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Air power is becoming a more common investment. Huge turbines line coasts and hills where constant winds whip through to spin the massive blades. Wind farms comprised of these towering blades are constantly expanding. But why focus on building turbines on such a massive scale, rather than focusing on the alternative; less intrusive smaller turbines on a mini-scale? International award winning designer and exhibitor, Augustin Otegui, asked just that question before coming up with nanoventskin.

In Otegui’s patented design, tiny turbines spin and make the most out of wind energy by being symmetrically designed: If the wind’s direction changes, the turbines adapt by rotating in the other direction ensuring that energy isn’t lost. To make the most out of this system, photovoltaic cells will play a role in the energy capturing process as well.

The design process is covered in Otegui’s nanoventskin blog:

“The outer skin of the structure absorbs sunlight through an organic photovoltaic skin and transfers it to the nano-fibers inside the nano-wires which then is sent to storage units at the end of each panel.

Each turbine on the panel generates energy by chemical reactions on each end where it makes contact with the structure. Polarized organisms are responsible for this process on every turbine’s turn.

The inner skin of each turbine works as a filter absorbing CO2 from the environment as wind passes through it.”

Ensuring that every section of the skin functions properly can be a tedious process. Thousands of turbines make up a small portion of any wall and if any debris causes issues or a malfunction occurs, a round supply unit monitoring the turbines makes it clear that maintenance is necessary in that area. Not only that, but the unit will relay how much energy is produced.

Nanoventskin is still in the conceptual stages, but Otegui hopes to incorporate the design into existing buildings, allowing for efficient energy transfer on any structure. He even suggests adding nanoventskin onto wind turbines by placing the ‘skin’ onto the huge supportive trunk. That way, every single part of the turbine converts wind to energy.

Keep an eye on Otegui’s blog to hear about more recent developments.

The pace car for the 2008 Indianapolis 500 ran on E85; the race cars burned 100% ethanol fuel.

Last month, for the first time in history, the cars racing in the Indianapolis 500 were fueled by pure ethanol. This should put to rest any concerns about ethanol lacking sufficient energy density to function as a motor fuel.

While the absolute amount of energy contained in ethanol is somewhat lower than gasoline – about 76,000 BTUs per gallon for ethanol compared to about 116,000 BTUs per gallon of gasoline – ethanol has higher octane, generally speaking 110 or more vs. 90 or less, allowing ethanol to run in higher compression, higher efficiency engines. A car optimized to run on ethanol can get comparable mileage to a car optimized to run on gasoline.

There are other concerns about ethanol, for example, the notion that it takes more energy to manufacture ethanol than the energy value of the fuel itself, the suggestion that it isn’t “carbon neutral” after all, and the whopper, the accusation that ethanol production has taken food crops out of production. All of these concerns have some validity, but are shrouded in complexities that defy simple characterizations or easy conclusions. Yet that is what has happened. A few years ago, biofuel in general, and ethanol in particular, could do no wrong. Today the situation is reversed, and around the world, for the most part the powerful media and environmentalist communities have turned on biofuel.

In many respects this awakening is healthy – when mandatory carbon offset trading in the European Community was subsidizing rainforest destruction in southeast asia to make way for oil palm plantations, something was clearly out of whack. But corn ethanol in the USA has drawn the most visible criticisms. California’s Air Resources Board, struggling to implement a lower carbon fuel standard, has recently determined, perhaps correctly, that hauling tank cars by rail over the Rocky Mountains from Iowa to the west coast probably eliminates any carbon neutrality ethanol may have otherwise enjoyed. In Washington D.C., the political backlash continues to build against the subsidies corn ethanol receives, with increasing urgency due to the global food shortages that are allegedly exacerbated by dedicating so much acreage to corn for ethanol.

In the USA, 10 billion gallons of corn ethanol will be produced annually within a few years.

There are many responses to these concerns, however. When producing ethanol from Brazilian sugar cane, for example, the energy payback can go as high as 8 to 1. In the case of corn ethanol, most analysts put the payback around 1.5 to 1, and at a margin that thin, there is plenty of room for interpretation. But the analyses that claim corn ethanol’s energy payback is insufficient to justify its use as a fuel ignore the caloric value of the distiller’s grain, a byproduct of corn ethanol production.

Critics of corn ethanol subsidies ignore the value of keeping these dollars in the U.S. to reduce the trade deficit. Those environmentalists concerned about the growing “dead zone” caused by agricultural runoff, presumably destined to grow even faster as we turn more acreage to biofuel, are certainly justified. But it is disingenuous to suggest that because we are distilling corn instead of harvesting grain there is somehow a more urgent problem than before. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico needs to be cleaned up. Agricultural runoff is an environmental challenge that awaits cost effective solutions – with or without the reality of biofuel.

The most problematic challenge to corn ethanol undoubtedly comes from those who are concerned it is causing rising food prices. But here again there are many significant factors that in aggregate eclipse the impact of corn ethanol, possibly by orders of magnitude. Rising per capita income in Asia and elsewhere has caused increased consumption of meat products, and livestock requires grain. Estimates vary, but for every calorie of meat consumed, about eight calories of grain have to be grown and fed to the livestock. This phenomenon has caused global demand for grain to grow far faster than it would already be growing due to increasing human population. At the same time, there have been temporary but severe setbacks to global grain output – a drought in Australia, flooding in the American mid-west. If that weren’t enough, commodities speculators have hedged themselves against devaluing dollars and falling asset values in stocks and real estate by purchasing commodities futures – driving prices up more than the forces of normal supply and demand already have.

Ethanol proponents have answered the critics in a variety of ways. The “25×25 Alliance,” an industry group committed to the goal of the USA producing 25% of its energy from renewable sources by 2025, has issued “sustainability principles” for biofuel production. The National Corn Growers Association has compiled a great deal of data in an attempt to debunk the position that corn ethanol is the primary cause of worldwide food shortages and commodity price increases. Automakers are caught in the middle – a powerful environmental lobby demands cars capable of being fueled with alternatives to gasoline, then savagely turns on corn ethanol, despite the fact it is the only motor fuel alternative we’ve got that we can produce in meaningful quantities today.

