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As old manufacturing jobs dwindle across the country, the promise of clean energy manufacturing jobs looms large.
As the clean energy manufacturing base in this country grows, it often builds upon the facilities and expertise of struggling traditional industries.
Last week, my colleague Kirk Johnson wrote about how the old steel town of Pueblo, Colo., is adapting to the times with a new wind turbine plant. Similarly, in the town of San Angelo, Texas, a steel company took a 50 percent joint venture stake in a wind tower plant in June.
There are many more examples of the co-mingling of old and new industries. A few mills, suffering amid the pulp and paper industry’s retreat, are reorienting to process biofuels. These include a once-shuttered Maine pulp mill being refitted to make biobutanol, as well as two Wisconsin mills (see here and here) that will produce biodiesel from wood waste.
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The UK market for alternative fuels could be handed a boost by the establishment of a new quality protocol for biodiesel derived from waste cooking oil, it has been revealed.
Part of the Waste Protocols Projects – a joint scheme between the Environment Agency (EA) and the Waste & Resource Action Programme (WRAP) – the set of rules aims to clearly define the point at which waste becomes a fully recovered product.
By setting a standard point at which quality biodiesel derived from waste is no longer considered as a waste project itself, it is hoped that the quality protocol will encourage further production and trading.
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A reduced demand for fossil fuels saw carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions produced by the UK energy industry fall by two percent in 2008.
That is one of the headline findings of the Digest of UK Energy Statistics 2009, which was released by the Department of Energy and Climate Change today.
The digest noted that there was a one percent fall in prime energy consumption last year, which coupled with significant shift from coal to gas, led to the reduction in CO2 emissions.
Electricity generated from renewable energy sources accounted for 5.5 percent of total electricity generation, up from 4.9 percent in 2007.
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Green cars have been branded overpriced, sluggish and ugly. Today, the most famous eco-car, the Toyota Prius, enters its third generation. Will the cleaner hybrid tempt buyers? Novelist Toby Litt took a test drive.
Toby Litt test-drives the new Toyota Prius hybrid car Photograph: David Levene/David Levene.
I drove it down to Brighton, because it seemed a very Brighton sort of car – a hybrid vehicle for a transition town. I was expecting it to receive admiration, affirmation, perhaps even sly congratulation. But did it get envying sideways looks from cyclists? Thumbs up from Green activists? Tranced out nods from dog-on-string trustafarians?
No, not really. In fact, it was much better at passing unnoticed, particularly at passing unheard. When running only on its self-recharging battery, the thing is virtually soundless. (I usually drive a P-reg Audi A4, the cassette-player in which – when rewinding – is louder than the Prius.)
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The new zero-emission electric vehicle, Leaf, during the opening ceremony of the new Nissan headquaters in Yokohama on Sunday. Photograph: Kiyoshi Ota/Getty Images.
Nissan has unveiled what it claims to be the world’s first mass-market electric car — a five-door hatchback called Leaf which its Sunderland plant is vying to build for the European market.
The family-sized car, which has a maximum range of 100 miles and a top speed of about 90mph, will be in showrooms in Britain, Europe, the US and Japan by the end of next year.
The Leaf is the first of Nissan’s new range of fully electric powered cars, which produce no carbon emissions, unlike hybrid vehicles such as the Toyota Prius, which uses a petrol-powered engine as well as an electric battery. Nissan’s range of electric cars will include small, medium-sized and large saloon cars.
A Nissan spokeswoman would not disclose how much the Leaf would cost consumers, other than to say it would be similarly priced to other family-sized cars in the £10,000-£15,000 bracket. This excludes the cost of the electric battery, which drivers would have to buy at a cost of several thousands pounds, or lease for a monthly fee.
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Two years into development, innovative startup enables path to energy independence; Unveils proprietary production system capable of supplying unlimited quantities of renewable fuel at costs competitive with fossil fuels.
Cambridge, Mass.—July 27, 2009—Joule Biotechnologies, Inc., an innovative bioengineering startup developing game-changing alternative energy solutions, today unveiled its breakthrough Helioculture™ technology—a revolutionary process that harnesses sunlight to directly convert carbon dioxide (CO2) into SolarFuel™ liquid energy. This eco-friendly, direct-to-fuel conversion requires no agricultural land or fresh water, and leverages a highly scalable system capable of producing more than 20,000 gallons of renewable ethanol or hydrocarbons per acre annually—far eclipsing productivity levels of current alternatives while rivaling the costs of fossil fuels.
