The report from the Bundeswehr Transformation Centre, described in Spiegel Online, was prepared for the German military but not intended for release. The study warns of security impacts likely to develop as global oil production peaks and then dwindles. Among those effects, which — according to the report — could be felt within 15 to 30 years:

• Rising prominence of oil-exporting countries: As petroleum becomes harder to come by, those nations with any supply to spare will be able to flex more global muscle and expand the scope of their influence;
• Less free market, more politics: Growing competition for dwindling oil supplies will likely bring a return of more of the “privileged partnerships” last seen in petroleum markets before the 1973 Middle East oil embargo;
• Price shocks, shortages, rationing and collapse: With nearly every aspect of modern society — from agriculture and transportation to medicine and communications — dependent upon oil, declining supplies could lead to a global chain reaction of economic and political crises.

The German report echoes the analysis offered by a similar study released in March by the US military. The “Joint Operating Environment 2010″ document, prepared by the US Joint Forces Command, warned that the world’s “surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear” by 2012. Such an energy shortfall could lead to food shortages, regional breakdowns in security and a growing risk of petro-dollars being siphoned into terrorist networks, the report found.

Leaders in the UK have also recently been wrestling with the spectre of looming energy shortages. Earlier this year, the UK Industry Task Force on Peak Oil & Energy Security warned an oil crunch could begin hitting Britain hard within five years. And the Guardian recently reported that UK officials, while in the past dismissive of the peak oil concept, appear to be closely guarding documents related to the issue from public release.

As the late and greatly missed oil industry analyst Matthew Simmons once noted, peak oil is “one of these fuzzy events that you only know clearly when you see it through a rear view mirror, and by then an alternate resolution is generally too late.”

If those experts in Germany, the US and the UK are right, we might find ourselves peering into that rear view mirror sooner than some expect.

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Of the 31 new companies judged to be the most innovative around the world, 13 — the most ever — are in the cleantech sector. They include a UK firm that’s developed a new cement that’s carbon-negative, a US-based company whose technology can help consumers and businesses monitor and manage their energy consumption and a California startup that enables wireless communications for the smart grid, water distribution and other services.

Announced today, the WEF’s Technology Pioneers 2011 will be recognized during the “Summer Davos” gathering of business leaders in Tianjin, China, later this month.

“I strongly believe that a robust innovation ecosystem is crucial for building both sustainable information-based economies and the solutions required to tackle many of today’s societal challenges,” said Jeong Kim, president of Alcatel-Lucent Bell-Labs. “In reviewing this year’s candidates, it was evident that many of them will play a significant role in that innovation ecosystem.”

Chosen from a field of more than 330 applicants, this year’s cleantech Technology Pioneers include:

• Digital Lumens (Boston), which produces light-emitting diode (LED) lamps that can reduce lighting-related energy consumption by up to 90 per cent;
• Ecovative Design (Green Island, New York), which has developed a process for converting crop waste into a plastics substitute;
• Ferrate Treatment Technologies (Orlando, Florida), which makes a portable reactor that can produce inexpensive ferrate for water treatment;
• Flexoresearch Group (Patum Thani Province, Thailand), which has developed an enzyme blend that can recover fibre from laminated paper waste and use it to produce new paper;
• Novacem (London), which has created a new type of cement made with magnesium oxide, magnesium carbonates and magnesium silicate minerals that’s a carbon-negative alternative to traditional Portland cement;
• On-Ramp Wireless (San Diego), which offers a wireless processing system for low-power monitoring and control applications;
• OPOWER (Arlington, Virginia), which developed an analytics engine to help consumers understand their energy consumption behaviour;
• Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies (Vancouver, British Columbia), which has created a new type of wastewater treatment process that eliminates clogging problems and turns a once-polluting byproduct into a slow-release fertiliser;
• Quintas Renewable Energy Solutions (Akure, Nigeria), which produces inverters to prevent power outages in hospitals and businesses;
• TaKaDu (Yehud, Israel), which has developed a smart-grid-type approach to detect leaks and failures in water distribution systems;
• Tendril (Boulder, Colorado), which offers a suite of products for monitoring and controlling home energy consumption;
• Topell Energy (The Hague, Netherlands), which has developed an efficient way of converting woody biomass into solid biofuels; and
• Transonic Combustion (Camarillo, California), which makes a fuel injection system that can improve vehicle mileage and reduce polluting emissions.