In any event, corn ethanol isn’t the ultimate solution to biofuel supplies, it is only a transitional fuel. This crucial point is often lost amid the controversy surrounding corn ethanol. It is cellulosic ethanol that has the potential to completely replace petroleum based fuel, and when cellulosic ethanol begins to arrive in high volume, a preexisting ethanol infrastructure – cars that run on ethanol, fueling stations that sell ethanol, and a transportation network to deliver ethanol to retailers – will need to be in place. Corn ethanol is priming the pump for the arrival of cellulosic ethanol.

Within the next few years corn ethanol production in the United States is predicted to top 10 billion gallons. This is not a trivial amount of fuel, given the entire light vehicle fleet in the USA consumes only 15 times that amount. Corn ethanol has already reduced the demand for foreign oil for light vehicle use by about 6.5%. Nonetheless, critics who claim corn ethanol production cannot possibly increase enough to replace petroleum are correct. The math of these critics is elegant – 10 billion gallons of corn ethanol, at 2.8 gallons per bushel and 155 bushels per acre equates to 23 million acres, about 7% of America’s active farm acreage. If you use corn ethanol to service 100% of America’s fuel requirements for light vehicles, you use 100% of America’s farmland.

Once again, however, this math is missing the point. Corn ethanol, distilled from corn mash, is not the end of biofuel, it is just the beginning of biofuel. Even the impressive global production of ethanol from sugar cane is easily eclipsed by the potential of cellulosic extraction. So what is cellulosic ethanol, where does it come from, how can it be produced, and how long will it be before meaningful quantities of this fuel arrive at the corner filling station?

One of the most visible and visionary proponents of biofuel is the noted venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who early in his career was one of the four co-founders of Sun Microsystems, and has parlayed this spectacular victory into an impressive portfolio of investments in private sector companies. Over the past few years Khosla Ventures has invested in dozens of clean technology and sustainable energy companies, including several top tier biofuel ventures, including Coskata and Mascoma, mentioned later in this report. In a recent research paper written by Vinod Khosla entitled “Where will Biofuels and Biomass Feedstocks Come From ,” Khosla identifies and quantifies the many potential sources of cellulosic feedstock for ethanol fuel. Some of the information on the table below borrows from Khosla’s research, but changes some of the assumptions; other data comes from the U.S. Dept. of Energy.

HOW MUCH ETHANOL FEEDSTOCK IS THERE IN THE USA?

At least 1.0 billion tons of ethanol feedstock can be sustainably harvested each year in the United States.

The figures on this table are arguably realistic, not optimistic, based on the following assumptions for each feedstock:

Dedicated land use refers to cellulosic crops, such as miscanthus or switchgrass, planted on 5% of American farmland (total US farmland is estimated currently at 317 million acres), less than is currently planted for corn ethanol production. At a yield of 15 tons of cellulosic feedstock per acre and 100 gallons of ethanol per ton of feedstock, nearly 24 billion gallons of ethanol can be produced each year. While 15 tons of feedstock per acre is more than can currently be grown, it is considerably lower than forecasts of yields expected within the next couple of decades, which range as high as 25 tons per acre.

Winter cover crops would not displace existing farmland, and if they were profitable to grow it isn’t unlikely they could become additional income for farmers on 25% of land already under summer cultivation. At a yield of 3 tons per acre – projections go as high as 5 tons per acre – another nearly 24 billion gallons of ethanol can be produced each year.

California’s Redwoods. Forest thinning could help prevent catastrophic fires, reduce infestations, and provide hundreds of millions of tons of cellulose.

Excess forest biomass is a difficult number to calculate, but when one considers there are about 750 million acres of forest in the USA (ref. Forest Resources of the United States), as well as the fact nearly all of them have become dangerously overgrown (major factors in more catastrophic fires and beetle infestations, ref. Restoration Forestry), the figure we’ve used of 226 million tons per year is probably quite low. It would suggest a growth in forest mass of less than one-third of a ton per acre per year. And in our estimate, even the figure of 226 million tons is only assumed to be 70% utilized. Forest thinning is a form of stewardship long overdue, it will return America’s forests to their healthier historical densities, and their excess mass will power our engines instead of burn in forest fires.

Construction debris and municipal solid waste are obvious candidates for cellulosic harvesting, and even the non-cellulosic materials can be used as fuel for the extraction of syngas (which is converted into ethanol), or reclaimed as building materials. According to the Dept. of Energy, 325 million tons of these waste resources are produced each year. We have assumed 90% utilization, and only 75 gallons of ethanol per ton, a yield that is below most projections.

Other waste resources are deliberately understated – just our industrial emissions are probably sufficient to deliver 100 million tons of feedstock. Also not included in this analysis anywhere else are crop residue, a huge source of feedstocks, some percentage of which can certainly be allocated sustainably to ethanol production without sacrificing soil health.

It isn’t easy to estimate just how much cellulosic feedstock could be sustainably harvested each year in the USA, but but two things are clear from this analysis. (1) When cellulosic ethanol extraction becomes a commercially competitive process, and the industrial capacity is in place to produce high volumes of ethanol from cellulosic materials, there will be plenty of feedstocks – at least 1.0 billion tons per year; possibly twice that. Cellulosic ethanol definitely has the potential to become a significant source of transportation fuel, and (2) Khosla’s contention that land use dedicated to ethanol production in the USA might actually decrease when cellulosic processing takes over is completely plausible. In the example above, no corn ethanol was produced, and the dedicated acreage committed to cellulosic ethanol was assumed to be 5% of America’s farmland, whereas today corn ethanol is grown on about 7% of America’s farmland.

