Greenbang

Scientists use laser to take oil’s ‘fingerprints’

Greenbang — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:00:11 +0000

Researchers with the petroleum company Saudi Aramco have found a way to use a laser to “fingerprint” oil. The innovation promises a number of benefits, including better quality control at refineries.

The laser device takes mere nanoseconds to excite an oil sample’s fluorescence spectra, which is then analysed to provide a “spectral fingerprint” of the sample. The instrument is also sturdy and portable, which will enable it to be used in the field to assess petroleum quality.

“(W)e’re also working on a remote sensing version that can be used in helicopters to detect and identify oil spills and seepage into water,” said Ezzat M. Hegazi, senior research scientist at Saudi Aramco and leader of the instrument design effort.

Among the device’s potential uses:

Measuring the exact ratios of different types of crude oil in any particular blend down to 0.001 per cent;
Detecting illegal blending of fuel oils;
Assessing an oil sample’s water and sulphur content;
Identifying oil spills; and
Monitoring viscosity in oil pipelines.

The research team says the laser instrument can also serve as an additional investigative tool in assessing geological formations in oil exploration.

Survey: Where’s the value in corporate social responsibility?

Greenbang — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:19:16 +0000

Do you work for a firm that’s taking steps to be a socially responsible business? If so, we’d like to ask you a few questions in this brief survey.

We’re interested in learning more about how much your organisation is spending on corporate social responsibility, who’s in charge of funding those efforts and what sort of value your business gains from its CSR programmes. The survey has just four questions, so should take less than a minute to complete.

Let us know what your company is doing in CSR and take the survey now by clicking here.

Jurdy: Wasteful motoring

Greenbang — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:11:02 +0000

Jurdy finds a better use for government paperwork …

US unveils new climate portal for decision-makers, public

Greenbang — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:49:27 +0000

The US government today unveiled a new web portal today that’s designed to meet a rising demand for information on how climate change might affect farming, public health, business and infrastructure.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Services site will serve as a one-stop shop for the agency’s climate-related information, data, products and services.

“More and more individuals — community planners, farmers, public health officials and small business owners — are seeking reliable, user-friendly climate data and information,” said NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco. “We envision this climate portal as the first step toward making the wealth of climate information at NOAA available in one easy-to-use resource.”

The site is designed to meet the needs of five broadly-defined user groups: decision-makers and policy leaders, scientists and applications-oriented data users, educators, business users and the public.

Highlights of the site include:

An interactive “climate dashboard” that lets users see a range of constantly updating climate datasets (including temperature, carbon dioxide concentration and sea level) over adjustable time scales;
A new Web-based climate science magazine called ClimateWatch that features videos and articles of scientists discussing their recent climate research and topics that cannot be relayed in charts and graphs;
Explanations and exploration of data products available from NOAA and partner agencies, with direct links to the sources of the comprehensive datasets;
Educational resources for students and teachers, including lesson plans for the classroom and laboratory, educational games and interactive media; and
Easy-to-understand fact sheets and presentations for professionals and the public about climate science, research and climate impacts.

US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke today also announced plans to create a NOAA Climate Service line office dedicated to bringing together the agency’s climate science and service delivery capabilities.

“By providing critical planning information that our businesses and our communities need, NOAA Climate Service will help tackle head-on the challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change,” Locke said. “In the process, we’ll discover new technologies, build new businesses and create new jobs.”

Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, said such information would help “bring about an economic recovery by more rapidly modernising our nation’s energy infrastructure.”

He added, “Addressing climate change is one of our most pressing environmental challenges. Making climate science more easily accessible to all Americans will help us gain the consensus we need to move forward.”

Car bodies, mobile phones could one day be their own batteries

Greenbang — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:41:58 +0000

Could we one day see a battery-free future for mobile phones, electric cars and other devices?

European researchers believe we can, and have just launched a €3.4 million project to develop a new material that could essentially allow phone housings and car bodies to act as their own power source. The effort, if successful, could enable credit-card-thin phones and electric cars far smaller, lighter and more efficient than those today.

The key to all these potential innovations lies with a new material made of carbon fibres and a polymer resin. Patented by Imperial College London, the material can both store and discharge electrical energy and is strong and lightweight enough to be used for car parts, mobiles, computers and other devices.

“We are really excited about the potential of this new technology,” said Emile Greenhalgh, a researcher at Imperial’s department of aeronautics and co-ordinator of the EU-funded project. “We think the car of the future could be drawing power from its roof, its bonnet or even the door, thanks to our new composite material. Even the Sat Nav could be powered by its own casing.

“The future applications for this material don’t stop there — you might have a mobile phone that is as thin as a credit card because it no longer needs a bulky battery, or a laptop that can draw energy from its casing so it can run for a longer time without recharging. We’re at the first stage of this project and there is a long way to go, but we think our composite material shows real promise.”

The research project aims to refine the new material so it can replace the metal flooring in a car’s wheel well, which holds the spare tyre. Volvo, one of the project participants, is exploring the possibility of installing such a wheel well in prototype cars for testing. The innovation could reduce the number of batteries needed in hybrid cars and reduce vehicle weight by 15 per cent.

