Innovation Toronto » environment

Monitoring greenhouse gases

innovation2 — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:03:46 +0000

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Highs and lows

You might think that measuring the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be a priority. If you did think that, though, you would be wrong.

IN NEGOTIATIONS on nuclear weapons the preferred stance is “Trust but verify”. In negotiations on climate change there seems little opportunity for either. Trust, as anyone who attended last year’s summit in Copenhagen can attest, is in the shortest of supplies. So, too, is verification.

Barack Obama was asked when he was in Copenhagen whether a provision by which countries could peek into each others’ assessment processes was strong enough to be sure there was no cheating. He answered reassuringly that “we can actually monitor a lot of what takes place through satellite imagery”. That statement conjured up thoughts of the sort of cold-war satellite system that America used to identify and count Russian missiles. But the president was being a bit previous; at the moment, no such system exists, because America’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a satellite that would have fulfilled the role, was lost on launch this time last year. The purpose of OCO was to work out the fate of carbon dioxide that is emitted by industrial processes but does not then stay in the atmosphere—about 60% of the total.

America is planning to build a new OCO. In the meantime, however, a small group of scientists labours away on Earth, doing its best to monitor emissions at ground level. At the end of February a number of these researchers met at the Royal Society in London, to discuss what they were up to.

Measuring gas levels day in, day out can look a little humdrum to outsiders, including those who hold the purse strings. They tend to prefer scientists to experiment and test hypotheses, not just tally things. But that attitude galls the greenhouse-gas measurers, and not only because it denies them money. It also ignores the fact that careful measurement is a way of discovering new things, not just of checking the status quo. Monitoring is not just a necessary handmaiden of science—it is the real thing.

De bas en haut

Governments are required by treaty to inform the world about their greenhouse-gas emissions. To do this, they take a bottom-up approach, using data about how much of the relevant gases all sorts of activities, from steelmaking to dairy farming, are expected to produce and how much of each of those activities is going on. The researchers at the meeting work top down, looking directly at what is in the atmosphere, and how quickly it accumulates.

Ray Weiss of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, has been studying the difference between these approaches. In most cases, he has found that the top-down estimates are appreciably higher. In some, such as that of sulphur hexafluoride, a powerful greenhouse gas that is used as an insulator in high-voltage electronics, the trends as well as the values are different: bottom-up accounts say emissions are falling; top-down analysis says they are going up.

Andreas Stohl of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research and his colleagues have been looking at weather patterns to discover where some of these gases are emitted. The level of a gas seen at a particular monitoring station depends on where it came from and which way the wind was blowing, so if you have a number of stations and some data on how their readings change with wind directions, you can have a good guess at the source.

Among Dr Stohl’s conclusions is the positive one that China now seems to be emitting less HFC-23, a powerful greenhouse gas produced by the refrigeration industry, than it did in 2005. This suggests that the large amounts of money invested through carbon markets in reducing such emissions may be having an effect. More detailed studies might show precisely which industrial regions the gases are coming from, and thus reveal what is going on with specific HFC-23-mitigation projects.

For gases that are sometimes or always produced biologically, such as carbon dioxide and methane, a less geographic way of assigning sources is possible. Living things treat carbon atoms of different weights slightly differently, and these differences show up in the weights of the gases they churn out. So it is possible to distinguish, for example, between methane that has been stored in permafrost and methane that is made by rotting vegetation.

Read more . . .

IMF proposes global climate change fund (guardian.co.uk)
Concerns mount over vague Japanese climate bill (businessgreen.com)
Black Carbon: A Visible but Overlooked Factor in Warming (time.com)

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Antro SOLO human-electric-hybrid aims for double the fun

innovation2 — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:51:33 +0000

Hungarian designers Antro are aiming to introduce a new fuel efficient vehicle to the consumer market by 2012

which (like the recently covered HumanCar) will rely on the muscle-power of driver and passengers as well as a hybrid fuel/electric engine. The designers are also looking to have the three-seater SOLO link up to another to make one vehicle capable of carrying six people.

As more opportunities arise to accumulate wealth in the East, more and more people are being given the chance to own cars which will only add to the world’s environmental problems. In order to nip such problems in the bud, Antro has suggested a fuel-efficient three seater where the driver is flanked on either side by a passenger and all three would join forces to propel the SOLO Light using pedals in front of them.

Antro’s prototype has been built using a light magnesium alloy/carbon fiber frame and body construction and features electric assist for when the occupants tire or the driver is alone. Photovoltaic cells incorporated in the roof provide the power for the electric hub motors at each wheel and although the current model doesn’t have one yet, the designers are aiming to install a fuel engine to give a longer range than the 12 miles or so that the electric motors currently provide. It is intended that the fuel engine will achieve fuel efficiency in the region of 150 miles to the gallon and reach speeds of around 87mph.