So how will we convert cellulosic material into ethanol? There are hundreds of companies around the world working on ways to accomplish this, using a variety of technological approaches. Last month, while on a General Motors sponsored tour for automotive journalists, I had the opportunity to visit two companies who are pursuing promising, and very different, solutions to the cellulosic ethanol puzzle.

Our trip began in Chicago on the morning of May 21st, where about a dozen journalists assembled to drive a convoy of GM vehicles, all equipped to run on E85 ethanol. In a completely unexpected turn of events, I found myself behind the wheel in a high riding Chevy Silverado, painted with GM colors that announced to the world the truck’s status as an ethanol fueled vehicle, with extended cab and a monstrous bed. Although I was unaccustomed to piloting such a behemoth, there was excellent road visibility from the cab, and GM’s OnStar tracked my position and provided constant audio directions, so I swung into downtown Chicago traffic, and joined the late morning rush out of town. At one point it was clear we needed to move across a couple of lanes to catch our exit, and to make sure we would safely execute this maneuver amidst the 18 wheelers and such, I found it appropriate to smash the gas pedal to the floor and hold it there. The tactic was brilliantly successful, as this gigantic truck leapt forward with impressive accelleration and increased our speed from 45 to 75 in a matter of seconds. Safely in our place on the correct route, I let off the accelerator and knew the power of corn.

Coskata CEO Bill Roe and General Motors Chairman Richard Wagoner seal the deal, as early Coskata investor Vinod Khosla looks on.

About 40 miles west of Chicago, in Warrenville, Illinois, are the labs of Coskata, a company that is contending to be the first to commercialize production of cellulosic ethanol.

In February 2008 General Motors invested an undisclosed sum in this three year old private company, whose CEO, Bill Roe, stated “we do not believe we have any remaining technological hurdles.” Coskata is betting on this with a pilot plant they are building in Madison, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. They expect to have this plant operating early in 2009, producing 40,000 gallons of fuel per year. GM intends to use the fuel to test their growing fleet of E85 flexfuel vehicles.

Coskata’s technology for extracting ethanol from cellulose is elaborate, but apparently closer to commercialization than competing processes. Whether or not Coskata’s technology ultimately dominates is harder to assess, but according to Roe, the variable costs to produce a gallon of ethanol using their technology is expected to be under $1.00 per gallon. Here’s how Coskata intends to produce ethanol:

In the diagram below, “Coskata’s Manufacturing Process,” there are three primary steps. First the feedstock is shredded and dried, and fed into the gasifier, where it is reduced to syngas at a temperature of 5,000 degrees. Some of the syngas is used to provide the energy for the conversion process, but about 85% of the syngas is converted into ethanol in step two. A recent study by Argonne National Labs estimates Coskata’s process yields an energy payback of about 8 to 1.

The second step is to feed the syngas into a bioreactor, where microbes eat the syngas and excrete ethanol. These microbes are anerobic, meaning they can’t survive in atmosphere, and they are the result of careful selective breeding whereby they are now 100 times more efficient converting syngas into ethanol than they were when they began the process a few years ago. “We know our microbes can convert syngas to ethanol at commercial quantities, cost effectively,” said Roe.

The final step in the process is to feed the ethanol and water out of the bioreactor into a recovery tank, where the ethanol is extracted and the water is recycled back into the bioreactor.

From the look of things during our visit to Coskata’s lab in Warrenville, about the only bugs left in their process are the bugs in the bioreactor. According to Wes Bolson, Coskata’s Chief Marketing Officer, the company is actively seeking partners among the companies who have access to huge quantities of cellulosic feedstock, and currently have nothing they can do with it. These candidates include timber companies, sugar cane refiners, pulp and paper mills, and waste management companies. Coskata can also partner with companies who already are generating syngas, but haven’t got the bioreactor technology.

COSKATA’S MANUFACTURING PROCESS

Coskata executives believe their technology is ready today.

After spending a half-day at Coskata, our corn fueled convoy got back on the highway and headed south to Indianapolis, driving most of the way on southbound Interstate 65. And as our expedition hurtled through America’s heartland on this beautiful afternoon, as far as the eye could see, across the rain watered endless fertile fields of Indiana sprouted new shoots of spring corn.

If you are within blocks, long blocks, of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, during the last full week in May, you will likely hear the roar of the engines. And as we neared the track on the morning of May 22nd, we too heard and felt the sound as the drivers did qualifying laps in advance of the 92nd running of the Indianapolis 500. In a thankfully soundproof auditorium on the massive infield of the racetrack, we attended an ethanol summit co-sponsored by GM, where I had an opportunity to meet Dr. Mike Ladisch, Chief Technical Officer of Mascoma. This company, like Coskata, is hot on the trail of commercializing cellulosic ethanol production, but they are pursuing a solution that will not rely on high temperature gasification. Instead, Mascoma is developing a biochemical method to convert cellulose into ethanol. Ladisch, a genial scientist who has taken a leave of absence from Purdue to serve as CTO at Mascoma, was understandably guarded about his company’s technology, but characterized it in the following way:

“The work at Mascoma is based on organisms and processes designed to rapidly break down the components of biomass, convert a range of sugars and polymers of sugars to ethanol, and thrive in a manufacturing environment.”

Mascoma intends to do this in one step using genetically engineered microbes that are capable of performing both processes. This is known as consolidated bioprocessing, or CBP, and perhaps represents the ultimate technology to extract ethanol from cellulose.

Another informed opinion on Mascoma (and cellulosic technology in general) was obtained via email from Dr. Lee Lynd, a professor at Dartmouth who, along with Ladisch, is one of the leading scientists in the world pursuing advanced cellulosic technologies. Here is what he wrote:

“Mascoma has the largest and most focused effort worldwide on consolidated bioprocessing, which I consider to be the ultimate low-cost conversion strategy. If Mascoma is able to continue this aggressive effort, I believe that they will succeed and that they will have the lowest cost technology for converting herbaceous and woody angiosperms (e.g. grass and hardwoods) to ethanol and other biofuels. It is less clear that the Mascoma approach will be best for gymnosperms (softwoods), and this could be a long-term niche for thermochemical processing along with processing residues from biological processing. Mascoma’s business strategy features a ‘staircase’ of process configurations, starting with options that can be commercially implemented very soon and progressing ultimately to CBP.”

