The expiration of the credit on Dec. 31, 2009 put the breaks on an expanding industry and raised questions about biodiesel’s future in the U.S.

With many biodiesel plants either idle or shutdown throughout the country, the bill will reinstate the credit retroactively, extending it through Dec. 31., 2010.

Although biodiesel received a tremendous boost under the new renewable fuel standard (RFS2), without a tax credit, the industry could not compete on price with petroleum-based diesel.

RFS2 rules issued by the EPA include strong “biomass-based biodiesel” or “advanced biofuel” carve outs for biodiesel so long as it can show a favorable greenhouse gas (GHG) profile.  The tax credits will allow the biodiesel industry to begin taking advantage of its carve out under the new RFS2 definitions.

The biodiesel incentive is designed to encourage the domestic production and use of biodiesel by making the fuel price competitive with petroleum diesel fuel.  The subsidy is structured so that the value of the incentive is reflected in the market price of the fuel.

The new tax credit is contained in the bill’s “Title IV: Energy Provisions” (Section 401) and extends through 2010 energy conservation and production provisions, including:

(1) the tax credits for biodiesel and renewable diesel used as fuel;

(2) the alternative motor vehicle tax credit for large hybrid vehicles;

(3) the alternative fuel excise tax credit for natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas; and

(4) tax rules relating to sales required to implement federal and state restructuring policy for qualified electric utilities.

Specifically, sections 40A, 6426, and 6427(e) of the Internal Revenue Code provide tax incentives for the production, sale, and use of biodiesel and biodiesel mixtures.  Under the Code, the production tax credit applies to qualified blenders of biodiesel and agri-biodiesel fuels and allows them to receive an income and excise tax credit if certain conditions are met.

Biodiesel Mixture Excise Tax Credit

Excise taxes are imposed on gasoline, diesel fuel, and kerosene both for auto transport and aviation at the point of their removal from a refinery or terminal, entry into the United States, and sale.  A dollar excise tax credit is available to anyone that blends pure biodiesel or agri-biodiesel with petroleum diesel to produce a mixture containing at least 0.1 percent diesel fuel.

To qualify for the credit, the blender must be registered with the Internal Revenue Service.  A qualifying mixture must either be sold for use (sold by the producer to a buyer for use by the buyer as a fuel) or used as a fuel to operate a motor vehicle (be used as a fuel in the trade or business of the producer).

Small Agri-Biodiesel Producer Credit

A small agri-biodiesel producer credit is a volumetric based income tax credit for the production of Aagri-biodiesel.”  It allows any “eligible small agri-biodiesel producer,” meaning a person who, at all times during the taxable year, has a productive capacity for agri-biodiesel not in excess of 60,000,000 gallons, a $1.00 credit.

Definitions

• Biodiesel means the monoalkyl esters of long chain fatty acids derived from plant or animal matter which meet the registration requirements for fuels and fuel additives established by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under section 211 of the Clean Air Act, and the requirements of the American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM) D6751.

• Agri-biodiesel means biodiesel derived solely from virgin oils, including esters derived from virgin vegetable oils from corn, soybeans, sunflower seeds, cottonseeds, canola, crambe, rapeseeds, safflowers, flaxseeds, rice bran, mustard seeds, and (for fuel produced, and sold or used, after 2008) camelina, and from animal fats.

The bill now moves the measure into a reconciliation phase with the House’s version of the bill, which passed at the end of 2009.

Mackinnon Lawrence is an attorney, principal consultant with Biomass Advisors, and editor & publisher of Biomass Intel. Article appearing courtesy Biomass Intel.

photo: lincolnblues

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Despite strong evidence that growing food crops to produce ethanol is harmful to the environment and the world’s poor, the Obama administration is backing subsidies and programs that will ensure that half of the U.S.’s corn crop will soon go to biofuel production. It’s time to recognize that biofuels are anything but green.

In light of the strong evidence that growing corn, soybeans, and other food crops to produce ethanol takes a heavy toll on the environment and is hurting the world’s poor through higher food prices, consider this astonishing fact: This year, more than a third of the U.S.’s record corn harvest of 335 million metric tons will be used to produce corn ethanol. What’s more, within five years fully 50 percent of the U.S. corn crop is expected to wind up as biofuels.