Tree seeds could provide low-cost water purification for developing nations

innovation2 — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:46:15 +0000

“In the developing world, more than 1 billion people cannot get clean drinking water…

The United Nations says that dirty water causes 80 percent of diseases in the developing world, and kills 10 million people annually.” Those sobering lines are from the United Nations’ website, and underscore just how urgently needed water purification is in much of the world. What many people don’t realize, however, is that there are already naturally-occurring water filtration supplies available in many of these areas. They come in the form of seeds from the Moringa oleifera tree, and used properly, they can produce a 90.00 to 99.99% bacterial reduction in previously untreated water.

The drought-resistant Moringa has been described as the “world’s most useful tree”, as it produces cooking and lighting oil, soil fertilizer, and highly-nutritious food in the form of its pods, leaves, seeds and flowers. It is grown in Africa, India, South East Asia and Central and South America – all places that lack sufficient potable water.

It has been known for some time that its seeds can also be used to purify water, although that knowledge has never been widely disseminated, even amongst the locals. The purification technique has recently been written up in the scientific journal Current Protocols in Microbiology, and is being offered as a free download as part of publisher John Wiley and Sons’ Corporate Citizenship Initiative. It is hoped that by offering the technique is this widely-available format, communities that need the information will be better able to get it.

Read more . . .

The Perfect Tree (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
A Drinking Water Crisis In Haiti Long Before Earthquake Destruction (trueslant.com)
SwissINSO Launches Solar Water Purification Product (eon.businesswire.com)

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Dreaming the Possible Dream

innovation2 — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:22:51 +0000

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USA-centric but world important

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The thing I love most about America is that there’s always somebody who doesn’t get the word — somebody who doesn’t understand that in a Great Recession you’re supposed to hunker down, downsize and just hold on for dear life. I have a couple of friends who fit that bill, who think a recession is a dandy time to try to discover better and cheaper ways to do things. They both happen to be Indian-Americans — one a son of the Himalayas, who came to America on a scholarship and went to work for NASA to try to find a way to Mars; the other a son of New Delhi, who came here and found the Sun, Sun Microsystems. Both are serial innovators. Both are now shepherding clean-tech start-ups that have the potential to be disruptive game changers. They don’t know from hunkering down. They just didn’t get the word.

As a result, one has produced a fuel cell that can turn natural gas or natural grass into electricity; the other has a technology that might make coal the cleanest, cheapest energy source by turning its carbon-dioxide emissions into bricks to build your next house. Though our country may be flagging, it’s because of innovators like these that you should never — ever — write us off.

Let me introduce Vinod Khosla and K.R. Sridhar. Khosla, the co-founder of Sun, set out several years ago to fund energy start-ups. His favorite baby right now is a company called Calera, which was begun with the Stanford Professor Brent Constantz, who was studying how corals use CO2 to produce their calcium carbonate bones.

If you combine CO2 with seawater, or any kind of briny water, you produce CaCO3, calcium carbonate. That is not only the stuff of corals. It is also the same white, pasty goop that appears on your shower head from hard (calcium-rich) water. At its demonstration plant near Santa Cruz, Calif., Calera has developed a process that takes CO2 emissions from a coal- or gas-fired power plant and sprays seawater into it and naturally converts most of the CO2 into calcium carbonate, which is then spray-dried into cement or shaped into little pellets that can be used as concrete aggregates for building walls or highways — instead of letting the CO2 emissions go into the atmosphere and produce climate change.

If this can scale, it would eliminate the need for expensive carbon-sequestration facilities planned to be built alongside coal-fired power plants — and it might actually make the heretofore specious notion of “clean coal” a possibility.

Read more . . .

Calera and Novacem use concrete to capture CO2 (innovationtoronto.com)
Vinod Khosla: In energy, ignore the experts (news.cnet.com)
Putting ‘Green’ Technology Into Bricks (online.wsj.com)
On the price of coal (economist.com)

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Nanotech Discovery May Green Chemical Manufacturing

innovation2 — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 20:16:37 +0000

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A new nanotech catalyst

developed by McGill University Chemists Chao-Jun Li, Audrey Moores and their colleagues offers industry an opportunity to reduce the use of expensive and toxic heavy metals.

Catalysts are substances used to facilitate and drive chemical reactions. Although chemists have long been aware of the ecological and economic impact of traditional chemical catalysts and do attempt to reuse their materials, it is generally difficult to separate the catalyzing chemicals from the finished product. The team’s discovery does away with this chemical process altogether.

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Secret Energy Turbine: rooftop wind power in stealth mode

innovation2 — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:29:06 +0000

Few people would argue that having a rooftop wind turbine could help offset your power bills.