“There is no question that viable, renewable fuels are vitally important, both for economic and environmental reasons. And while many novel approaches have been explored, none has been able to clear the roadblocks caused by high production costs, environmental burden and lack of real scale,” said Bill Sims, president and CEO of Joule Biotechnologies. “Joule was created for the very purpose of eliminating these roadblocks with the best equation of biotechnology, engineering, scalability and pricing to finally make renewable fuel a reality—all while helping the environment by reducing global CO2 emissions.”
Joule’s transformative Helioculture process leverages highly-engineered photosynthetic organisms to catalyze the conversion of sunlight and CO2 to usable transportation fuels and chemicals. The scalable SolarConverter™ system facilitates the entire process—from sunlight capture to product conversion and separation—with minimal resources and polishing operations. This represents a significant advantage over biomass-derived biofuels, including newer algae- and cellulose-based forms, which are hindered by varying obstacles: costly biomass production, numerous processing steps, substantial scale-up risk and capital costs.
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ExxonMobil invests $300 million in Synthetic Genomics to develop algae biofuel.
Two of Craig Venter’s recent passions have been combing the Earth for microbes and other minute critters that reveal the diversity of life, and creating and redesigning life itself through synthetic biology.
Growing green: Synthetic Genomics and ExxonMobil are collaborating on the development of photosynthetic algae to make biofuels.
Never thinking small, Venter also has not been shy about blending research and commerce in his quest to finance and further his projects. In the 1990s he created Celera Genomics with over $1 billion in financing to compete with the public project to sequence the human genome.
There comes a point, he once told me, when projects need the king-size resources available in the private sector to scale up and implement. In this case, the goal is to produce a viable alternative fuel to petroleum and–just possibly, he insists–to reduce the fresh carbon spewed in the air when petroleum is burned.
Last week, ExxonMobil announced a commitment to invest $300 million over five to six years in Synthetic Genomics, which Venter founded and now leads as CEO, and to spend an additional $300 million on a complementary internal algae program.
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A plan has been launched in England to boost the supply of woodfuel.
Ministers say using more wood for energy could provide new rural jobs and help Britain meet its climate targets.
The new strategy, developed by the Forestry Commission, aims to source an extra two million tonnes of wood a year by 2020 for burning in boilers.
Energy-efficient boilers would burn wood chips
Environment minister Barry Gardiner says if this is taken from properly managed woodlands it should save 400,000 tonnes of carbon annually.
“It also has huge benefits in terms of biodiversity and improvement of habitats for all the species we want to preserve within the countryside,” he told the BBC.
Burning wood is considered broadly carbon neutral because the CO2 released in combustion matches that absorbed by the trees as they grew – provided the woodland it is taken from is restocked, and that harvesting and processing does not itself use too much fossil fuel.
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A startup unveils a high-yield process for making fuel from carbon dioxide and sunlight.
A startup based in Cambridge, MA–Joule Biotechnologies–today revealed details of a process that it says can make 20,000 gallons of biofuel per acre per year. If this yield proves realistic, it could make it practical to replace all fossil fuels used for transportation with biofuels. The company also claims that the fuel can be sold for prices competitive with fossil fuels.
Solar farming: A photobioreactor houses photosynthetic microorganisms that use the energy in sunlight to make fuel and other chemicals from carbon dioxide and water.
Joule Biotechnologies grows genetically engineered microorganisms in specially designed photobioreactors. The microorganisms use energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide and water into ethanol or hydrocarbon fuels (such as diesel or components of gasoline). The organisms excrete the fuel, which can then be collected using conventional chemical-separation technologies.
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Environmental activist network argues that the oil industry might be approaching a tipping point from fall in the price, advances in technology and policies on climate change
A long-term decline in the demand for oil could undermine the huge investments in Canadian tar sands, which have been heavily opposed by environmentalists, according to a report published today.
The report, by Greenpeace, will make uncomfortable reading for the companies that are investing tens of billions of pounds to exploit the hard-to-extract oil in the belief that demand and the price would climb inexorably as countries such as China and India industrialise.
Citing projections from the oil producers’ cartel Opec and the International Energy Agency, as well as various oil experts, the report casts doubt on the conventional assumption that consumption and prices will begin gathering pace once the world pulls itself out of recession.
It argues that alongside the cyclical fall in the oil price there are more fundamental structural changes taking place. These are driven by advances in energy efficiency and alternative energy, cleaner vehicles, government policies on climate change and concerns over energy security. Greenpeace has posted the report to 200 shareholders in Shell and BP, including pension funds, in an effort to put pressure on the companies to think again. BP reports quarterly results tomorrow and Shell on Thursday.
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