Here’s another sobering fact. Despite the record deficits facing the U.S., and notwithstanding President Obama’s embrace of some truly sustainable renewable energy policies, the president and his administration have wholeheartedly embraced corn ethanol and the tangle of government subsidies, price supports, and tariffs that underpin the entire dubious enterprise of using corn to power our cars. In early February, the president threw his weight behind new and existing initiatives to boost ethanol production from both food and nonfood sources, including supporting Congressional mandates that would triple biofuel production to 36 billion gallons by 2022.

Congress and the Obama administration are paying billions of dollars to producers of biofuels, with expenditures scheduled to increase steadily through 2022 and possibly 2030. The fuels are touted by these producers as a “green” solution to reliance on imported petroleum, and a boost for farmers seeking higher prices.

Yet a close look at their impact on food security and the environment — with profound effects on water, the eutrophication of our coastal zones from fertilizers, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions — suggests that the biofuel bandwagon is anything but green. Congress and the administration need to reconsider whether they are throwing good money after bad. If the biofuel saga illustrates anything, it is that thinking ecologically will require thinking more logically, as well.

Subsidy supports are a testament to the power of the farm lobby and its sway over Congress.

Investments in biofuels have grown rapidly in the last decade, accelerating especially in developed countries and Brazil after 2003, when oil prices began to climb above $25 per barrel, reaching a peak of $120 per barrel in 2008. Between 2001 and 2008, world production of ethanol tripled from 4.9 billion gallons to 17 billion gallons, while biodiesel output rose from 264 million gallons to 2.9 billion gallons. Together, the U.S. and Brazil account for most of the world’s ethanol production. Biodiesel, the other major biofuel, is produced mainly in the European Union, which makes roughly five times more than the U.S. In the EU, ethanol and biodiesel are projected to increase oilseed, wheat, and corn usage from negligible levels in 2004 to roughly 21, 17, and 5 million tons, respectively, in 2016, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In the U.S., once a reliable supplier of exported grain and oilseeds for food, biofuel production is soaring even as food crop export demand remains strong, driving prices further upward. Government support undergirding the biofuels industry has also grown rapidly and now forms a massive federal program that may be good for farm states, but is very bad for U.S. taxpayers.

These subsidy supports are a testament to the power of the farm lobby and its sway over the U.S. Congress. In addition to longstanding crop price supports that encourage production of corn and soybeans as feedstocks, biofuels are propped up by several other forms of government largesse. The first of these are mandates, known as “renewable fuels standards”: In the U.S. in 2007, energy legislation raised mandated production of biofuels to 36 billion gallons by 2022. These mandates shelter biofuels investments by guaranteeing that the demand will be there, thus encouraging oversupply.

The rapid increase in grain and oilseed prices has been a shock to consumers worldwide.

Then there are direct biofuel production subsidies, which raise feedstock prices for farmers by increasing the price of corn. In the U.S., blenders are paid a 45 cent-per-gallon “blender’s tax credit” for ethanol — the equivalent of more than $200 per acre to divert scarce corn from the food supply into fuel tanks. The federal government also pays a $1 credit for plant-based biodiesel and “cellulosic” ethanol.

Finally, there is a 54 cent-per-gallon tariff on imported biofuel to protect domestic production from competition, especially to prevent Brazilian sugarcane-based ethanol (which can be produced at less than half the cost of U.S. ethanol from corn) from entering U.S. markets. These subsidies allow ethanol producers to pay higher and higher prices for feedstocks, illustrated by the record 2008 levels of corn, soybean, and wheat prices. Projections suggest they will remain higher, assuming normal weather and yields.

The rapid increase in grain and oilseed prices due to biofuels expansion has been a shock to consumers worldwide, especially during 2008 and early 2009. From 2005 to January 2008, the global price of wheat increased 143 percent, corn by 105 percent, rice by 154 percent, sugar by 118 percent, and oilseeds by 197 percent. In 2006-2007, this rate of increase accelerated, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “due to continued demand for biofuels and drought in major producing countries.” The price increases have since moderated, but many believe only temporarily, given tight stocks-to-use ratios.