Another benefit of the new material is that, unlike conventional batteries, it doesn’t use chemical processes to hold and discharge electricity. That makes it quicker to recharge and less prone to degradation over time.

One of the first goals of the new research project is to improve the new material so it can store more energy. Researchers believe they can achieve that by growing carbon nanotubes on top of the carbon fibres, which would increase the material’s surface area and boost its energy storage capacity.

Breakthrough could lead to cheap, printable sheets of light

Greenbang — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:25:42 +0000

Swedish and US researchers have developed a new lighting technology that could lead to innovations like illuminated wallpaper made entirely of plastic and cheaper, more easily recycled electronic devices.

The secret, they believe, lies with using organic light-emitting electrochemical cells (LECs) to replace the organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, that currently provide the light-up displays in mobile phones, cameras and flat-screen TVs.

While today’s OLED technology has enabled a proliferation of ultra-thin, energy-efficient gadgets, it comes with a couple of drawbacks. One, OLEDs are made with indium tin oxide, and indium is rare, expensive and difficult to recycle. Two, the OLEDs themselves are costly to make.

Replacing OLEDs with LECs could solve both those problems, as the LECs feature a transparent electrode made with graphene — a one-atom-thick lattice of carbon, which is far cheaper and far more abundant than indium.

“This is a major step forward in the development of organic lighting components, from both a technological and an environmental perspective,” said Nathaniel Robinson, a scientist at Sweden’s Linköping University. “Organic electronics components promise to become extremely common in exciting new applications in the future, but this can create major recycling problems. By using graphene instead of conventional metal electrodes, components of the future will be much easier to recycle and thereby environmentally attractive.”

Today’s OLEDs feature a light-generating layer of plastic between two electrodes, one of which has to be transparent. With the LECs, the transparent electrode is made of graphene. Furthermore, all the components of LECs can be produced from liquid solutions, making it possible to essentially print LECs on a roll.

“This paves the way for inexpensive production of entirely plastic-based lighting and display components in the form of large flexible sheets,” said Ludvig Edman, a researcher at Umeå University. “This kind of illumination or display can be rolled up or can be applied as wallpaper or on ceilings.”

Jurdy: Piecing things together

Greenbang — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:25:00 +0000

Jurdy offers a reminder …

Brazil: Europe’s perfect supplier for biomass & biofuels

Greenbang — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:22:08 +0000

Editor’s note: The following is a guest commentary by Stanley Wootliff, chairman of jatropha grower Viridas PLC.

Shell’s joint venture with Cosan highlights the strong positioning of Brazil as well as the burgeoning demand for biofuels. While this may have come as a surprise to some, it was no surprise to me, having spent the last three years developing an appropriate strategy to deliver biofuels to Europe from Brazil.

Brazil has the ideal climate in terms of sunlight and rainfall; it also benefits from having large areas of accessible, fertile, idle land. The country benefits from a strong economy and good political stability, as well as having excellent infrastructure.

While Brazil may be perfect, the views on biofuels have been mixed. There is no doubt that there have been many lessons to learn, particularly from some of the mistakes of the past adopted by first-generation biofuel developers. Companies need to adopt an owner/operator plantation model that ensures the biomass and fuel is generated in a truly sustainable way. Food crop-derived biofuels have fallen out of favour but second-generation replacements are not expected to enter the market in the short term.

However, jatropha is one of few feedstock crops which has the potential to become a truly sustainable dedicated energy crop.

Jatropha, a tree indigenous to Brazil, will grow to heights in excess of five metres and is ideal for mechanised crop picking. Furthermore, jatropha plantations will not be a monoculture but will be co-planted with grass and legumes. The jatropha seeds will be transported to the UK on dry bulk tankers to a 250,000-tonnes-per-annum capacity crushing plant which will be located close to its customers (ensuring inland transportation costs are kept to a minimum). By transporting the seeds rather than crushing in Brazil and transporting the biomass and oil separately, shipping costs are substantially reduced. When generating 60,000 tonnes of jatropha oil, you will also generate 240,000 tonnes of biomass!

The UK biomass demand is largely unsatisfied. Despite an attractive incentive (two Renewable Obligation Certificates per megawatt-hour), power producers cannot secure sufficient sustainable biomass for power generation. With Scottish & Southern, Drax and others all currently planning dedicated biomass power stations, the demand is truly significant. Sourcing materials from a country that can produce it sustainably is essential to us cutting carbon sooner rather than later.

Given jatropha can be produced for a cost per barrel less than oil, it makes complete economic sense to develop this now.

Why Cisco is feeling so smart

Greenbang — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:10:21 +0000

Energy companies around the world are worried. They’ve been tasked to deliver a “smart grid” — one that is able to control consumer appliances , cut costs and boost efficiency while managing the distribution of power.

A source (who shall remain nameless) who works at one of the UK’s largest energy suppliers recently told Greenbang how utility companies are finding it hard to see where they can make any money from the smart grid. It encourages people to use less electricity — and if they don’t, it does it for them, keeping the costs down all the way. And it means a big overhaul of infrastructure.