How soon will Mascoma and others deploy these technologies? Although Mascoma’s website has an excellent description of the various cellulosic technologies (ref. Consolidated Bioprocessing), exactly when they expect their technology to be ready for commercialization appears to be a closely guarded secret. Other observers, off the record, have stated commercially viable enzymatic processing is 5-10 years away. But advances in biotechnology are happening at a staggering pace, and unforeseen breakthroughs are not something to bet against. On the other hand, even if Coskata, Mascoma, and countless other credible contenders to deliver commercially competitive cellulosic ethanol technologies were all ready tomorrow, it will still take years to build the new refineries and transform America’s light vehicle fleet.

In the meantime, corn carries the weight of being the primary source of ethanol in the USA, as the rest of the infrastructure falls into place. There are already 1,600 ethanol stations in the U.S. – about 1% of all gasoline retailers – and with UL certification imminent the big box chains are going to begin offering ethanol fuel, greatly increasing access. General Motors now offers 15 models of flexfuel vehicles; and they are now producing over 1.0 million of them per year. Other automakers are following suit. All over the world, governments are determining what percentages of ethanol fuel – along with other biofuels, biodiesel in particular – to blend into their transportation fuels.

How long can corn carry the weight of this growth, serving as the transitional feedstock? How soon can hybrids and extended range electric vehicles level off or even reduce the demand for transportation fuel? There is little doubt ethanol is a viable fuel for light vehicles, and there is little doubt cellulosic ethanol feedstocks exist in sufficient sustainable abundance to greatly offset petroleum consumption. Finally, there is little doubt that money and support for cellulosic ethanol commercialization is ongoing; from Washington DC to Detroit to the Silicon Valley, everyone is on board. The uncertainty lies in whether or not the new technologies to extract ethanol from cellulose will emerge in months or decades, and in how fast we can build large scale industrial capacity to exploit these new technologies. Look to pilot plants in Madison, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, for early indications of what may come, and when.

Getting fruits and vegetables onto the kitchen table is a stressful affair. Farmers constantly deal with pests, weather changes, pesticides, droughts, increased costs of running equipment and crop diseases. For example, the moth, Helicoverpa armigera, causes crop damage in excess of 5 billion dollars worldwide per year, while the 2008 floods in the U.S Midwest have already soaked through thousands of acres of farmland.

Losing a crop is extremely frustrating; especially to farmers who excitedly bought land and then purchased the popular $110,000 180-PTO horsepower diesel tractor to maintain the now demolished harvest. Architects and agriculturalists believe that many of these issues can be solved with indoor agriculture. Not only that, but by incorporating farming into high rise buildings protected from outside variables, the volume of produce harvested increases dramatically. In fact, one indoor acre may yield up to 6 times as much of a crop as a traditional outdoor farm.

The Living Tower, a theoretical 30 floor high rise farming community designed by Paris based SOA architects, would house;
130 apartments on the first 15 floors, 9000 square meters of office space on the remaining 15 floors, a 7000 square meter shopping center, a library and even a nursery in addition to the gardens distributed throughout the building. Link to the Press Release for more information.

Living Tower architects have focused on specific crop productions and believe the following estimates will represent respective crop yields:

63000 kg of tomatoes per year
37 333 feet of salads per year
9 324 kg of strawberries per year

The building design keeps efficiency and alternative power in mind as well: two large windmills rotating on the roof will generate 200-600 KWH of electricity per annum and will assist in pumping recovered rainwater throughout the complex. Photovoltaic panels will cover the outer walls while inside the tower, ventilation shafts draw in underground air keeping temperatures comfortable throughout the year.

VerticalFarm.com, a website devoted to vertical farming (VF) architecture, provides a list of benefits associated with the technology:

• No weather-related crop failures due to droughts, floods, pests
• All VF food is grown organically: no herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers
• VF virtually eliminates agricultural runoff by recycling black water
• VF returns farmland to nature, restoring ecosystem functions and services
• VF greatly reduces the incidence of many infectious diseases that are acquired at the agricultural interface
• VF converts black and gray water into potable water by collecting the water of Evapo-transpiration
• VF adds energy back to the grid via methane generation from composting non-edible parts of plants and animals
• VF dramatically reduces fossil fuel use (no tractors, plows, shipping.)
• VF converts abandoned urban properties into food production centers
• VF creates sustainable environments for urban centers
• VF creates new employment opportunities
• VF may prove to be useful for integrating into refugee camps
• VF offers the promise of measurable economic improvement for tropical and subtropical
• VF could reduce the incidence of armed conflict over natural resources, such as water and land for agriculture

There are few things more satisfying than picking a ripened tomato from your own tree and enjoying the fruit knowing that you don’t have to worry about pesticides, importing problems or other issues involved with the agriculture business. With vertical farming on the rise, it won’t be unheard of to enjoy homegrown strawberries while snow piles up on the busy city streets below.

For the last few weeks it’s tomatos, those wonderful fruits. Over 300 cases of salmonella poisoning from eating tomatoes (maybe) were reported all over the U.S., a country of 300 million people.

Were you afraid to eat a tomato? You do the math of your odds of getting sick from eating one (hint: odds similiar to you winning the lottery). So naturally, we removed all tomatoes from market shelves all over the country and restaurants stopped serving tomatoes on burgers and in your salad.

No matter that nobody died, and probably AT LEAST 50,000 cases of food poisoning occur every DAY from an assortment of bacteria in your food. Maybe you ate a bad oyster or clam, the food server in the restaurant didn’t wash his hands, you ate a chicken sandwich that sat out at room temperature for a few hours, an ecoli burger, etc. So you spend the whole night not sleeping, but barfing and having diarrhea and the next day you feel awful. You don’t report to some doctor because if you have any brains you know what happened and you know you will be fine the day after tomorrow.

