Tag Archives: Energy

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EU looks at the Emerging Energy Technologies

Artificial Photosynthesis, Bamboo Composites, Piezoelectric Materials, Salinity Gradients, Thermoelectric generators… these are some of the Emerging Energy Technologies (EET) that have recently been looked at by the Materials Unit of the European Commission in a workshop.

The objective of the workshop was to “to identify possible material priorities for emerging energy technologies that would have longer term (up to 2050) commercial prospects” but none of them are, as of yet, viable.

Take Artificial Photosynthesis…

The Report says that the “artificial photosynthesis is a direct way of producing solar fuels without the need of intermediate energy carriers” but “no functioning artificial photosynthetic device has yet reached the level of maturity needed to be useful outside laboratories.”

The research field is so new that “at this point, it is not known which of the different subfields (organic, biological, and inorganic) that will be developed most successfully.”

Bamboo Composite is similar: it aims at cultivating the bamboo locally in order to feed the micro-wind turbines and take the technology away from Chinese domination.

Low Energy Nuclear Reactions in Condensed Matter is another interesting development. It is based on the Fleischman & Pons effect, once controversial, which records excess energy production between palladium and deuterium (heavy water) which “may be ascribed to a nuclear process only.”

The conclusion of this brainstorming workshop is that more money needs to be devoted to these ideas but none of them are a total energy solution.

“No single technology would be a total solution in itself and that developing an energy mix will become even more important in the future,” is the conclusion of the workshop but the recommendation is that more “research into the structure and properties of materials for energy” should be done.

Of course, one ideal alternative technology would be energy from gravity – a seemingly inexhaustible resource available everywhere and, some say, has something to do with the newly discovered Higgs particle.

Full report on the workshop available here.

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China takes a swipe at US dollar policy

China says that it is facing a necessity to create an international yuan-based oil pricing and as a first step it plans to negotiate with “African, Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian nations for an increased use of its currency for the settlement of energy, minerals and grains trade.”

“This is an inevitable path for the rise of the yuan’s status in international energy trade. It is also a crucial step toward the yuan’s internationalization,” editorializes China’s government news agency China Daily.

China has already made some moves to internationalize its currency with plans to loosen up its capital account with an eye for developing greater liquidity for the yuan-based debt paper.

In addition to the recent HSBC introduction of yuan-based bond in London, Indonesia announced yesterday that it plans to issue yuan-denominated bonds in 2013. It is to be expected that more countries, particularly in Asia, will follow Indonesia’s example.

While developing the debt market and broadening its liquidity is one of the key ways to internationalize one’s currency, China’s introduction of yuan-based energy pricing is an even broader step that smacks Washington right in its dollar policy it has been conducting for the better part of the last 100 or so years.

With energy taking up greater proportion of global GDP, and China expected to be dominant driver of that expansion, Chinese seek to extract significant gains by pricing energy in yuan.

There is basic gain from seigniorage because Chinese would give the oil producing country paper currency that costs them way less to make then the value of oil Chinese would get in exchange.

More significantly, yuan priced energy exchange would create yuan holdings in the oil producing country and those yuan would need a conservative debt instrument to stash itself into, hence China’s aim at broadening its debt markets.

Now, many have argued that such a broad swipe at the US dollar dominance is sure to create fierce enemies in Washington.

Of course, there is no standing policy in Washington that one can point fingers at and say that attempts to dethrone the dollar from being the sole pricing currency for oil leads to war, but coincidental episodes in the past suggest likelihood of conflict.

Many have noted, for example, that for all the brilliance of Keynes, Washington pushed aside his idea about creating the reserve currency, the so called bancor, an instead foisted the dollar as the anchor for all others at $35 for 1 ounce of gold.

When trade and other flows broke this peg, Nixon de-pegged the dollar and an oil-dollar consensus was created with a tacit agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia to price oil in US dollars.

“The agreement with OPEC in the 1970s to price oil in dollars has provided tremendous artificial strength to the dollar as the preeminent reserve currency. This has created a universal demand for the dollar, and soaks up the huge number of new dollars generated each year,” noted Ron Paul in his 2006 speech in the US House of Representatives.

Many folks, Ron Paul included, have said that countries who decide to price their oil in currency other then dollar get attacked.

“In 2001, Venezuela’s ambassador to Russia spoke of Venezuela switching to the Euro for all their oil sales. Within a year there was a coup attempt against Chavez, reportedly with assistance from our CIA,” says Paul.

Libya’s Khadafy is said to have also contemplated switching to Euro pricing and even though he abandoned the idea, others take note, Khadafy eventually got clipped.

It is said that Iran is current focus of Washington’s scorn because, among other things, it sells oil priced in Euro.

Sure, some are pointing to the emerging Federal Reserve role as the “global” lender of last resort as a way to promote dollar’s dominance citing Fed’s dollar swaps in particular as a way to shore up international desire for the dollar, but apart from crisis, this tool is not particularly well suited for repetitive action… and that leaves energy markets as the perfect vehicle to promote reserve currency.

China’s initiative to price energy in yuan is definitiely a frontal swipe at the US dollar dominance that will elicit many critics in Washington right on top of accusations of currency manipulation, trade, human rights violations …

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RBS says buy energy stocks now

RBC Capital Markets technical analyst Robert Sluymer says that energy stocks should be bought because the energy sector is showing bottoming.