It is in poor countries that these price increases pose direct threats to disposable income and food security. There, the run-up in food prices has been ominous for the more than one billion of the world’s poor who are chronically food-insecure. Poor farmers in countries such as Bangladesh can barely support a household on a subsistence basis, and have little if any surplus production to sell, which means they do not benefit from higher prices for corn or wheat. And poor slum-dwellers in Lagos, Calcutta, Manila, or Mexico City produce no food at all, and spend as much as 90 percent of their meager household incomes just to eat.

But the most worrisome of recent criticisms of biofuels relate to their impacts on the natural environment. In the U.S., water shortages due to the huge volumes necessary to process grains or sugar into ethanol are not uncommon, and are amplified if these crops are irrigated. Growing corn to produce ethanol, according to a 2007 study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, consumes 200 times more water than the water used to process corn into ethanol.

In the cornbelt of the Upper Midwest, even more serious problem arise. Corn acreage, which expanded by over 15 percent in 2007 in response to ethanol demands, requires extensive fertilization, adding to nitrogen and phosphorus that run off into lakes and streams and eventually enter the Mississippi River watershed. This is aggravated by systems of subterranean tiles and drains — 98 percent of Iowa’s arable fields are tiled — that accelerate field drainage into ditches and local watersheds. As a result, loadings of nitrogen and phosphorus into the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico encourage algae growth, starving water bodies of oxygen needed by aquatic life and enlarging the hypoxic “dead zone” in the gulf.

Biofuels have made the slow fade from green to brown.

Next is simply the crop acreage needed to feed the biofuels beast. A 2007 study in Science noted that to replace just 10 percent of the gasoline in the U.S. with ethanol and biodiesel would require 43 percent of current U.S. cropland for biofuel feedstocks. The EU would need to commit 38 percent of its cropland base. Otherwise, new lands will need to be brought into cultivation, drawn disproportionately from those more vulnerable to environmental damage, such as forests.

A pair of 2008 studies, again in Science, focused on the question of greenhouse gas emissions due to land-use shifts resulting from biofuels. One study said that if land is converted from rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce biofuels, it causes a large net increase in greenhouse gas emissions for decades. A second study said that growing corn for ethanol in the U.S., for example, can lead to the clearing of forests and other wild lands in the developing world for food corn, which also causes a surge in greenhouse gas emissions.

A third study, by Nobel-Prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen in 2007, emphasized the impact from the heavy applications of nitrogen needed to grow expanded feedstocks of corn and rapeseed. The nitrogen necessary to grow these crops releases nitrous oxide into the atmosphere — a greenhouse gas 296 times more damaging than CO2 — and contributes more to global warming than biofuels save through fossil fuel reductions.

Thus have biofuels made the slow fade from green to brown. It is a sad irony of the biofuels experience that resource alternatives that seemed farmer-friendly and green have turned out so badly.

What’s needed are a freeze on further mandates to slow overinvestment, reductions in the blenders’ tax credit — especially when corn prices are high — and cuts in tariff protection to encourage cost-reduction strategies by U.S. producers. And the high environmental and human costs of using corn, soybeans, and other food crops to produce biofuels should spur government initiatives to develop more sustainable forms of renewable energy, such as wind power, solar power, and — one day, perhaps — algal biofuels grown at waste treatment plants.

Yet sadly, as in so many areas of policy, Congress and the administration prefer to reward inefficiency and political influence more than pursuing cost-effective — and sustainable — energy strategies.

Author C. Ford Runge is the McKnight University Professor of Applied Economics and Law at the University of Minnesota, where he also holds appointments in the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and the Department of Forest Resources. He is former director of the university’s Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy and has written for Foreign Affairs.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360

photo: nor

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This has created a public health crisis in developing countries, both in terms of contaminated drinking water and poor sanitation techniques. More than one million children mostly under the age of five die each year from diarrhea resulting from this lack of sanitary conditions. While the technology exists to solve this problem, it is expensive and sometimes hard to install.

But Swedish architect and entrepreneur, Anders Wilhelmson is hoping to tackle the issue with his invention: a safe, affordable, biodegradable plastic bag called the Peepoo that can be used as a single-use toilet.

