Current Savers Blog

In these green times energy producers are leaving no stone unturned in the hunt for new sources of energy.

The Los Angeles Times reports that rocket-builder RocketDyne and a Santa Monica-based renewable energy company, SolarReserve, are planning to build a plant that they say could eventually power 100,000 homes by using solar power and molten salt.

The idea, which analysts say is promising, is to use solar power, collected in a huge array of tilting mirrors, to heat up molten salt to over 1,000 degrees Farenheit and use the resulting steam to drive a turbine and generate electricity.

The molten salt would then be cooled and recycled to repeat the process – generating no emissions.

The Times points out that this idea isn’t totally new. In the California desert off Interstate-15, a large solar array of more than 1,800 mirrored panels still stands where a power plant was built as a pilot project using molten salt…

  A cynic might say they had seen it all before: New CEO of a big oil company, which is under pressure from shareholders, announces a wide-ranging restructuring that will make the company look like the much-admired industry leader.

Tony Hayward did it at BP in 2007 and Peter Voser, due to step up to the top job at Royal Dutch Shell Plc on July 1, did it on Wednesday.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/rbssEnergyNews/idUKLR94627920090527?sp=true

Perhaps fearing that restructurings, like jokes, don’t amuse as much on the retelling, Shell went one further than BP. While the London-based oil major said it would adopt Exxon’s approach of standardising procedures across its businesses, Shell said it would redraw its business units in the mould of Exxon’s.

Despite this, the Anglo-Dutch oil major’s announcement failed to attract the warm reaction investors gave BP’s aping of Exxon. Shell’s shares fell and analysts said Shell was coming late to the cost cutting and standardisation game.

Is this fair?

Shell may be behind BP but it has not just discovered cost cutting. At least since January, the company has been sending regular emails to staff demanding they slash overheads and the cost of contractors.

BP has indeed turned itself around in recent years, closing performance gaps against rivals, most notably in its U.S. downstream business. Some investors see this as Hayward’s restructuring paying dividends. Others say the downstream underperformance was due to problems at BP’s Texas City refinery which shut after an explosion and a hurricane, and that the recovery would have happened whoever was in charge.

Investors’ cool response to Shell’s restructuring may reflect scepticism about whether, in an industry where top management is usually made up of company lifers, any oil company can successfully adopt Exxon’s supremely profitable culture.

On the other hand, it could be that, at a time when the world’s largest oil company by market value is proving no more successful than rivals at addressing the industry’s biggest headache - falling oil and gas production – investors don’t just don’t get why everyone wants to be Exxon.

The feds are taking on California’s plan to limit tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases and discussing the idea of low carbon fuel, but California has one other major idea to curb vehicle pollution, says the state senator who pushed through the tailpipe emissions law, Fran Pavley. The idea: drive less.

“No matter what we do on the clean car regs, with the gross of the state… and the sprawl out into the suburbs and the rural areas, we are going to be going in the wrong direction. And that’s something the federal government hopefully will eventually look at — land use,” she said by phone, when asked about next steps for vehicle pollution.

2008’s Senate Bill 375 by Darrell Steinberg set up targets for coordinated planning of transportation, land use and housing with regional reduction targets for greenhouse gases. At the time the bill passed, California was expecting its population to rise to 46 million by 2030 from 38 million.

Photo by REUTERS/Larry Downing

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

Understanding the ice age cycles that have occurred on the Earth during the past million years is — without question — one of the great scientific puzzles of all time.

By ‘great’ I mean not only the importance for many current environmental issues, like climate change and the massive greenhouse gas increases, but great in the sense that solving the mysteries of their occurrence requires breakthroughs from so many different fields of science.

I did post-graduate research on ice ages with a climatologist, Barry Saltzman, who was a co-discoverer of chaos (with Ed Lorenz) and who spent much of his later career on ice age science. I remember marveling with him over the almost ridiculous number of disciplines ice-age science involves: geology, glaciology, climatology, atmospheric physics and chemistry, oceanography, astronomy, geochemistry, biology, geomagnetism, meteorology, nonlinear mathematics and probably other fields I’m not listing!

It’s like we are riding on the back of some kind of Moby Dick of science, learning incredible things about the Earth along the way. Not only that, but the ice ages obviously have shaped us as a species as well since we evolved during the waxing and waning of the enormous ice sheets, influencing our harnessing of technologies (tools, clothing, shelter) and minds. Children are intrinsically fascinated by the ice ages and scientists have been attacking the problem since 1800.