But the UK government and others around the world are pushing utility companies down the same road: to clean up their waste and, while they’re at it, bring the technology into the 21st century.

But there are some companies waiting patiently for more to happen. And one of them is Cisco.

The idea of the smart grid works in the same way as the internet and that means, from a business perspective, it could bring about an internet bubble all over again — with applications, devices, data and, most importantly for Cisco, a shiny-new infrastructure to build.

“I think it’s an area we need to keep our open eyes on,” says Phil Smith, vice president of technology for Cisco in Europe. “We think routing and switching and apps are a great opportunity. And Cisco hasn’t done too badly there.

“But (with smart grid) the whole metering structure and the way the information is measured is not in place either. There needs to be a much flatter structure that allows energy to be fed in and out of the grid in a much more peer-to-peer basis that would allow storage and microgeneration (the use of alternative energy generation on your home).”

Napster and Limewire — two of the best–known (and controversial) internet file-sharing applications — work on the peer-to-peer system. It works by connecting a supplier of a file with someone who wants to download it. In the case of music and films, its copyright legality has been challenged many times, but that doesn’t change the fact that peer-to-peer is an intelligent way of getting the supply of bits and bytes to meet demand.

“There are a number of areas of smart grid,” says Smith. “There is the delivery system. Then there’s a clear interface for users such as meters that allow users to control energy. The grid itself is about real-time management that delivers energy when it’s cheapest or most available from a certain areas.

“If you look at utilities companies, they are built in a very traditional model (that) looks like what networks used to be. In the early days, most networks started in the middle. Utilities are the same — they are built on power generation. It’s shared down through a hierarchy through a plug in the wall.

“Clearly the girds today are not set up to deal with the challenges of today.”

The US could save $117 billion over the next 20 years by modernising its energy grids, a study by the US Department of Energy found. In doing this, it would make the grid more intelligent, it could coordinate low-priority devices and schedule supply of energy in relation to its demand — wherever that may be.

Further research from the UK government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change states that the development of smart grids internationally is creating a rapidly growing global market, estimated to be worth €30 billion (£27 billion) over the next five years.

At Greenbang HQ, more and more press releases on smart grid are arriving every day. One PR agency even specialises in smart-grid technology and services. It’s a sign that the market is growing.

“Clearly it’s an attractive modernisation opportunity to be honest,” adds Smith. “It’s the same with any grid. We think we have something to say on how to control big grids and networks. But I think unless you create a structure that we talked about you can’t have a proper smart grid.

“Because if you can’t share properly, you can’t do all the things you need to do; there are opportunities for our utility customers. But they’ve got to build new and different relationships with existing customers.”

There are problems making the smart-grid happen: for one thing, a fully-functional smart grid that can manage devices in people’s homes is a long way off. It’s true that some technology exists, such as smart meters and remote-housing control, to pave the way to this, but pretty much all you can do at the moment is measure.

While the government has already committed to ensuring that smart meters are in all homes by 2020, legislation and government leadership are clearly lacking in the roll-out of an intelligent smart grid.

The UK’s low carbon transition roadmap, to be published in Spring 2010, will identify the actions for smart grids. That’s three months away while the clock ticks on. It’s likely that all will come of it is a clearer roadmap of how to measure and monitor – not what the smart grid will do and how to build it.

At best, monitoring is useful; most electrical appliances are at this stage recognisable from their energy patterns, but to take control of them would require many more link-ups with the internet. And that’s where Cisco sees the opening:

“In time, you could put certain devices into peak mode,” says Smith. “That’s interesting as people are going to want to manage more of them.

“You don’t have to build more power stations, as that’s expensive. I think people are being smarter. We can see it evolving through a real-time infrastructure and putting in distributed intelligence at the demand and supply ends.”

Finally, good government waste: Office trash becomes biofuels

Greenbang — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:39:57 +0000

Finally, a use for all those thousand-plus-page pieces of legislation that our elected officials never read anyway: shred ‘em, pulp ‘em, add a shot of enzymes and ferment them into something useful: biofuels for cars.

Turns out, two companies — Denmark’s Novozymes and US-based Fiberight — have done just that by turning government waste paper and cardboard into “trashanol.” They used that fuel last week to power a flex-fuel Chevy HHR and flex-fuel Ford F150 during demonstration drives in Washington, DC.

Both vehicles can run on E85, a blend of 85 per cent waste-based biofuel and 15 per cent petrol.

During the “Ride ‘n’ Drive” demo, officials and media members had a chance to take the trash-fueled Chevy for a spin. The event marked “the first time in US history” that a vehicle powered by government waste wound through the streets of the nation’s capital, according to Novozymes.

Fiberight recently bought an ethanol plant in Iowa and is converting it to a facility that’s expected to eventually produce up to 10 million gallons of biofuel a year from municipal solid waste. According to Craig Stuart-Paul, the company’s CEO, the US could produce up to 8 billion gallons of biofuel a year if it directed all of its paper waste toward that goal.

Don’t have time to brew your office waste paper into fuel? You might instead choose to feed it into White Goat, a machine that chews up old papers and spits out rolls of ready-to-use toilet paper (1 roll per 40 sheets of A4 paper).