Your neighbors, however, might not appreciate the sight of a windmill on your roof, nor would they like the sound of its blades whistling through the air. Don’t give up on the idea yet, though, because British inventor Rupert Sweet-Escott has come up with a product that he claims addresses those problems. His Secret Energy Turbine (SET) looks like an ordinary chimney stack and is boasts almost completely silent operation.

The SET has vertically-mounted blades, and two opposing magnets to help keep it spinning. As the blades catch the wind and start to spin, they form an airfoil by means of boundary layers. These boundary layers are the same as the layer of air that moves over an airplane’s wings, and the result is a faster-turning turbine. The uneven current it generates gets organized by an electronic load controller, then fed into one or more battery packs for storage. From there, a sine wave inverter converts it to a regular household voltage, and you can use it for whatever you want.

So, just how much energy does the thing produce? It depends on how windy your area is, and the size of your turbine. The SET website has a chart showing approximate energy-generation for the three sizes, which is shown below.

Read more . . .

Philippe Starck’s stylish wind turbine for your yard (treehugger.com)

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Fracking to Free Natural Gas?

innovation2 — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:41:50 +0000

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A new technique to shatter shale and get the gas within offers promise–and peril.

That’s the sound of fracking—pumping a mix of water, sand and chemicals a mile or more into the Earth to shatter shale deposits and release the natural gas within.

From the Barnett shale in Texas to the “supergiant” Marcellus shale that stretches from West Virginia to New York State, so much natural gas has been found that the U.S. may have enough to burn for 100 years or more. And burning natural gas releases 43 percent less CO2 than burning coal.

Fort Worth has transitioned from cow town to gas town. It’s the booming capital of fracking with thousands of wells within city limits. But fracking comes with a cost.

Read more . . .

Hydraulic Fracturing Regulations Sought By House Energy And Commerce Department (huffingtonpost.com)
Gas Drilling in Appalachia Yields a Foul Byproduct (abcnews.go.com)
Fracking Is Finally Getting Some Attention and Regulation (treehugger.com)

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Can greener gadgets save us from e-waste?

innovation2 — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:56:42 +0000

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One laptop per child seems a simple slogan, chock full of benefit. What could go wrong when you put the power of the Internet and solar cells into the hands of children in the developing world? After all, not only does it train the global underclass in the tools of modern production, it also unleashes a creativity that may allow them to leapfrog the old, dirty, industrial development that has fouled the planet.

Unfortunately, those very laptops may end up doing that last thing. “What is the entire country of Uruguay going to do with all those laptops” at the end of their useful life, asked Jeff Omelchuck of the Green Electronics Council at the Greener Gadgets conference in New York City on February 25. “They are a very resource intensive product to make. Will there be recycling? Did we also extend the gift to put in a closed loop infrastructure?”

More than one million such laptops have already been distributed, from Kenya to Uruguay, according to Yves Behar, a designer at fuseproject. In fact, every child in Uruguay now has such a laptop and the program is expanding into high schools. And the designer has begun to work on the next iteration of the machine, one potentially sporting two screens, thin like an iPad, and made completely from plastic: dubbed the XO3.

Even the cheapest laptop has “more precious gems and metals than any Pope has had,” noted Leonardo Bonanni, founder of Sourcemap.org, at the conference. His Web site allows users to track the constituents of any gadget, from a laptop to the carbon footprint of a bomb. “There is no excuse not to know where things come from and what they’re made of, especially if you’re buying them,” he said.

In fact, our gadgets collectively contain much of the world’s copper (there’s a pound in most laptops), tin from artisanal miners and lithium, “so much that it could be called a bomb,” Bonanni said. And then there’s the really rare stuff like indium for screens and super-expensive rhodium for electrical contacts. All told modern electronics require 60 different elements, ranging from the toxic to the treasured—and fuel the same kind of exploitative and annihilating resource-extraction that has been a hallmark of Western consumption since at least the ivory craze of Victorian England. “These materials don’t really belong to us, they belong to humanity. We’re just shepherding it from one place to another,” Bonanni said.

That turns out to be a short process: typical cell phone users replace their phones every 18 months, contributing to a growing pile of electronic waste (e-waste). The U.S. alone produces roughly three million metric tons of the stuff each year, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). That e-waste is then often improperly incinerated or broken down in places like China or India, poisoning locals.

In fact, the amount of e-waste looks set to grow exponentially, according to UNEP, as cell phones, laptops and other gadgets proliferate in these same countries. Seven times more mobile phones are set to be hitting the junkyard by 2020 in China, 18 times more over the same span in India. Already, the world produces 50 million metric tons of e-waste a year.

Read more . . .