Technology pioneers in other categories include INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND NEW MEDIA
Aster Data (US), Atlassian (Australia),  foursquare (US), GetJar (Lithuania/US), Knewton (US), Layar (Netherlands), NetQuin Mobile (China), OpenDNS (US), ReputationDefender (US), Scribd (US), SecondMarket (US), Spotify (UK) and Vortex Engineering (India) (information technologies and new media); and Adimab (US), Ion Torrent (US), Medicine in Need (South Africa), Molecular Partners (Switzerland) and Neuronetics (US) (life sciences and health).

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Building an infrastructure that can accommodate both traditional and renewable energy sources — and doing so in the short time frame that’s needed — will be the decade’s most critical engineering challenge, according to a survey of 323 engineering company leaders by the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC).

Given a choice of six potential engineering challenges, 29.9 per cent of respondents identified the top priority as, “The nation must vastly escalate the development of renewable and traditional energy infrastructure to meet future energy needs, decrease the adverse environmental impacts of fossil fuels, and reduce dependence on foreign oil.”

Coming in a close second, with 29 per cent choosing it as the number-one concern, was the need to update the US’s “underfunded and overburdened highways, airports, bridges and transit.”

“This unique survey of top engineering leaders underscores the necessity of putting energy and transportation higher on our national list of priorities,” said David A. Raymond, president and CEO of the ACEC. “The extraordinary fact is that we as a nation are not anywhere close to adequately addressing either of these problems.”

An interesting side note: executives whose companies worked primarily in the South and West of the US were more likely to name energy as the top priority, while those operating in the Northeast and Midwest gave greater weight to transportation.

Other looming engineering challenges, executives believe, include improving the nation’s crumbling water infrastructure (21.8 per cent named this the top priority), securing the social and economic infrastructure from cyber-attacks (10.6 per cent), implementing sustainable building designs and technologies (4.8 per cent) and upgrading the electricity grid and adding smart-grid technologies (4.7 per cent).

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Otarian, which recently opened its first “fast-casual” restaurant in London (and another in New York City), takes a variety of steps to keep the carbon footprints of its menu items as low as possible. First of all, there’s no meat, as livestock production is a large source of greenhouse gases. Second, it aims to get seasonal ingredients from local sources when possible. And, third, it has a “no air freight” policy for supplies that must come from more distant locales like Israel or California.

The result, hopes Otarian founder Radhika Oswal, are dishes that by default are associated with fewer carbon dioxide emissions when they arrive at your table. By then comparing each dish to a similar, meat-based or less sustainable alternative — a vegetable biryani compared to a lamb biryani, for example — Otarian calculates how much carbon you’ve avoided. Customers keep track of those savings via their “Carbon Karma” cards.

Earn 100 Carbon Karma credits, and you get a free item off the menu.

While it’s no Chez Panisse in terms of sustainable food sourcing, Otarian is no McDonald’s either. It composts or recycles 98 per cent of its restaurant waste — even though it’s paying a 100 per cent premium to do so — features furnishings made from sustainable or recycled materials, and gets its electricity from renewable sources. All combined, such efforts lend weight to Otarian’s claim to be the “first-ever low-carbon restaurant chain.”

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The $75 million (US)  plant, being built by Canada-based Enerkem (pdf), is expected to produce around 36 million litres (10 million gallons) of biofuels a year from municipal waste. That’s enough for a year’s worth of driving by 400,000 cars using a five per cent ethanol blend, according to the company. The plant’s construction is being paid for in part with government funding from the city of Edmonton and the province of Alberta.

Enerkem is building a similar plant in Mississippi with the help of $50 in funding from the US Department of Energy.

The 100,000 tonnes of solid waste that will fuel the Canadian plant will be garbage that the city cannot recycle or compost. In addition to generating biofuels, the facility will also reduce methane emissions from landfills, where organic waste decomposition produces large amounts of the powerful greenhouse gas.

Over the next 25 years, the Edmonton plant is expected to reduce Alberta’s carbon footprint by about six million tonnes.

“As a result of this facility, we will become the first major city in North America to see 90 per cent of residential waste diverted from landfill by 2013,” Stephen Mandel, Edmonton’s mayor, said at the plant’s groundbreaking ceremony today. “This is a major achievement, and a big step towards a greener Edmonton.”

“This groundbreaking marks the launch of a transformative project and leads the first wave of commercial-scale advanced biofuels plants in North America,” added Vincent Chornet, president and CEO of Enerkem. “This plant is the genesis of a world transformation where our non-recyclable garbage will power the vehicles we drive and reduce carbon emissions.”