According to the New York Times, Wilhelmson got the idea for the Peepoo while doing research in Kenya’s urban slums where he observed residents using cheap plastic bags to dispose of their waste and then literally tossing the bags out the window, know as “Flying Toilets.”

Wilhelmson and his team at Stockholm-based Peepoople developed a biodegradable bag made from 45 percent renewable materials (with a goal of 100 percent) with an interior lined with a thin layer of urea crystals. Urea, a non-hazardous chemical, breaks down disease-spreading pathogens such as parasites and bacteria in human excrement so the Peepoo can actually be used as a fertilizer. While in Kenya, Wilhelmson found that open areas that could be available for waste burial surrounded even the most densely packed slums.

Peepoople conducted tests in Kenya and Bangladesh in 2008-2009, and now Wlhelmson hopes to commercialize the product in 2010. He plans on selling each Peepoo for two or three cents, approximately the cost of an ordinary, non-disposable plastic bag.

The World Toilet Organization (WTO), a sanitation advocacy group, estimates the market for inexpensive toilets in the developing world is close to a trillion dollars. The organization has held an annual World Toilet Summit that has resulted in entrepreneurs such as Wilhemson working on low-cost sanitation solutions.

As reported in the Time, Rigel Technology of Singapore demonstrated a $30 toilet at the 2009 WTO meeting that turns solid waste into compost, and Sulabh International, an Indian nonprofit, has been promoting a number of low-cost toilets, including a one that produces biogas from human waste that can then be used for cooking.

The WTO has declared November 19 as “World Toilet Day” to increase awareness and generate local action for improved sanitation around the world.

Article by Julie Mitchell appearing courtesy Celsias.

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To be fair, said Michael Hanemann at last Friday’s BERC Energy Symposium at UC Berkeley, the private sector has been scratching its head about how to take advantage of business opportunities in water for years, but the opportunities are just not that easy to monetize.  He noted that nearly 90% of Americans receive their drinking water from public water systems.  While about half of drinking water utilities in the U.S. are privately owned, these companies provide water to just one tenth of Americans served by public water systems, and only 3% of Americans get wastewater services from private utilities (National Association of Water Companies).  There are some giants in the water industry – GE, Siemens and Halliburton are heavily involved, but many may have never even heard of the world’s largest water company, France-based Veolia Environnement.

But despite the lack of hype about the water industry over the last decade, there seems to be an awakening as of late as academics, nonprofits, investors, and entrepreneurs align to take a shot at breaking through the barriers to innovation in the water sector.  For those interested in catching up on the space, The Cleantech Group featured quite an interesting corps of water leaders at its February San Francisco Cleantech Forum, and UC Berkeley’s BERC Energy Symposium had an excellent panel of water experts including Steve Weismann of the California Center for Environmental Law and Policy, Matthew Heberger of the Pacific Institute, Laurie Park of Navigant Consulting, and Noah Goldstein of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in addition to world-renown professor Hanemann.

Numerous prizes have also recently been announced for water sector startups in an effort to jumpstart investor interest in the sector, and it will be interesting to track the winners’ progress.  The Cleantech Group and The Guardian’s Global Cleantech 100 included 12 water and wastewater companies, and the nonprofit Artemis Project’s annual competition highlights its top 50 water technologies.  Imagine H2O announced French-American vineyard water efficiency startup Fruition Sciences as the winner of its Water Innovators Prize just this past week.  The Water Innovators Prize was particularly focused on water efficiency, an area that has led to a massive decline in industrial water use over the past fifteen years but has had little impact on residential water use.  Let’s all hope that some of these incubators are able to nudge water technologies into the marketplace to make more of a dent in this space and others.  If they succeed, it will be an exciting year for an often-overlooked industry.

Water event tonight:
Imagine H2O is hosting a showcase on water innovations tonight. Learn about exciting new businesses that have risen to the surface. Meet the winning teams and other finalists from Imagine H2O’s recent Water Innovation Prize, the elite water experts who selected them, and Imagine H2O’s ecosystem of water leaders, including John Bohn, Chairman of the California Public Utilities Commission. Learn more…

photo: laszlo-photo

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IBEW Local 569

Micah Mitrosky is an Environmental Organizer with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 569 in San Diego.  She is focused on the renewables sector and talked with CleanTechies about unionization plans for the green industry.