The Greener Gadgets Conference (PHOTOS): 10 Notable Gadgets Of The Future (huffingtonpost.com)
Greener Gadgets 2010: Yves Béhar’s Hacked Car Concept, Green Underwear project, and Top 3 Design Principles (treehugger.com)
Survey says: Greener gadgets not yet a priority, but getting there (green.venturebeat.com)
UN warns world could be swamped by electronic waste (telegraph.co.uk)
Photos from Greener Gadgets 2010 (makezine.com)

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A Battle at Midway

innovation2 — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 02:57:02 +0000

We talk with photographer Chris Jordan, who recently traveled to a remote part of the Pacific Ocean to document effects of the world’s largest known mass of garbage.

What happened to that disposable Solo cup—the one you used once at a work party—after you tossed it into the garbage? For that matter, what happens to any of the countless plastic products (shopping bags, coffee stirrers, water bottles, etc.) we use and then discard on a daily basis? Of course, conventional plastic doesn’t readily biodegrade; so where is it now? If you live in North America or Asia, there’s a chance that cup is trapped in a broad ocean current, known as a gyre, in the middle of the northern Pacific Ocean along with an untold number of other pieces of litter in what has been named the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The mostly plastic mass of marine pollution is giant—the gyre is actually made up of a pair of large vortices that stretches from Japan to about 1,000 kilometers off the western coast of North America—but it’s not a contiguous “garbage island” one could walk on or even see in satellite imagery.

Near the center of this giant swarm of pollution are the Midway Islands, a series of small atolls in a remote area of the Pacific, about a third of the way to Tokyo from the Hawaiian Islands. Here, some of the effects of the patch are just now becoming apparent. A full third of the resident Albatross chicks die due to feeding on the ubiquitous plastic, mistaking the ingestible bits as baitfish. The phenomenon threatens more than the biodiversity of marine wildlife at Midway. Many researchers view what’s happening at Midway as a bellwether for ecosystems across the globe, with the Albatross as proverbial canaries in the coal mine, alerting the world to an environmental toxicity that could ultimately impact us all in ways we’re just beginning to understand.

Read more . . .

Plastic Trash Collects In Atlantic Ocean, Comparable To Great Pacific Garbage Patch (huffingtonpost.com)
Death by Plastic (neatorama.com)
A Sea of Plastics (usnews.com)
Where Plastic Goes When It Dies: Birds’ Stomachs [Image Cache] (gizmodo.com)
“Plastic rubbish patch” blights Atlantic Ocean (news.bbc.co.uk)
TOXIC: Garbage Island (cnn.com)
‘Rubbish patch’ blights Atlantic (news.bbc.co.uk)

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HumanCar aims for a healthy planet with healthy drivers

innovation2 — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:51:24 +0000

At first glance it might look a bit like an elongated pedal car for kids, but its designers are convinced the HumanCar Imagine PS NEV is a serious player in the search for cleaner, greener ways to get around. The vehicle converts the rowing motion of the driver and any passengers into rotational thrust to charge a battery and power the vehicle in conjunction with an electric motor. So not only is it healthy for the planet – it is healthy for the occupants too. And as an added bonus the vehicle can also be used store energy and act as a backup power generator to provide electricity to the home.

History

The HumanCar is the brainchild of Chief Scientist/Engineer Charles Samuel Greenwood P.E., who first hit upon the idea for a human powered car some 40 years ago. Sitting in a traffic jam in Silicon Valley in 1968 Greenwood noticed the many overweight commuters sitting in their cars breathing in noxious exhaust fumes. He was inspired to create a modest modification to vehicles that would reduce the need for conventional fuel, while at the same time providing exercise.

Searching for a full-body workout Greenwood eschewed a bicycle-type mechanism in favor of the rowing-like mechanism and developed the forerunner to the Impulse PS, the FM-4 (Fully Manual – 4 people). This was a research “skeleton” car that was built to test the concept of a human powered vehicle and the lessons it provided eventually led to the development of the Impulse PS (Power Station) NEV.

The innovative vehicle is dubbed an NEV because it falls into the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (NEV) classification for low speed vehicles. So although the HumanCar is capable of reaching speeds of around 62 mph (100 km/h) it is limited to 25 mph (around 40 km/h) to comply with the classification.

The car includes seating for four, with rowing handlebars for each passenger. It can be powered by one, two, three or four people, the battery-powered electric motor, or any combination of human and electric power. The battery can also be charged via a standard electrical outlet if you feel you’ve had your quota of exercise for the day.

To make the most out of the power generated the vehicle also incorporates a regenerative braking system and an advanced power system to enhance overall efficiency. Because steering using the rowing handles would be too difficult to control the vehicle is steered by “Body Steering” (read leaning into turns). According to Chuck Greenwood, HumanCar Inc. CEO and son of Charles Greenwood, this is apparently much more intuitive (not to mention more fun) than using a conventional steering wheel.

Read more . . .

HumanCar rolls out a plug-in hybrid for $15,500 (dvice.com)
HumanCar Test Drive (neatorama.com)

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Innovation Toronto » environment

Monitoring greenhouse gases

Highs and lows

De bas en haut

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History

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