While Enerkem uses a gasification process to convert solid waste into fuel, even burning solid waste for energy is a better bet for the environment. Every tonne of organic waste that goes to landfill produces about 62 cubic metres of methane as it degrades. That amount of gas has more than two times the greenhouse gas potential than the one tonne of carbon dioxide that would be produced by burning.

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Climate change, resource depletion, water scarcity and other major environmental challenges have prompted governments and venture capitalists to sponsor a wave of entrepreneurial innovation. Entrepreneurs worldwide are striving to address these issues through breakthrough technologies and new business models. Fortune 1,000 companies are also heavily focused in this area, often collaborating with smaller firms to tap into new ideas. The resulting cleantech industry is a dynamic force in the economy today.

Private investors are active as well. Cleantech venture capital investments equalled $5.64 billion in 2009, with notable concentrations in North America, Europe, and Asia — about a quarter of all global venture investments and the most of any single category. According to the United Nations Environment Programme and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, investment in the sustainable energy market defied the global recession, growing by around five per cent  — from $148 billion in 2007 to around $155 billion in 2008. Industry analyst predictions suggest that cleantech investment in 2010 will recover and exceed 2009 numbers.

Scoping the challenge

Erwin Burth, director of industry development for Autodesk

Yet despite the strong recent growth of the cleantech market, the sector today is facing a range of complex challenges. One of the most important of these challenges is the need to accelerate time to market. Like all startup companies, new cleantech-focused organisations are heavily dependent on bringing their products to market quickly to tap into new revenue streams.

Speed to market is, however, a particularly key issue in the cleantech arena. Cleantech products often integrate with infrastructure and broader systems and they typically need to be developed using alternative materials, so bringing a product to market is a complex, lengthy process. Also, as cleantech is a relatively new and highly competitive arena, market timing for new products is often a key determinant not just of long-term success but of short-term survival. And from a broader societal perspective, it is important that new cleantech solutions are developed rapidly to find greener alternatives to the way organisations operate today.

Finding a solution

Fortunately, there is a new approach to product design that enables cleantech manufacturers  to overcome this challenge called “digital prototyping.” Developing cleantech products requires high-quality, 3D mechanical design and simulation software that allows product designers to create digital prototypes. Digital prototyping helps to make the cleantech product development process far more efficient by allowing manufacturers to digitally design, visualise and simulate how a product will work under real-world conditions before it is built. It reduces reliance on physical prototypes, which helps accelerate time to market in highly competitive industries like cleantech. It also assists cleantech manufacturers with using recyclable materials and to fully optimise materials usage.

By giving conceptual design, engineering and manufacturing departments the ability to virtually explore a complete product before it becomes real, digital prototyping makes the whole design process more streamlined and efficient. It also reduces the inherent risk in the process, helping to ensure that cleantech companies make their mistakes on the computer desktop — where the cost is low — and not in the factory or  the marketplace. After all, an engineer can try out many design iterations to test if a digital prototype works at a much lower cost with fewer materials, and have confidence the physical prototype will perform better.

Digital prototyping also helps cleantech companies become cleaner and greener. Dedicated to solving environmental problems, it is important that these firms design and manufacture their products in a sustainable way. Part of this means  selecting product materials that can be re-used or are biodegradeable at the end of a product’s lifecycle, and part of it is about reducing or eliminating toxic materials and sourcing materials more wisely.  Twenty years ago, the development of a wind turbine would have typically involved significant materials waste. Today, this practice would be entirely unacceptable. Digital prototyping  is the key to easily exploring alternative designs to see which ones best meet both a product’s commercial and sustainability objectives.

Looking to the future of sustainable design

Pyrum Innovations, a German/French startup working on a newly invented recycling process for used tyres, is one of a growing numbers of cleantech companies that have joined the Autodesk Clean Tech Partner Programme.

Today, the clean technology industry has the opportunity to solve some of the most pressing environmental problems of our generation and is one of the most dynamic sectors of the global economy. As we look to the future, the increasing  purchasing power and capital investments by multibillion-dollar global companies underscore the market opportunities that lie ahead in cleantech. In a recent survey conducted by Environmental Leader into the views and opinions of large corporations, the vast majority of respondents project their companies will spend at least $10 million on cleantech investments by 2010, with 22 per cent predicting a cleantech spend of at least $100 million. Case in point: giant conglomerate GE said it will double its eco-related R&D spending to $1.5 billion in 2010 and aims to double its revenues from sales of cleantech products and services to $20 billion.