Against this venerable background, I am humbly publishing a paper that tries to paint a new picture of the ice ages. I am linking it here (and publisher here) for those of you want to see the details of my case.

There is a more-or-less standard model of the recent ice ages that says they have resulted from a gradual long-term cooling of the Earth since the time of the dinosaurs, when no glaciers are known, towards the present. At some point, around 34 million years ago, the Earth became cool enough for large scale glaciers to form on Antarctica and later elsewhere, culminating in the great 100-thousand year cycles that have dominated recent times.

My paper does not question this model — indeed it is essential for my case that it is largely correct. Rather I focus on the 100-thousand year cycle mystery and what caused that. The essence of my paper is that this mystery of the cycles may be related to another cycle in geology that is also unexplained – sedimentary cycles on the margins of continents during warm geologic epochs.

These coastal cycles were discovered by oil geologists (most notably at Exxon) during the 1960s and 1970s.  In my paper I try to show that there are a mind-bending number of parallels between these two cycles that cannot be accidental. The one common link that explains these parallels is that both ice sheets and continental margin systems are sedimentary systems.

You can read my paper if interested but among other things I conclude that continental margin sediments may oscillate almost automatically. Another conclusion, relevant to current global warming, is that my paper bolsters the case that Antarctica did not support any glaciation during very high greenhouse gas periods of geologic history. I think we are just at the ‘tip of the iceberg’ in understanding the mysteries of ice ages and their relation to other systems on Earth.

The leviathan lives on!

(Credits: top right: an image of Cro Magnon Man, Photo by Roderick Mickens, copyright by American Museum of Natural History. Map centre: Ice sheet extent during ice age: Hannes Grobe/AWI)

While it might not seem immediately obvious for a quietly purring car that drips water out its tailpipe, even hydrogen-powered vehicles have a carbon problem.

Given all the electricity needed to get hydrogen compressed and ready for the tank, that juice will need to come from solar, wind or (whisper it) nuclear power to get the fuel cells under the hood nearer to zero carbon output over the fuel’s ”life-cycle.” According to a Volkswagen manager developing the technology, the current mix of power generated on the U.S. grid is still too dirty.

The efficiency of the fuel cell is what makes these prototypes greener than the average gas gazzler, but then there’s also the “chicken and egg” problem of fuel distribution to consider. John Tillman, VW’s program manager for U.S. advanced powertrain research, said hydrogen refueling stations can cost two to three times as much as a gasoline equivalent to build.

“Government’s going to have to get involved in some ways,” he said ahead of a test drive of a VW Passat Lingyu, which was showcased at last year’s Beijing Olympics. “There won’t be enough fuel (at first) to make it profitable.”

Speaking at the California Fuel Cell Partnership headquarters, just outside Sacramento, Tillman also showed reporters what he called the world’s busiest hydrogen pump — owing to the many car companies involved: Ford, Toyota, Hyundai and Nissan all display signage outside.

And while these erstwhile rivals are not working on specific fuel-cell technology together, the partnership does offer them a chance to ask — and try to answer — tough questions about poultry, and which comes first.

With highly-touted plans for a new electric car in jeopardy, an overseas investor steps in to provide new capital and a much-needed endorsement.

GM? No, Tesla.

Remarkably, the terms of German automaker Daimler AG’s 10-percent stake in Tesla may have also helped the Silicon Valley electric-car start-up inch closer to GM in value.

Daimler’s vague disclosure of its purchase price as  “double digit million dollar” means Tesla is valued at a minimum of $100 million.
That would make Tesla, which was founded nearly six years ago, about one-eighth the size of 100-year-old GM.

A world away in Detroit, GM has seen its share price spiral downward to near $1.  That the price may fall to near zero if the automaker files for bankruptcy as is widely expected. It would be worth less than 2 cents if GM proceeds with plans to issue a flood of new shares to pay off creditors.

GM was worth around $768 million, making it by far the smallest component in the Dow Jones industrial average judged by market cap.

A bankruptcy judge would also cast doubts on the 2010 launch plans for GM’s Volt plug-in range-extended hybrid while Tesla’s all-electric and pricey Roadster is already on the road.

Tesla chief executive, financial backer and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk and GM executives have traded barbs in the past.

GM’s flamboyant former product chief Bob Lutz has described San Carlos, California-based Tesla as a “little West Coast outfit” that was stitching together laptop batteries together.

Musk, meanwhile, has shot back that GM’s range-extender technology in its still-in-development Volt was “neither fish nor fowl.”

Late last year, Musk, who also founded PayPal, couldn’t resist a dig when asked why GM, an early proponent of electric car technology,  had not bought his company. “I’m not sure they can afford Tesla right now,” Musk said.