To top it off, on June 17 the FDA said all those junked tomatoes would have been safe to eat after all!! The only food scare more stupid than this latest one is the mad cow scare in the U.S. a few years ago. ONE, count em, one cow was discovered to have mad cow disease in Washington state. Nobody would eat beef and it was a DAIRY cow, not even slated to enter the food supply.

Because of that one sick cow, Japan and South Korea stopped importing all U.S. beef. Of course, the whole mad cow thing started in Europe in the 1980′s. It was hypothesized, and it is still just a hypothesis, that eating mad cow meat could cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in human meat eaters, maybe perhaps.

For more than a decade, 60 million meat eaters in Great Britain had been eating mad cow meat without knowing it. The result? Around 300 people got that disease, maybe from the meat but maybe not, and the whole British beef industry was destroyed (Germany too). I’ll let you do the math on that as well as the tomatoes! I invite comments, especially from readers who might have more good examples of how easily the public can be fooled and terrified by the scare du hour, du week, du month, du year.

One of the most useful ways to measure how efficiently we use energy is to calculate how many units of energy are required to produce a unit of wealth – this is known as energy intensity. In theory energy intensity can be measured in a variety of ways, but a useful convention is to divide the total annual energy consumption for a nation, expressed in British Thermal Units (BTUs), by that nation’s Gross Domestic Product for the same year. The fewer BTUs per dollar of GDP, the better the score.

BTUs are a universal energy measurement favored by economists – one BTU is defined as the amount of energy it takes to heat one cubic centimeter of water by one degree centigrade at room temperature. One kilowatt-hour is equal to 3412 BTUs. One gallon of gasoline has about 130,000 BTUs. When looking at entire economies, the standard unit is one quadrillion BTUs. The USA, for example, consumed about 101 quadrillion BTUs of energy in 2007. California consumed 8.4 quad BTUs in the same year.

You can get recent information on energy production and energy intensity by country from the U.S. DOE Energy Information Administration’s country index. You can also calculate energy intensity by U.S. state from the EIA website; for example, California’s energy intensity can be found in the EIA’s energy profile for California. The wide range of energy intensity calculations across various nations and states is quite revealing.

Among nations, the worst energy intensity is found in nations where energy is extremely cheap and abundant. Saudi Arabia, for example, has an energy intensity of 17,979. Russia has an energy intensity of 14,935. In Russia’s case, cheap energy, a cold climate, far flung cities, and aging energy infrastructure all combine to give it a poor score. But even in Canada, a nation with modern energy infrastructure, but otherwise similar to Russia – relatively cheap energy, cold climate, far flung cities – their energy intensity at 13,825 is not much better.

The most advanced European nations might be looked to for the best energy intensity, while they have cold climates, they are densely populated and have modern infrastructure. And energy is very expensive in Europe, which has encouraged efficient energy use. So it is logical that their energy intensity is dramatically better than the vast northern nations of Canada and Russia – indeed, France only requires 7,243 BTUs per dollar of GDP, Germany scores 7,021, and the United Kingdom logs 6,048.

And what about the USA? Most Americans still live in cold climates, there are vast areas to cover which requires heavy consumption of transportation fuels, infrastructure is relatively modern – so America’s energy intensity of 9,113 should also come as no surprise. California’s energy intensity is an impressive 4,840, partly due to her warm climate and densely populated urban centers, partly due to large sectors of California’s industries being exceptionally profitable with very little energy input – the high tech industry creates GDP with a far higher energy intensity than, say, auto manufacturing. No doubt, California’s extraordinary energy intensity is also partly due to government policies enacted over the past few decades to encourage Californian’s to use energy efficiently.

An important dimension to energy intensity is to correlate it to per capita income. It appears that pre-industrial economies have very efficient energy intensities – Sierra Leone, to use one example, has an energy intensity of 2,459, with per capita GDP of $700. As a nation industrializes, its energy intensity worsens, but per capita income rises. India, for example, whose process of industrialization is now well underway, has an energy intensity of 4,001 and a per capita GDP of $2,700. China, a nation somewhat closer to completing their process of industrialization, has an energy intensity of 7,906 and a per capita GDP of $5,300.

Returning to California, whose high-tech economy might loosely be characterized as post-industrial, their energy intensity of 4,840 combines with a per capita GDP of $47,186. The rest of the United States – measured with California’s population and GDP subtracted – delivers an energy intensity of 9,904 BTUs per dollar of GDP, and a GDP per capita of $34,885. There is no economic region on earth that delivers anywhere near California’s combination of extraordinarily efficient energy intensity alongside per capita GDP that ranks among the highest in the world. The reason – as the preceding statistics might indicate – is because California’s economy runs on brainpower more than horsepower. California’s state government would do well to see to it they do not drive these brains elsewhere, by making California even more business unfriendly than it already is.

As California’s legislators flirt with a descent into pure socialism, cloaked in radiant and rhetorically unassailable green rationalizations, they might consider the example of Russia, a nation blessed with extraordinary scientific talent, whose innovators were strangled for nearly seventy years on the alter of socialism. California’s dream has survived in spite of a government that is grotesquely hostile to business innovators. California’s government has been squandering the prosperity of the golden state on obscenely generous pensions and benefits for state employees, and entitlement programs that have undermined the work ethic of entire subcultures – while only creating more government jobs. Unless California’s slide into state socialism is reversed, the golden state’s century of economic growth will become only a memory.

Al Gore has said Americans are addicted to “short term thinking.” He is correct. Even in the business world, which is presumably rational, timelines often stretch no further than the next quarter’s earnings reports. To think ahead by spans of generations or more is not very common.

Sadly, however, Al Gore fails to emphasize – for reasons either cynical or simply because he suffers from the same affliction as most everyone else – that Americans are also victims of “scope insensitivity.” That is a big phrase – “scope insensitivity” – but understanding the meaning of this phrase is key to understanding many of the policy failures of America, especially in recent decades.