This is positive news, but the success of the cleantech sector in coming years will depend heavily on the innovation of smaller businesses and startup companies, where digital prototyping will be critical in driving faster time to market and competitive advantage for cleantech businesses, from solar device-makers to wind turbine manufacturers. Embracing digital prototyping will separate the winners from the losers, particularly as consolidation occurs in sectors or geographies where there’s been over-investment in recent years.

One thing is clear, those cleantech companies that employ digital prototyping are increasing their odds to seize more than their fair share of the market’s rapid growth.

Editor’s note: This was a guest article by Erwin Burth, director of industry development at Autodesk. Autodesk, which specialises in 2D and 3D design technology, recently launched a Clean Tech Partner Programme in the UK and across Europe. The scheme provides digital prototyping software grants to clean technology companies to help them innovate more rapidly.

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Case in point: did you realize that, over the past several months, four high-profile members of the US Climate Action Partnership have quietly, unceremoniously quit their memberships? These one-time and, now, not-so-much warriors against global warming include Deere & Co., ConocoPhilips, Caterpillar and — what a slap in the planet’s face is this? — BP America. And why are these firms no longer championing efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Because they can. Because conservative (though not of a livable climate or natural resources, apparently) groups like FreedomWorks and the Free Enterprise Project feel free to run attack ads against companies that dare to come out in support of things like cap-and-trade. And because no one on the other side is running an equally aggressive, big-budget attack on the attackers.

In similar fashion, a Sunday Telegraph article late last year implied that Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, had profited millions from “conflict of interest” dealings with carbon traders and other firms. The allegations reverberated loudly throughout the blogosphere, unquestioned for the most part by other media outlets or climate organisations that could have easily proved otherwise. It took Pachauri’s own employer, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), to undertake an audit that concluded — as published today in The Guardian — there was “no evidence” of financial gain from any conflicts of interest.  In fact, as Guardian columnist George Monbiot notes, rather than millions, Pachauri made “£45,000 as his salary at TERI, and a maximum of £2,174 in outside earnings.”

And then there’s California’s Proposition 23, a so-called “jobs initiative” set to be decided by that state’s voters this December. However, the initiative is more of an anti-jobs proposal — at least as far as green jobs are concerned. According to the Huffington Post, the proposal, which would suspend some of the state’s ground-breaking environmental regulations, has the financial backing of — surprise — oil companies like Valero and Tesoro. Never mind that such green legislation on California’s part has actually stimulated jobs growth. But if the cleantech crowd doesn’t speak up, as well as pony up the bucks needed to finance an equally large media campaign before election day, those green jobs could become history.

More than being repeated year after year, these types of stories appear to be becoming more common. As the unsustainable nature of reality on the ground and in the atmosphere becomes harder to deny, those who stand to lose the most in a greener, more sustainable society dig deeper into their pockets and crank up the volume ever more loudly on their PR machines. Unfortunately, their ever increasing noise is too often met with the type of silence Pastor Martin Niemöller warned against.

Let’s not wait until there’s no one left on the pro-sustainability side to speak up.

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In fact, the powdery version of Earth’s most abundant liquid could potentially hold the key to reversing global warming, harnessing natural gas energy and driving new, more energy-efficient ways to produce food ingredients, medicines and other consumer products.

Researchers from the University of Liverpool detailed the promises of dry water at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society taking place this week in Boston.

Dry water is actually 95 per cent water with a bit of modified silica thrown in. The silica coats individual droplets of water, preventing them from coalescing into a liquid and producing a fine granular material that looks and pours like powdered sugar. First discovered in 1968, it was rediscovered by scientists at the University of Hull in 2006. A research team at the University of Liverpool is now exploring a host of applications for this unique material.

“There’s nothing else quite like it,” said researcher Ben Carter, a member of study leader Andrew Cooper’s team at Liverpool. “Hopefully, we may see ‘dry water’ making waves in the future.”

One of the team’s discoveries shows that dry water can absorb more than three times as much carbon dioxide as an ordinary mix of water and silica. That talent could in theory be exploited to soak up large volumes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or power plant emissions, trapping the greenhouse gas in the form of a hydrate (a compound formed when water is added to certain types of molecules).

Cooper’s team has also shown that dry water can act as a storage vehicle for methane — natural gas. That could make it possible to store and transport natural gas supplies in powder form, which could make it easier to store methane for natural gas-powered vehicles and harness the energy of the vast amount of methane hydrates found beneath the oceans … one day, anyway.

“A great deal of work remains to be done before we could reach that stage,” Carter said.

Dry water also has the potential to speed up the catalysing reactions used in manufacturing a number of different consumer products. Many food ingredients, drugs and other products today are made using succinic acid, which is produced through a reaction with hydrogen gas and maleic acid. Activating that reaction, however, typically involved a lot of stirring … which means a lot of energy input. By instead using dry water that contains maleic acid, manufacturers could produce succinic acid without the stirring, Cooper’s team has shown.

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Seventy-eight per cent of adults surveyed online by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) see the greatest advantage of electric cars being the ability to operate without the need for petrol. However, less than half (42 per cent) say they’re likely to follow news coverage of plug-in vehicles and just 40 per cent say they would be interested in test-driving such a car.

Perhaps not surprisingly in such a motor-happy society, the US consumer’s familiarity with greener forms of transport remains low, with only 25 per cent of those surveyed saying they were even familiar with electric car technology. Even hybrid vehicles don’t yet register on the radars of many: just 32 per cent said they were familiar or very familiar with that more fuel-efficient type of car.

While respondents said they also liked the fact that plug-in cars produce less pollution (67 per cent) and don’t require oil changes and tuneups (60 per cent), they still see numerous disadvantages. Seventy-one per cent expressed concern about the possibility of running out of battery power on the road, 66 per cent worried about the availability of charging locations and 59 per cent view limited mileage as a problem. Vehicle costs, reliability and battery life also were causes for concern.

Convenience also appears to be likely to affect motorists’ future car-buying decisions. More than half (51 per cent) of those surveyed said they would be less likely to consider an electric vehicle if they would have to install special charging equipment for the batteries.

Addressing such issues will be important in any future electric-car marketing efforts, said Chris Ely, CEA’s manager of industry analysis.

“(C)oncerns regarding battery life, charging stations and limited mileage may keep some consumers away until a comprehensive infrastructure is in place,” Ely said. “Manufacturers, dealers and other sellers will need to emphasise mileage and battery-related specifications when promoting and selling electric vehicles.”

The organisation’s next big conference — 2011 International CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas– in January will be the CEA’s first to feature electric cars along with energy storage devices and charging equipment.

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With this year’s late spring expected to lead to a late-arriving autumn, theWeather Club aims to enlist the help of a virtual army of Britons to document fall’s arrival and see whether that prediction actually comes true. Dubbed “The Great British Weather Experiment,” the effort will invite schoolchildren and interested adults to take photos of trees, plants and other things in nature to document autumn’s arrival across the UK.

“Some interesting things could happen,” said Bentley, who has also worked as the chief instructor of forecasting at the Met Office College and manager of the BBC Weather Centre. “The more regionality we get, the better.”

While the Great British Weather Experiment is just being taken for a test drive, theWeather Club — being formed by the Royal Meteorological Society to promote an appreciation and understanding of the weather — itself will be here to stay. Bentley says it’s an initiative that’s long overdue, considering the large community of British gardeners, sailors, walkers and others who have reason to be interested in the weather. Where the US has long had the Weather Channel to meet that need, “the UK doesn’t really have that,” she says.

“It’s a big void at the moment,” she says.

Set to officially launch on 14 September, theWeather Club site is already live, although it will feature much more content after its formal debut. During the launch week — “Weather Club Week” — Bentley herself will be out on tour around the UK with a great big blue “theWeather Club” camper van and a 4×4 vehicle loaded with weather instruments that the public can check out.

In addition to providing lots of insights, information and a public forum for discussing the weather, theWeather Club will also carefully tackle the subject of climate change. Bentley said she and others had “quite a bit of discussion” regarding how to handle the topic, which she acknowledges is “still a little bit of a hot spot.”

Ultimately, theWeather Club’s official stance is “to focus on education and to allow discussion to take place … theWeather Club will address the science and impacts of climate change, but will not be a campaigning body or take a political stance.” Sceptics will be able to have a voice in the forums, Bentley says, although she adds theWeather Club will take care not to let any discussion get hijacked.

While the media have, for the most part, moved on since the drama of “Climategate” late last year, public opinion has not yet fully rebounded, Bentley acknowledges.

“It could be a few years for the British public to get back to where it was,” she says.

For more information, visit theWeather Club at http://www.theweatherclub.org.uk.

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