Shares in Pacific Ethanol lost almost half their value in morning trading after the biggest West Coast-based producer and marketer of ethanol announced that it had put its production facilities in California, Oregon and Idaho into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The company said on May 12 that it would likely need to file for bankruptcy if it was not able to restructure its debt.

A string of energy firms have filed for Chapter 11 recently, suffering from weak U.S. demand that has depressed prices and margins. VeraSun Energy, once the largest publicly listed U.S. ethanol maker, filed for bankruptcy last year.

(Track and comment on the emerging greentech sector by joining the Reuters Business of Green Portfolio community)

The California State Senate passed a bill on Friday that would ban smoking at all state parks and beaches — and imposing a $100 fine for anyone caught lighting up on the sand.

Senate Bill 4 still awaits approval from the state Assembly, but seems destined to become law in the Golden State, which prides itself on its more than 400 beaches along over 1,100 miles of coastline — and its repuation as a leader in the green movement.

In fact more than 100 local governments in California already ban smoking on beaches and in parks.

State Sen. Jenny Oropeza, who introduced the bill, says on her Web site that cigarette butts are the most commonly found marine debris in the U.S. and make up 38 percent of all litter found on beaches.

Fighters for “No Climate Protection without Forest Protection - last exit Copenhagen ” were in Frankfurt to promote forest conservation ahead of the global climate meeting in Copenhagen at the end of 2009.

Their appeal to investment circles and government institutions in Germany’s business capital was fresh and vigorous. Each year, forests the size of Bavaria disappear, they said. Logging for profit and to open land for arable crops contributes to about 20 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, and substantial parts are not legal.

Avoid it now to save the planet, they said — is it not weird to be able to look at the world via Google Earth but to be totally powerless when it comes to watching its biodiversity being destroyed?

The event was supported by the David & Lucile Packard foundation and the Global Canopy Programme. They are among supporters of an initiative called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD).

It is little known that the EU is in policy discussions to decide whether its members should be allowed to offset their emissions through REDD, and how this could be technically done.

And much more is unclear. Who monitors and polices the avoidance of trees being cut and who pays for it — new asset classes such as forest gilts may make sense. Or there could be market-based forest funds, financed via auction revenues. But nobody knows yet who should get the cash thus generated.  And how would one deal with land rights, and with corruption in some of the countries housing forests?

There is even criticism from Greenpeace which has said including forests in established CO2 markets such as Europe’s would flood them and torpedo pricing mechanisms.

Bernd Hansjuergens, co-author of the TEEB report that aims to prove the business case of biodiversity said, “The function of forests is relevant in markets. Consequently they must appear in markets and present a market.”

Is it a market worth having?

(Photos: top left - A truck transports logs cut from Amazon rain forest by workers employed in the Jari Managed Forest Project, February 11, 2008. REUTERS/Jamil Bittar (BRAZIL). Right - A pair of scarlet macaws perch on a tree in Bolivia’s Machia Park in Villa Tunari in the Bolivian Amazon jungle 520 km (323 miles) southeast of La Paz August 17, 2005. REUTERS/David Mercado

This portable electric recharging device could be a lifesaver if you break you leg on a windswept mountaintop in the middle of the night and find that your mobile phone battery is dead when you try to call for help.

Of course that’s vanishingly unlikely (and not part of the official sales pitch) but the K3 is an interesting example of “tribrid” technology - using three sources of power. You can plug it into the mains electricity, it has tiny solar panels and a micro wind turbine … Going on sale in June for $99.95, it can charge cell phones, iPods or other electronic devices.

“The K3 allows anyone to charge their devices at any time, anywhere in the world,” said Tod Wagenhals, president of makers Kinesis Industries in Arizona.

Hybrid technologies - for instance cars using both gasoline and another power such as an electric motor - have taken off in recent years as part of efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

So maybe tribrid cars are the next generation? You can bolt solar panels to the roof, for instance.

Add a small windmill or two and you have a “quadbrid” (or perhaps it might be called a ”tetra-brid”?) - see this link for an picture of a converted quadbrid Ford Escort.

So will tribrid or quadbrid technology catch on? Or is it just a complicated gimmick?

(Pictures: Top Left: the K3 ’tribrid’ charger - courtesy Kinesis Industries LLC. Above right: Electric cars are connected to a charge spot in central London April 16, 2009. Motorists are to be offered up to 5,000 pounds (about $7500) to encourage them to buy electric or hybrid cars under a new government plan. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth)