrocarbon molecules that can be processed into fuels such as gasoline or diesel in existing oil refineries. The process, Kior claims, boasts numerous advantages over other methods of producing biofuels: it could prove relatively cheap, relies on a nontoxic catalyst, taps into the present fuel-refining and transportation infrastructure, and produces clean-burning fuels that can be used in existing engines.

Biofuels are widely seen as a key stepping-stone on the path from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, particularly for transportation. Their use could also reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But ethanol, the most widely produced biofuel, contains little energy compared with gasoline or diesel. And a great deal of energy goes into its production: growing the grain from which it is fermented, distilling it, and transporting it. Many biofuels boosters have pinned their hopes on finding ways to produce ethanol from cellulose, the tough polymer that makes up much of plant stems and wood. In practice, though, cellulose must be broken down into simple sugars before it can be fermented into ethanol or converted into synthetic gas and turned into fuels. Despite three decades of research, these remain difficult, expensive, and energy-intensive processes that are not yet commercially viable. Additionally, recent research shows that ethanol, which is highly volatile, may actually exacerbate smog problems when it evaporates directly into the air instead of burning in vehicle engines.

The way to make cellulosic biofuels viable, says Bioecon's founder, Paul O'Connor, is to use catalysts to convert biomass into a hydrocarbon biocrude that can be processed into gasoline and diesel in existing petroleum refineries. After decades developing catalysts for the petroleum industry, O'Connor started Bioecon in early 2006 to develop methods for converting biomass directly into biofuels. His first success is a catalytic process that can convert cellulosic biomass into short-chain hydrocarbons about six to thirteen carbon atoms long. Khosla Ventures agreed to provide an undisclosed amount of series A funding to spinoff Kior in order to commercialize the process. Vinod Khosla, founder of the venture fund, believes that converting biomass into liquid transportation fuels is key to decreasing greenhouse-gas emissions and compensating for dwindling petroleum reserves. Khosla is funding a number of biofuels startups with competing technologies and says that Kior's approach is unique. "They have some very clever proprietary catalytic approaches that are pretty compelling," he says. "They can produce relatively cheap crude oil--that's attractive."

The most effective method of converting biomass into fuel requires subjecting it to high temperatures and high pressure to produce synthetic gas, or syngas. In the presence of a catalyst, the syngas reacts to produce fuels such as ethanol or methanol (used as an additive in biodiesel). But this is a costly process that often results in a product that is too low quality to be used as fuel without further processing. And catalysts able to withstand the high temperature of the syngas are expensive and frequently toxic.

Attempts to produce fuel by directly exposing agricultural cellulose to a catalyst have had little success because most of the cellulose is trapped inside plant stems and stalks. O'Connor says that while the Bioecon researchers are developing new catalysts, their "biomass cracking" process is the real breakthrough. Using proprietary methods, they have been able to insert a catalyst inside the structure of the biomass, improving the contact between the materials and increasing the efficiency of the process. While O'Connor won't go into details, he says that the most basic version of the technique might involve impregnating the biomass with a solution containing the catalyst; the catalyst would then be recrystallized. "What we're doing now is improving the method to make it easier and cheaper," O'Connor says. ...

Steve Deutch, a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, says that the little information Kior has released about its process is plausible enough, but that until the details are available, the company's claims are "not really possible to evaluate." The main challenge for Kior, or anyone working on cellulosic fuels, Deutch says, is to develop a process simple enough to bring close to the sources of biomass--farms. "Collecting biomass and getting enough of it in one place to make a difference is a problem in the biomass world," Deutch says. "Trucking costs can become exorbitant. You want to preprocess it at the farm and then ship a high-density, high-energy intermediate to processing plants."

Xinhua reports that China is about to commence mass production of maglev wind power generators.

Construction began on the world's largest production base for magnetic levitation (maglev) wind power generators in central China on Monday. The Guangzhou-based Zhongke Hengyuan Energy Technology Co. Ltd. invested 400 million yuan in building the base for the generators, from which it expects a yearly revenue of 1.6 billion yuan. The base will produce a series of maglev wind power generators with capacities ranging from 400 to 5,000 watts in the first half of 2008, said a company statement.

The maglev generator co-developed by the company and Guangzhou Energy Research Institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences is expected to create new opportunities for harnessing wind power in low-wind-speed areas, as it can utilize winds with starting speeds as low as 1.5 meters per second.

The problem of the traditional wind turbines was that they require high wind speeds to start, because of the friction caused by their bearings, said Li Guokun, chief scientific developer of the new technology. The frictionless maglev generator would cut the operational expenses of wind farms by up to half, keeping the overall cost of wind power under 0.4 yuan per kilowatt-hour, said Li.

Jeremy Faludi at WorldChanging has a "Green Computing Update" - "Part 1: Data Centers".

It's been a while since we've done a comprehensive article on green computing. So much is happening in this industry that it won't all fit into one article. With this first update, I'll focus on data centers; next week's second update will focus on green personal computers, components, and services.