Scope insensitivity is the inability of a person, or voting block, or nation, to understand simple quantitative proportions, which if understood, would cast a policy issue in an entirely different light. Simply put, because of scope insensitivity, the logical conclusions one might rationally find obvious are eclipsed by emotional arguments.

Absent the ability to recognize basic quantitative realities, the proper scope of the relevant variables that affect a policy issue are incomprehensible, and policy becomes a puppet of whoever has the most money and the most compelling emotional appeal. Here are three interrelated examples:

HOW SCOPE INSENSITIVITY ENABLES FLAWED POLICIES:

Immigration: There is nothing wrong with America opening her borders to immigrants. America is a nation of immigrants. But Americans appear unable to grasp the difference between allowing immigration sufficient to make up for low birthrates – something all developed nations are experiencing – and allowing immigration that based on current rates will cause America’s population to increase by 50% or more within the next 20-30 years!

American policy ought to reflect a rational calculation of what rate Americans want their total population to increase – then taking into account the high birthrates of immigrants recently arrived – should calculate how many additional immigrants be admitted every year. Scope insensitivity prevents this calculation from being made. Instead, Americans are led to believe they must absorb all the dispossessed, the persecuted, the destitute, from all the world. But simple calculations will indicate conclusively that even if Americans doubled or tripled their already alarming rate of immigration, it would make virtually no dent in the number of people in the world who suffer these afflictions. The realistic way for Americans to help alleviate poverty in the rest of the world is to assist them with economic development.

Corporate Profits: Pointing a reproachful finger at the major oil companies, who perhaps in aggregate declared profits of $100 billion dollars in 2007, has great emotional appeal. Ordinary people who are paying $4.00 per gallon for gas are understandably concerned.

Quantitative reality, however, scope, paints a very different picture. First of all, most of those profits are outside the USA, but even if they were all inside the USA, yearly profits of $100 billion divided by annual American gasoline consumption of 170 billion gallons only translates to a price drop of $0.58 per gallon. But major international oil companies only make a fraction of those profits in the USA, and they are not allowed to deduct from their taxable income all the money they need to explore for more oil, which means if they make no profit, they have no money to find more oil. More on that later.

Another way corporate profits are used to generate emotional arguments that translate into misguided voting and subsequent bad policy relates to CEO compensation. There are perhaps 1,000 corporate executives who make $100 million per year – probably not even that. This equates to $100 billion per year. But public employees, thanks to their public employee unions who exercise nearly absolute control over politicians and elections at the state, county and local level in most American states, now enjoy compensation that exceeds private sector compensation by a factor of 2-4x. This eggregious disparity is easily validated if, along with salaries and wages, you take into account the value of health and retirement benefits, overtime, and generous paid time off.

The difference between what America’s approximately 30 million public sector workers make, compared to what they would make if they were paid according to the globally competitive rates paid for similar work in the private sector is approximately 1.5 trillion per year (30 million times $50K) – 15 times as much! This staggering sum of money could be used to eliminate government deficits and fix our roads – but scope insensitivity means emotion rules – corporate chieftans are demonized, and cities and states go bankrupt so public employees can retire early.

Global Warming: Let’s assume all of these catastrophic projections are actually true; that we have to immediately drop atmospheric CO2 concentrations to under 350 PPM, and this is something under our control. In pursuit of this goal, in California, for example, we are going to now cram everyone into ultra high density lots, destroy all semi-rural suburbs with subsidized ultra high density infill, coerce people out of their cars, and carpet the landscape with wind and biofuel farms. But is this feasible and likely to make any difference in global atmospheric CO2 concentrations? The answer is an absolute and definite NO.

Currently over 80% of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuel. And even if we were able to bring everyone in the world up (or down) to a per capita energy consumption at 30% that of people in the USA, energy production in the world would have to double. There is no way this will happen without fossil fuel. It is inspiring and appropriate to work to accelerate the deployment of non-fossil fuel energy. But it is completely impossible to ratchet atmospheric CO2 down to 350 PPM through curtailment of fossil fuel burning. It isn’t going to happen. Only gross scope insensitivity would allow anyone to come to such a conclusion. And absent this conclusion, policy options change considerably.

WHO ARE THE VICTIMS OF SCOPE INSENSITIVITY?

The ironic answer is the real victims are regular working people, ordinary people, all of them potential voters who never got out their calculators and overcame their scope insensitivity. And who wins? In America the environmentalist socialists – or socialist environmentalists – are the ones who win. The socialist left has taken over the environmentalist mainstream throughout the world, something that should, and does, horrify any of us who are environmentalists, but not socialists.

The unwitting agenda of socialists in America is to create a nation where social cohesion has been shattered because private sector workers including recently arrived immigrants were unable to enjoy the benefits the privileged elite enjoyed. Why? Because social security and medicare were never reformed and upgraded, because 30% or more of the electorate had unionized public sector jobs and had taxpayer supported retirement security utterly disconnected from social security and medicare. Because Americans never confronted the challenge that faces, within a generation, all humankind, which is to learn to live with a stable population. Because environmentalists marginalized economic growth at the same time as they forced an unsustainably growing, culturally fractured population into the “urban service boundaries” of exisiting cities, piling everyone on top of each other, creating social havoc, but also creating a meal ticket for the public sector employees; special education teachers, social workers, and public safety workers.

And what of the corporate sector? Socialists understand that the difference between socialism and communism is this: Socialism is communism with rich people and huge corporations. The most powerful multinational corporations always manage to thrive under the environmentalist / socialist agenda, because only the largest and wealthiest corporations can afford to comply with these ever stricter regulations. Under the eco-socialist regime, America’s traditions of market competition and creative innovation will be tragically undermined, but huge coporations will prosper. And well they should, since the tax revenues assessed on their profits – rhetorically demonized – is what enables environmentalist nonprofit activists and overpaid public sector workers to exist.

Scope insensitivity is a big part of the reason Americans may see their nation complete its downwards drift towards becoming a socialist police state controlled by government employee unions in partnership with mega corporations, enforcing rationing instead of competition, artificial scarcity instead of abundance, and solidifying the nation into two very different classes; the unionized government elite and their partners, the super rich, and everyone else. And this is the vision that carries the day unchallenged in 2008, carried on the rhetorical wings of humanitarian ideals, resentment at corporate profits, global warming crisis mongering, and extreme green ideology in general.

Companies are looking to landfills to make their products more “green” by using recycled materials that would otherwise end up wasted. Trucks overflowing with plastics, glass or rubber bring the products to companies instead of dumps. (Ideally these trucks would also run on the biofuel created by the landfill, but that’s another story.) Recycled glass, for example, is used to create exotic mosaic tiles that can outlast any comparable material. The Mohawk group, a leader in the flooring industry, has chosen to work with plastics and rubber, both of which are incorporated into their carpets, rugs, vinyl and other home products.

Mohawk prides itself on being green and putting a dent in landfills. A nifty calculator placed on their homepage shows viewers how much of a difference Mohawk has made in the few seconds it’s taken to glance at their page. In a little less than a minute the numbers whizzing by denote that:

• 2700 PET bottles have been recycled into carpet yarn
• 31 pounds of tires have been recycled into door mats
• 3100 pounds of waste were diverted from the landfill

Quoted from their site; “Everything we do at Mohawk is green. We’re the largest recycler in the flooring industry, a net purchaser of waste, and leader in green technologies and innovations.”

In Nov, 2007, Mohawk unveiled their greenworks center in Chicago. In a press release they described the unique recycling model: “GreenWorks Center is the first of its kind to not only process all major types of synthetic carpet fiber — accounting for 90 percent of the nation’s post-consumer carpet waste — but also the only recycling program to recover 90 percent of those materials into useable products…GreenWorks Center will process 100 percent of the carpet it receives, including fiber, backing and latex. It will also manage a variety of thermoplastic non-carpet recyclables, helping to further minimize the amount of carpet that finds its way to the landfills”

Mohawk’s impressive accomplishments since the introduction of greenworks include:

• the design of a carpet tile, free of PVC, that is 100% recyclable
• 3 billion PET bottles and cans recycled into fiber per year
• 30 million pounds of crumb rubber (from tires) diverted from landfills per year

Customers have the opportunity to choose from countless designs and as an additional incentive to buyers, 25 cents is donated to breast cancer research per square yard of carpet bought

We have never simply posted a press release, but they remain essential to keeping track of what’s going on out there. Today we received two press releases, almost back to back, that have a lot to do with each other.

The first one announced a major new partnership between Caterpillar, “the world’s leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, clean diesel and natural gas engines and gas turbines,” with CleanAIR Systems of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The announcement continues: “CleanAIR’s reduction technology will be installed on existing Caterpillar commercial engine applications to reduce diesel particulate matter, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and NOx.”

Literally minutes later, another press release arrived in the in-box, this one promoting a book entitled “The Coming China Wars,” by Peter Navarro. We certainly hope there won’t be “China Wars” on the way, but as the book describes, China’s challenges as such a huge and rapidly growing nation are many. Here’s an excerpt: “unlike in the United States, Germany, or Japan where sophisticated pollution-control technologies are deployed, much of what Chinese power plants and factories spew in the air is not just sulfur dioxide but also a high percentage of fine particulate matter. This is a critical observation because particulate matter is the most damaging form of airborne pollutants.”

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, this is what we should be worrying about with China right now – the genuine, immediately unhealthy pollution coming from burning fossil fuel. The problem is we are so focused on CO2 emissions, we are taking the spotlight away from particulate matter, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and NOx. Even if we aren’t ignoring these more immediate and deadly pollutants completely, and this is key, the trajectory of reductions is slowed down because we are so focused on CO2.

The ability of the fully industrialized nations to provide advanced technologies that would render the burning of fossil fuel virtually clean – except for the CO2 – is already here. We have proven technologies to accomplish these goals that get better and cheaper every day. And the Chinese certainly have the money and know-how to deploy these technologies. In fact, their coal plants use coal more efficiently than most of the plants in western nations, because they are newer plants. They simply need to install the scrubbers.

Even more ironic is the fact that if China accellerated the building of modern coal plants, it would actually reduce air pollution in China, because these plants would provide energy to countless millions of households that currently rely as well on coal because they are off-grid. And unlike power plants that produce hundreds of megawatts of power, off-grid coal is almost impossible to regulate.

If they aren’t already, Caterpillar and CleanAIR technologies should go to China and sell their clean technology. And if environmentalists might embrace a greater measure of complexity, they might advocate diplomacy and protocols that emphasize the possible – healthy clean fossil fuel power plants – instead of the impossible – pumping 25+ cubic kilometers per year of CO2 into fissures in the earth. And if we actually did that, the unintended geologic consequences might make the biofueled, CO2 offset subsidy enabled burning of Borneo look like a small campfire.

With desalination, reuse & recycling, and smart agricultural irrigation, fish can thrive, and humans can avoid rationing.

Industrial workers at a desalination plant.

The global desalination industry has been one of the first to benefit from the impact of the triple threat to water supply. Desalination offers a means for increasing the supply of fresh water from a source independent of existing ground and surface water supplies.

It can form an important supplement to existing water supplies during droughts or periodic water supply shortfalls. Worldwide, desalination operations are set to grow from a capacity of 39.9 million cubic meters per day (m3/d) at the beginning of 2006 to 64.3 million m3/d in 2010, and to 97.5 million m3/d in 2015. This represents a 61 percent increase in capacity over a five-year period, and a 140 percent increase in capacity over a ten-year period, according to the latest estimates for the desalination market.

The compound annual growth rate of installed capacity is roughly 9 percent. The compound annual growth rate of the market for new capacity hovers around 13 percent. This expansion of capacity will entail capital investment totaling $25 billion by the end of 2010, or $56.4 billion by the end of 2015.

Dramatic improvements through innovation have brought the cost of desalted water closer to that of other water sources than ever before. Improved membranes and pumping systems have sharply reduced electricity costs. For example, the Carlsbad, California, desalination plant expects to pay $1.10 in electricity to produce 1,000 gallons of water, down from $2.10 per 1,000 gallons at the mothballed Santa Barbara plant. Costs have been as low as $0.50 per 1,000 gallons in the large-scale plant in Ashkelon, Israel. Here are two companies on the forefront of desalination technology:

Energy Recovery Incorporated

www.energyrecovery.com

Location: San Leandro, California, United States

Funding: $9.5 million from private individuals, S-1 registered for an IPO

Value proposition: Energy Recovery, Inc. (ERI) invented, patented, and commercialized an energy recovery solution: the PX Pressure Exchanger® (PX), which saves energy in high pressure hydraulic operations, such as reverse osmosis for desalination. The PX energy recovery device uses the principle of positive displacement and isobaric chambers to achieve extremely efficient transfer of energy from a high-pressure waste stream, such as the brine stream from a reverse osmosis desalination unit, to a low-pressure incoming feed stream. According to ERI, the PX is 98 percent efficient, losing little energy in the transfer.

ERI states that it has 10 times more operating experience than competing manufacturers of isobaric energy recovery devices, including 10 million unit hours of proven experience and over 6,000 units installed or contracted worldwide. This install base is estimated to account for more than 5.2 million m3/day of capacity installed or under construction, and more than 450 independent reference plants.

Take away: ERI has established a dominant position for energy recovery in the desalination market. Given that leadership and the revenue and profitability (9.6 percent net) that position affords the company, it should be able to enter a host of other water and energy markets that use high-pressure pumps, such as the considerable market for cooling energy generation facilities.

Israeli Desalination Enterprises (IDE)

www.ide-tech.com

Location: Petah Tikva, Israel

Funding: IDE is equally owned by ICL (Israel Chemical Ltd.) and the Delek Group. Both holding companies are multinational and multidisciplinary groups, with an annual turnover of approximately US$2 billion (2003) each.

Value proposition: Established in 1965, IDE Technologies Ltd. is internationally recognized as a pioneer and leader in the delivery of sophisticated water management solutions. IDE specializes in research and development of saline water desalination processes, concentration and purification of industrial streams, wastewater treatment, heat pumps, and ice/snow machines. The company develops, designs, manufactures, and installs sophisticated equipment for industrial and domestic applications throughout the world.

While IDE lacks the market presence that the larger desalination providers such as Veolia and Suez possess, it continues to win portions of key projects based on its innovative approaches to various processes such as pre-treatment reverse osmosis, energy recovery, and input water uptake.

Take away: Look for spinoffs from IDE that provide breakthrough technology and are able to work with IDE competition in their niche markets.

Laura Shenkar is an international water expert on water investments and water technology, and a Principal of The Artemis Project, a consultancy that specializes in supporting innovative technology companies achieve their potential in the global market. As a member of the leadership team of three successful startups, she has learned how to employ the unique capabilities of a company’s technology and its team to target the best opportunities in an emerging market. Laura is an active member of several national and international water industry associations and participates in governmental water management initiatives as well as venture investment conferences. This combination of activities enables her to share with The Artemis Project clients a wide view of emerging opportunities and new product trends. This report was excerpted from a recently released study by the Artemis Project entitled “Water Matters: Venture Investment Opportunities in Innovative Water Technology,” which can be obtained by contacting Ms. Shenkar at laura@theartemisfund.com.

Additional EcoWorld reports on water and desalination:

- India’s Hydropower

- India’s Water Consciousness

- Our Endangered Oceans

- India’s Water Future

- Arctic to Aral

- Mangroves Stop Tsunami

- Clean the Ganges

- Seawater Farms

- Affordable Desalination

- California’s Water System

- Sverdrups & Brine

- Revisiting Desalination

- Photovoltaic Desalination

Landfill gas is an appealing alternative to increasingly expensive oil-based fuels. This type of biogas is a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide that forms a liquefied natural gas (LNG) after being purified, condensed and finally super-cooled.

Linde North America and Waste Management are working together to create the world’s largest waste-to-energy facility in Livermore, California. Biogas will be used to fuel the fleet responsible for transporting the endless supply of garbage to the facility: This will begin the cycle of garbage fueled garbage trucks, where one would not exist without the other.

According to the Linde website “Linde [an international gases and engineering company] is responsible for the engineering of the plant as well as the cleaning and subsequent liquefaction of the landfill gas. Waste Management, North America’s leading recycling and waste management company, is supplying the landfill gas – which comes from the natural decomposition of organic waste.”

Methane gas is emitted when waste decomposes without exposure to oxygen, but methane does occur naturally in the environment as well: The EPA Landfill Methane Outreach Program explains that “Methane is emitted from a variety of both human-related (anthropogenic) and natural sources. Human-related activities include fossil fuel production, animal husbandry (enteric fermentation in livestock and manure management), rice cultivation, biomass burning, and waste management. These activities release significant quantities of methane to the atmosphere. It is estimated that 60% of global methane emissions are related to human-related activities. Natural sources of methane include wetlands [accounting for about 80% of emissions], gas hydrates, permafrost, termites, oceans, freshwater bodies, non-wetland soils, and other sources such as wildfires.

Methane gas produced by landfills currently seeps into the environment as wasted energy. Not only that, but methane supposedly causes more damage to the environment than CO2. Landfills are the largest source of human-related methane, accounting for almost 1/3 of emissions. It is only logical to absorb the gas for use as a clean and efficient fuel while eliminating another biproduct of human refuse.

Waste Management claims that “When the facility begins operating in 2009 it is expected to produce up to 13,000 gallons a day of LNG”. (press release)