CleanTechies: What is the mission of IBEW Local 569?

Micah Mitrosky: Our mission is to make sure that as our economy shifts to a low-carbon, sustainable economy, that we’re creating middle-class jobs with health care benefits, skilled career opportunities. A lot of what you think of as the fossil fuel sector are middle-class, union jobs. We want to make sure that, as we’re bringing in these new greener technologies and new green ways of doing things, that we’re replacing those with better middle-class career opportunities.

CleanTechies: What’s your biggest challenge in doing that?

Mitrosky: We’re running into the same things with industry that we’ve always run into. They’re working hard to keep wages low, off-shore jobs, cut corners on safety if it means a few cents more in profits.  It’s the same old story that unions have faced for a century.

CleanTechies: What is the educational level of the people you’re trying to recruit?

Mitrosky:  What we’re finding is that a lot of the building blocks of the green economy are really the same skills that union craftspeople have had through their apprenticeship training. So, for example, when you talk about green building, you don’t necessarily need new skills. It’s just buildings are going to be built in a different way, more efficiently.  But fundamentally, the building blocks of how to work with these technologies and to install them and use them are the same.

CleanTechies:   Renewable energy projects take a lot of money upfront and a lot of them never make it to the finish line. What are companies saying about their reluctance to pay these middle-class wages you’re seeking?

Mitrosky:  I think that they’re giving the same excuses that we’ve heard in every industry. But the reality is, as I mentioned before, that companies are always going to look for ways to cut corners on safety and middle class wages. And it’s up to us to hold them accountable and require that these are good middle-class jobs with skilled career training opportunities.

CleanTechies:  What’s your typical day like?

Mitrosky:  I’m working on everything from policy to media work to organizing, talking with non-union workers, planning events.

CleanTechies:   What are your current projects?

Mitrosky:  We’re looking at the electric car. I know that’s going to require a lot of skilled electrical work.  Houses are going to need to be upgraded. Charging stations will need to be built. In this case, a lot of this work will require the skills that IBEW electricians have in order for it to be done in a quality way and make sure everything is working properly and safety is the highest priority.

I’m looking at some energy efficiency retrofit possibilities. Are there some ways to partner with municipalities here in our region?  Energy efficiency is the low-hanging fruit. It’s a way to create jobs quickly, save electricity right away, reduce your greenhouse gases and there’s a lot of public funds and utility funds available for that. And also this spring, looking at ways that we can partner more closely with environmental allies and work more closely with them.

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In the United States, about 2.5 tons of carbon produced per person annually — or about 11 percent of U.S. per capita emissions — are emitted elsewhere, researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science say.

In Europe, it’s about four tons of carbon per person. In fact, in smaller European nations like Switzerland, the emissions associated with products manufactured outside the borders exceed the actual emissions produced at home.

Using 2004 trade data from 113 countries and regions, the authors of the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were able to construct a global model of the flow of “imported” and “exported” emissions, most of which are “outsourced” to developing nations. The biggest “importer” by far is China, they said.

“Just like the electricity that you use in your home probably causes CO2 emissions at a coal-burning power plant somewhere else, we found that the products imported by the developed countries of western Europe, Japan, and the United States cause substantial emissions in other countries, especially China,” said lead author Steven Davis.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

image: Steven Davis/Carnegie Institution for Science

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In the process, a network of solar mirrors direct sunlight at a mounted gasifying unit, heating ceramic tubes to 1,200 to 1,300 degrees Celsius.

Any biomass, such as wood and crop waste, that is passed through the tubes becomes vaporized and is converted into synthetic gas, the company says.

At such extreme temperatures, the process leaves behind little tar residue, which the developers say can be expensive to get rid of and can kill the catalysts that reform the product into liquid fuel later in the process.

And unlike other gasification processes — in which the heating comes from the burning of 30 to 35 percent of the biomass — this system requires no biomass to heat the unit, said Alan Weimer, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who is working with Colorado-based Sundrop Fuels to commercialize the process.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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Fruition Sciences, which operates in both California and France, came first among 50 teams in Imagine H2O’s global competition aimed at building a “Silicon Valley” for water.

Water is a $500 billion business worldwide, but draws a mere 0.5 to 1.0 percent of venture capital and only a handful of investments per year despite growing demand for solutions to widespread water shortages.

The prize rewards the business plans with the greatest promise of breakthroughs in the efficient use and supply of water, and Fruition was able to show significant water savings for nine California grape growers that used the monitor.

“In the water sector, most entrepreneurs want to be in every single market, but Fruition has started out with an intriguing niche market where they can polish their idea and then go broader into other agricultural markets,” said Scott Bryan, director of operations for Imagine H2O, a non-profit backed by Royal Bank of Canada and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Fruition co-founder Sebastien Payen said he saw a real challenge in the wine industry because there were “absolutely no plant-based sensors to optimize water management.”

He combined his expertise in sensor and information technology with co-founder Thibaut Scholasch’s research on vine water status to create the Web application.

Australia’s Rainwater HOG was prize runner-up with its H2OG water tank, which collects rainwater and can be used by city dwellers who do not have much space.

The tank already sells in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom and markets are opening in India and Japan.

California’s WaterSmart Software was also a runner-up with a Web-based application that allows water utilities to optimize their water conservation programs.

Once it goes to market, the WaterSmart application could save participating homeowners an average of 3,000 gallons of water per year, and in some cases lead to a total water use reduction of 20 percent, Imagine H2O said.

Imagine H2O offers cash prizes as well as business, legal, accounting and tax support, and access to partners, customers and financiers to bring ideas to market.

“The prize is intended to become a magnet for water entrepreneurship and give the finalists extraordinary exposure to the investment and business community,” said Imagine H2O chairman and executive director Tamin Pechet, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.

Article by Mary Milliken appearing courtesy Reuters.

photo: dklimke

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With a single, concerted initiative, says Lakshman Guruswami, the world could save millions of people in poor nations from respiratory ailments and early death, while dealing a big blow to global warming — and all at a surprisingly small cost.

“If we could supply cheap, clean-burning cook stoves to the large portion of the world that burns biomass,” says Guruswami, a Sri Lankan-born professor of international law at the University of Colorado, “we could address a significant international public health problem, and at the same stroke cut a major source of warming.”

Sooty, indoor air pollution from open wood or other biomass fires has long been linked to health problems and deaths. More recently, scientists have been surprised to learn that black carbon — not only from biomass fires but from dirty diesel engines and other sources — is a far larger contributor to global warming than previously suspected: The dark particles absorb and retain heat close to the Earth’s surface that might otherwise be reflected.

Some two billion people around the world, Guruswami notes, do most or all of their cooking and heating with fires from simple biomass — dried dung, wood, brush, or crop residues. In India alone, the ratio is much higher — about three-fourths.

“Think about that,” says Guruswami, who directs his university’s Center for Energy and Environmental Security. “Two billion people, one-third of the people on Earth, are caught in a time warp, with no access to modern energy. They got energy from Prometheus a long time ago, and that was it.”

Public health scientists have been pointing out for years that open fires and primitive stoves for cooking and heating used in much of the developing world pose profound health risks, particularly among women and children. Women typically spend hours cooking multiple meals beside smoky fires and stoves, with infants and small children in close proximity.

The public health implications alone are profound: 1.5 million lives are lost to respiratory, heart and other soot-related harm every year, according to World Health Organization estimates.

As for the climate aspects, atmospheric scientists have more recently reported that ordinary soot — or black carbon — plays a surprisingly large role in global and regional warming. Some scientists now estimate that small, solid particles of black carbon are responsible for about one-fifth of warming globally and, as such, are the second-largest contributor to climate change, after carbon dioxide gas.

In addition to soaking up heat in the atmosphere, the tiny, dark particles — or aerosols — are blown poleward or up mountains, where they settle on snow and ice and absorb warmth. Although dirty diesel engines, power plants and other more advanced technologies produce black carbon, cooking fires appear to be the largest source of soot in developing nations.

More alarming, extra warming driven by black carbon appears to be especially amplified in the high country of Asia’s Tibetan Plateau, home to the world’s highest mountains. There, in a region sometimes called the “Third Pole,” summer melt-water from thousands of glaciers forms the headwaters of major rivers that provide water to more than a billion people in teeming cities and small farms below, in India, China, and smaller nations like Burma and Vietnam. In fact, the plateau has been called “Asia’s water tower,” feeding the Ganges, the Indus, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Yellow rivers.

Already, glaciers on the plateau have declined by about 20 percent since the 1960s. Scientists have predicted that with rising Asian populations and more open fires, diesel engines, and burning of forests, the glacial melt will accelerate, eventually diminishing the rivers below.

Beginning in 2007, scientists at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography helped establish just how profound warming boosted by black carbon might be in the Tibetan Plateau. While previous hints had come from computer models, Scripps scientists working in India measured soot levels and dispersion by flying three unmanned aircraft equipped with sensors across the region. Using this data, the Scripps team, headed by climatologist Veerabhadran Ramanathan, concluded that black carbon was probably contributing at least as much to the Tibetan Plateau’s glacial melt as were greenhouse gases. A separate study last month estimated that black carbon was responsible for at least 30 percent of glacial melt in the Himalayas.

Late last year, NASA reported that black carbon rises into the atmosphere, attaches to dust, and moves with warm-season air patterns to the Himalayan foothills. Heat from the sun warms this “brown cloud,” accelerating its typical monsoon season rise up the slope, essentially pumping heat up the mountains, according to William Lau, who heads research in atmospheric sciences at NASA’S Goddard Space Flight Center.

“Over areas of the Himalayas, the rate of warming is more than five times faster than warming globally,” Lau said at a press briefing in December, noting that the heating problem is most dramatic in the western part of the Tibetan Plateau. “Based on the differences, it’s not difficult to conclude that greenhouse gases are not the sole agents of change in [this] region,” he added. “There’s a localized phenomenon at play.”

Enter the cook stove. A November 2009 study published in The Lancet, the British medical journal, estimated that a decade-long, all-out effort to equip about 90 percent of Indian households that burn biomass with clean-burning cook stoves by 2020 would reduce premature deaths by 17 percent annually, essentially saving 55.5 million years of human life.

But there’s a key reason the world’s poor have long cooked with biomass over sooty fires, often nothing more than a “three-stone fire” with dried dung or brush smoldering under a pot sitting on a triangle of stones: They couldn’t afford anything better.

The University of Colorado’s Guruswami says that to be workable for billions of people who might live on as little as one dollar a day, a better cook stove has to have three main attributes: It has to reduce soot, it has to be long-lived, and it has to be cheap — ideally $10 or less. The good news is that inventors and engineers have come up with various versions of efficient cook stoves, some of them both simple to use and inexpensive.

In the early 1980s, Oregon-based engineer Larry Winiarski developed what he called the Rocket Stove, designed for cleaner combustion and more heat using a fire that burns the tips of a long bunch of small wood sticks: To feed the fire as the tips burn away, a cook need only push the bundle in further. The Rocket stove is designed to take advantage of natural convection to burn its biomass more efficiently, and in fact uses about half as much wood as a primitive three-stone fire or simpler stove.

The Aprovecho Research Center, a nonprofit where Winiarski serves as technical director, estimates that more than 40 stove projects in many nations have since built Rocket stoves, and estimates that more than a quarter-million Rocket stoves are now being used worldwide.

Fort Collins, Colo., home to a major university-based combustion laboratory, is a hotbed of cook-stove advocacy and dissemination.

Envirofit, a nonprofit started by two engineering graduates of Colorado State University and two professors, has developed a modified, patent-pending Rocket stove that it claims is exceptionally durable. A problem with past designs is that metal combustion chambers tend to quickly fail due to high heat and caustic fumes. But Envirofit worked with Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists to develop a combustion chamber made of metal alloys that give it an exceptionally long life — long enough, it says, that it can issue warranties on the chamber for five years.

The group works closely with Colorado State’s world-class Engines and Energy Conversion Lab to develop other combustion-chamber and stove efficiency features. The engineering focus, says Envirofit Vice President of Engineering Nathan Lorenz, has been to “control the geometry of the combustion chambers and heat transfer.” The more heat you transfer, the faster a pot heats up, the less fuel you burn.