Before getting started, though, it must be said that greening the computer industry is touching off an unprecedented level of cooperation and information-sharing among companies, government, and laboratories. The Server Specs blog recently interviewed industry consultant Deborah Grove, who said it was unlike anything she'd seen in 24 years in high tech. "There is increased transparency... Executives are offering up what worked and what didn't work instead of everybody having to reinvent the wheel," said Deborah. "It's tangible in the sense of better products... Organizations are taking on the responsibilities that they can deliver on -- not worrying about turf, just trying to get the job done."

Deborah's largely referring to the Green Grid, a consortium of industry leaders (like AMD, Intel, Dell, HP, IBM, Sun, and others who are normally competitors) to share data and strategies for greener data centers. Green Grid's membership also includes the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (better known as PG&E), and it recently announced a collaboration agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy.

Data Centers

Data centers (also called server farms) are where companies like Google or Amazon or internet service providers locate the hundreds or thousands of computer servers that provide their online services. As Worldchanging's Joel Makower has written before in a couple great articles, data centers use massive amounts of electricity; large ones can use megawatts of power, with each square meter using as much power as an entire average US home. According to a Tech Target white paper on green computing, "Data centers consume 1.5 percent of the total electricity used on the planet."

It's not just the computers themselves that use all this power: the combined heat output of all these servers, hard drives and network gear is so large that massive air conditioning is required to keep it all from overheating. "Cooling is about 60 percent of the power costs in a data center because of inefficiency," said Hewlett Packard executive Paul Perez in Data Center News. "The way data centers are cooled today is like cutting butter with a chain saw." Cooling capacity is often the limiting factor of how big these systems can be -- I've talked with more than one engineer whose data center facility sat half empty or more; even though there was plenty of room for more servers, the building's air conditioning was maxed out.

How can data centers get greener?

Lawrence Berkeley Labs has published a white paper titled Best Practices for Data Centers. Researchers measured 21 facilities and recommended strategies that they found most successful. These include several HVAC (air conditioning) improvement strategies, water cooling, efficient power supply and conversion, and on-site power generation. Other useful design strategies the paper does not mention are virtualization and "blade" servers. A paper at GreenIT titled Greening the Data Center: A 5-Step Method actually lists many more than five strategies, similar to those suggested by the LBL, but a bit newer and written for the layman. One step specifically emphasized is getting to know your facilities managers, as they are the ones who know about your HVAC system and energy bills. CIO.com also has a list of six strategies, including not letting your cabling block the flow of your air conditioning system, and moving power and cooling systems outside the data center -- even outside the building. ...

TreeHugger's quote of the day comes from Jonathan Porritt on Saving Our Seeds.

The number of people out there today seriously worried about the health of all the plants and seeds on which modern agriculture depends must be very limited, and the number of people actively campaigning to protect them vanishingly few. ... Of the Earth's 250,000 plant species, only 200 are cultivated for food on any serious scale.

Even more extraordinary, the vast majority of the world's food comes from just 20 crops, in just eight plant families. Most of these monocultures are dangerously vulnerable to diseases (both old and new), pest infestations, and a rapidly changing climate.

Yet the "genetic pool" on which plant breeders might need to draw to build resistance and adaptability is being constantly eroded as older, non-commercial varieties disappear. ...

[S]eed banks can only do so much in this massive salvage operation. The seeds they store need to regularly germinated, otherwise they too die. The best way of maintaining an active and vibrant seed bank is to ensure that farmers (and gardeners) are planting out those 'land races' and rare varieties of plants which are now so endangered.

More often than not, that sets small-scale, subsistence farmers (on whom this kind of "active conservation" depends) in conflict with the juggernaut of industrialised, intensive agriculture."

The FT reports that Brazilian oil company Petrobras has made a large offshore find in the Atlantic. Apparently the proven reserves are only about 700 million barrels, so its not huge in the grand scheme of things.

Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras unveiled on Thursday a giant crude reserve, sending its shares soaring and prompting the government to withdraw 41 oil blocks from an upcoming auction in a bid to keep potential natural resources out of foreign hands. ”This is about preserving the country’s sovereignty, while maintaining the auction with areas that are not linked to the discovery,” cabinet chief Dilma Rousseff said at a news conference, explaining the decision to pull blocks linked to the find from a concessions auction on Nov. 27-28.

Petrobras made Brazil’s largest oil find at great depth in the subsalt cluster at the offshore Santos basin field called Tupi. The crude is 28 API grade, unusually light for Brazil. Petrobras said tests allowed it to estimate recoverable reserves of between 5 billion and 8 billion barrels -- about half Brazil’s existing proven reserves. Company officials said commercial production could begin in five to six years. A pilot project should start in 2010 or 2011 with an aim to gradually reach an output of 100,000 barrels per day.

The Age has a new article by Kenneth Davidson on climate policy - "The major parties' green credentials are off the rails".

A fixation with road transport compromises climate change policy.

RUDD Labor's green credentials are slipping. And you don't have to look far for the reasons. Until Labor produces interim greenhouse gas targets for 2020, and policies to match, the promise of a 60 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 just remains so much hot air.

On the ALP's election website there were 29 transport policy promises — 27 involved specific pledges for road funding totalling $8.3 billion and two "vision" statements on shipping and rail in speeches by shadow transport minister Martin Ferguson in July and August.

These speeches don't commit a dollar expenditure or give even an indication of the roles shipping and rail might play in achieving greenhouse targets. Nor do they mitigate the double whammy of peak oil (which is driving world oil prices towards $100 a barrel) and Australia's "oil squeeze" as declining domestic production and rising demand will push oil self-sufficiency from a present 84 per cent to 20 per cent in the next two decades.

Gilles d'Aymery at Swans has an article on "The Inexorable March Into Iran: The American People's Forgivable Irresponsibility", predicting a likely strike on Iran between February and April 2008.

"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."

"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

—Hermann Wilhelm Göring in a conversation with Dr. Gustave M. Gilbert, Nuremberg, April 18, 1946 (see Nuremberg Diary, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, June 1947, ISBN 0374223519 - pp. 278-279).

Unfathomably, Iran tops the chart of all the countries viewed by the American people as the biggest threat to the U.S., ahead of the perennial culprits -- China, Iraq, and North Korea, soon to be rejoined by the old scarecrow of yesteryears, Russia. If Iran develops the bomb, the American people in their overwhelming majority believe that Iran will attack Israel, Europe, or the United States. They further believe that Iran will provide terrorist organizations with some sort of nuclear device to attack the U.S. Not surprisingly, a majority of likely voters support a military strike against Iran and believe it will happen before the end of the Bush administration on January 20, 2009. But no worries, 30 senators have signed a letter telling Mr. Bush he had no congressional authorization to attack Iran, and the administration steadfastly repeats that the president wants diplomacy to work with the help of our friends and allies. The corporate media, meanwhile, keep ringing the alarm bells -- the Iranians are coming, the Iranians are coming! -- and the antiwar forces, or what remains of them, are increasingly being muffled by the forces of Law and Order.

First and foremost it should be noted that as abundantly explained in "Propaganda: Then and Now" (Swans, November 12, 2001) propaganda does indeed work. "Propaganda means repetition and more repetition!" Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda in Nazi Germany, used to say. "Nuclear Holocaust," "World War III," "Israel wiped off the map," "mushroom clouds," "the new Hitler," "this is 1938," "state-sponsor of terrorist organizations," "killing American troops through proxy militias," "arming and training the terrorists," "irrational mullahs," "islamofascists," "financing and training Hezbollah and Hamas," and all combinations therein repeated ad nauseam on cable and network news programs, in the written press, the blogosphere, the Congress, and in hundreds of position papers from countless think tanks right, left, and center. Even the humanitarian hordes are on board to defend women's rights and freedom of the press; supposedly, the anarcho-libertarian left is falling back on their sempiternal "neither-nor" position that they used so fruitfully with Milosevic and Saddam Hussein: Neither Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nor the U.S. It looks eerily like the fall of 2002 all over again.

It may be disappointing to observe the American people being taken for another wild destructive ride, but in their defense, that's all they hear. Göring was right on mark, "it is always a simple matter to drag the people along." That the people have turned against the Iraq War, yet 41 percent still "believe" that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was behind 9/11, ought to be viewed as simple forgivable irresponsibility. They don't know because they are not being told (or are actually being fed falsehoods and disinformation), aren't naturally curious, and are quite possibly the most insecure people on the surface of the globe. Fear is the common denominator of the American psyche all the way back to the first colonies in the 1700s and the birth of the nation. Enemies are always looming behind dark, dangerous, smoky clouds to take their life, liberty, and pursuit of [material] happiness away from them. Imbued with a sense of innate goodness, permeated by pseudo-religions, infused with the conviction that America is the best country in the world, any dissenting views or oppositions are inevitably deemed a sign of evil. Evil roams the world, envious of our freedoms and way of life, always seeking to destroy America, the last best hope on planet Earth. Our god-given right, besides going to the Mall, is first and foremost to defend ourselves against the dragons that wish to set us afire, with or without the help of our ever-changing friends and allies. ...

Links:

* The Oil Drum - Peak Oil in the Mainstream Business Press
* Energy Bulletin - Young Daniel Yergin as peak oil activist (book review)
* Sustainable Energy Blog - Palm Oil to CO2 disaster
* Cleantech.com - Cash flows into solar power and biofuel
* TreeHugger - Office Building Lit By 100% LED Light
* Cleantech.com - Range Fuels' Mitch Mandich breaks ground in cellulosic ethanol
* Green Car Congress - University of Alberta Team wins iGEM Prize for Bioengineering E. Coli to Produce Butanol. Revenge of the Butanerds.
* SMH - Solar panels for the roof -- worth it or not?
* The Age - Drought hits rice industry
* Science Daily - Geothermal Energy Exploration: Deep Drilling For 'Black Smoker' Clues
* TreeHugger - Neurosis River: Coal Power & Wastewater Create Toxic Fish
* The Last Whale - No Humane Way to Kill a Whale: Tim Winton
* The Age - It's the Seinfeld election: Latham
* Cryptogon - Arraignment and Federal Indictments for Bernard Kerik, Close Giuliani Associate and Botched Nominee to Head Department of Homeland Security