Sluymer says it’s time to “buy energy stocks” because the sector is oversold and represents “the most attractive risk-reward” profile.

Sluymer sees Brent going to $127 with some resistance at $120.

Energy ETF, XLE, broke out of the sideways pattern and may have an “open air” to $80.

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Energy demand underestimated, paper

Energy demand growth is vastly underestimated because the models fail to incorporate household adoption of energy intensive appliances like refrigerators and cars, argues a new paper by Catherine Wolfram, Orie Shelef, and Paul Gertler.

The paper How Will Energy Demand Develop in the Developing World? notes that, as consumers exit poverty, their consumption pattern is S-shaped, meaning that, at some higher income, many households become first time buyers of energy intensive appliances.

The authors argue that by 2035, developing world will reach such critical inflection point on income so that the energy demand will spike sharply higher.

“The large share of the world’s population that has yet to go through the first [income] transition suggests that there is likely to be a large increase in the demand for energy in the near future,” note the authors.

It would not take a great deal of a marginal energy demand increase in order to trigger a huge aggregate demand spike.

In 2008, “the developed world consumed 202 million BTU per person and the developing world consumed 47. If every person in the developing world increased energy use to the 2008 level of the developed world, developing world energy use would quadruple.”

The paper is available here.

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Penn State claims “inexhaustible energy” discovery

Engineers at the Penn State University are claiming that they have discovered an inexhaustible source of energy that uses microbial electrolysis cells to produce hydrogen from wastewater.

“This system could produce hydrogen anyplace that there is wastewater near sea water. It uses no grid electricity and is completely carbon neutral. It is an inexhaustible source of energy,” reads a statement by Penn State’s Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering Bruce E. Logan.

Prior to discovering microbial electrolysis, hydrogen fuel cells required electricity as an input energy source.

The paper that explains the discovery says that “pure hydrogen gas can efficiently be produced from virtually limitless supplies of seawater and river water and biodegradable organic matter.”

Full story at the Penn State website.

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Bill Gates’ feces obsession

Bill Gates has sure put his money where his mouth is – in feces!

Bill Gates Foundation is allocating $1.5 million for a project to convert human excrement into methane and biodiesel fuel as the Foundation issued a call to creative minds to redesign the toilet.

Toilet revolution and the feces-to-fuel conversion initiative are a concerted attack by the Gates Foundation to solve the problems of world sanitation and in March the Foundation put out a call, and the money, “seeking affordable, effective, and hygienic sanitation technology solutions that can improve the quality of sanitation services for the billions of people currently using non-piped sanitation systems.”

Yet much of the sanitation problem is behavior driven. Many countries in Africa, Asia and eastern Europe simply do not have toilets on their radar screen.

Gates Foundations says, for example, that “India alone loses $58 billion a year in health care cost and lost labour” but availability of toilets escapes all architectural planning there.

In India, reports Bloomberg, fancy “gated office parks with swimming pools and food courts and enclaves [of] condominiums” have no toilets, while in villages “people empty chamber pots into open drains in front of their homes.”

In eastern Europe, much of the highway system built during the communist era has rest stops but no toilets (nor trash cans) on them with defecation occurring all along the road.

According to the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program study from 2005, little over 12% of mothers in Indonesia wash their hands with soap after defecation while very few bother to wash their hands before making a meal.

In Liberia, writes Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Blog, “They [Liberians] knew the creek water was dirty, and they still drank it…. Still they used the bush for defecation. Still they tramped fecal particles back into their cooking and living areas.”

The Foundation Blog concedes that indeed “Sanitation, you see, is not easy. It is not easy because humans can be difficult.”

If so, then Gates has decided to bypass sanitation’s behavioral causes altogether by explicitly specifying in the call that the Foundation “will NOT fund behavior change programming”… and that is why the toilet revolution may have a chance of becoming a success, commercially as well.

Modern toilets are heavy and stationary but the way of life in many countries is not very stationary: many homes across the world are made out of cardboard, mud or a rusted steel sheet anchored, like domino, on another home or structure. Modern toilets also require a water line and a disposal and in some places there simply is no water.

“A standard flush toilet is a tremendous waste of pure drinking water. In a typical household, 35 to 45% of all household potable water is flushed down the toilet,” writes L. Elizabeth Seiberling, Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida.

If economically collected into a sludge, feces indeed has a competitive advantage over food as a fuel input source.

According to the World Bank, over 13 million tons of feces is discharged into inland water bodies in just 4 of Asian countries. Being able to gather and harness this feces for fuel production may displace food as source of fuel not just because there is more feces but because feces are basically free.

Explains Christian Science Monitor:

Now a Columbia University professor of environmental engineering has teamed up with a social enterprise in Accra, Ghana, to turn “fecal sludge” into biodiesel or methane fuel. The project, called the “Next-Generation Urban Sanitation Facility,” is in cooperation with Waste Enterprisers and is being underwritten by a recently announced $1.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“Latrines are fascinating,” Gates recently told the TechCrunch folks at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe. “No one wants to read about it – it’s one of the greatest under-investments,” says Gates and believes that “We’re gonna have a breakthrough in the latrines”.