About 100,000 Envirofit stoves have already been sold in India, at prices as low as 700 rupees, or about $15. The stoves quickly pay for themselves in fuel savings alone, allowing households to save $50 to $75 annually that would have been spent on wood or other biomass, even while using 60 percent less biomass and eliminating about 80 percent of soot.

Another Fort Collins-based nonprofit, called Trees, Water, and People, focuses on Central America, Mexico, and Haiti, where it promotes local construction of Rocket-type stoves. Working with local partners, the group says it has built more than 35,000 stoves.

In India, Scripp’s V. Ramanathan has helped pioneer a newer program that adds a layer of science. Dubbed Project Surya, this nascent effort is conducted in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme. Its first community-wide experiment, launched last March in a village in Uttar Pradesh state, will provide cook stoves, along with solar lanterns (to replace sooty kerosene lamps), to every household that wants them.

The unique feature: The project is designed to collect a wealth of data. A small sensor on the roof of the home of the village leader will provide the first accurate measurements of how much carbon is actually reduced in the local setting. Regional sensors and satellites will eventually help scientists learn more about more widespread pollution effects.

The Energy and Resources Institute in India also has launched a “Lighting a Billion Lives” campaign designed to replace soot-producing kerosene lamps and dung or wood fires with solar-powered lanterns. Begun in 2008, the campaign has so far supplied more than 6,000 solar lanterns to people in roughly 200 Indian villages.

Elsewhere, two of Europe’s largest industrial corporations, Phillips and Bosch, also have high-efficiency cook stoves in development. At Yale University, mechanical engineer Allesandro Gomez, director of the school’s Center for Combustion Studies, has begun to work on other designs.

But a conundrum remains. Researchers have found that it can be difficult to convince people to switch from traditional cooking methods to more advanced stoves, for a variety of reasons that range from uneasiness with unfamiliar or finicky technology, to upfront costs. Working with Yale development economist Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and a local NGO, a team of researchers at Stanford University has found that many households in Bangladesh simply do not regard the high-efficiency cook stoves as great improvements. The group found that even when offered completely free stoves, more than 30 percent of households refused the offer.

Envirofit’s Lorenz says some of those stoves are simply too cheaply made. That’s why his nonprofit focuses on charging at least minimally for its more durable products, and even paying attention to product aesthetics. “People would rather be treated like customers than victims,” he says.

In India, the promise of improved cook stoves and reduced black carbon have triggered high-level government action recently. In December, New and Renewable Energy Minister Farooq Abdullah announced a new “National Biomass Cook-stoves Initiative.” Given that the world’s wealthiest nations are overwhelmingly responsible for planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, it seems reasonable to suggest that these countries could launch micro-lending programs to underwrite the widespread adoption of clean stoves.

India and the world have at least one good reason to move quickly to reduce black carbon: Compared to greenhouse gas reductions, slashing black carbon offers a much quicker and cheaper fix. While climate-altering carbon dioxide can remain in the atmosphere for many decades, solid soot generally falls from the sky in days or weeks.

“It’s a faster fix, and when you think about the humongous cost of fixing even one power plant to reduce carbon dioxide, it’s really cheap,” says Guruswami. “This is what economists like to call low-lying fruit. Let’s find a way pick it.”

Article by John Luoma appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360, NASA Visible Earth.

photo: Ed Brambley

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The state set a record on March 5 when wind turbines generated 6,272 megawatts of energy, or about 19 percent of the electricity on the state’s main power grid.

That peak far exceeded the 6.2 percent average for wind power in Texas, whose 9,410 megawatts of total wind capacity make it the nation’s wind power leader.

But wind power’s growth poses a critical challenge for the state’s booming wind industry, which includes a 180-megawatt wind farm completed last fall near Corpus Christi in South Texas.

On some days wind turbines are slowed or shut down because the state doesn’t have enough transmission wires to send the energy from remote areas, where wind resources are great, to cities that need it, including Dallas and Houston.

The state is planning to spend more than $5 billion to expand and update its transmission system.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

photo: swisscan

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