The Clean Industrial Revolution

I have just finished reading the brilliant new book by Ben McNeil, called "The Clean Industrial Revolution." Ben is a climate scientist and economist at the University of New South Wales in Australia. As the subtitle suggests, his book is about how to grow prosperity in a greenhouse age.

Which was quite timely, considering cabinet announced on Monday their plans for a revised Emissions Trading Scheme. I was always a wee bit hesitant to wade into the whole carbon tax/emissions trading scheme debate because I had not made my mind up fully on the topic. After reading Ben's book and talking to my learned economist friend, goonix, I believe that it is essential for NZ to begin either a tax or trading scheme.

I think a lot of the debate centred around the question of how much is it going to cost our economy now, vs. how much will it cost to fall in line and adapt later? We are only 0.1% of the worlds emissions after all, so why spend all this money, lets just wait and see what the world does and adapt later.

Well, one of the key points I took out of Ben's book is that creating a 'carbon price' will be a massive incentive for innovative change. When (not if) the world moves to a low carbon future, any country that is researching, commercialising and exporting these new clean technologies will be in a great economic position. Surely it would be harder to do this if we chose to wait and adapt, giving the rest of the world a head start. (Note: Masdar City, in the UAE, which I have blogged about here).

Sure, some industries in NZ will be harder hit than others initially, (ie. the polluters, farmers and their farting animals) however, do we want to end up dependent on a costly carbon rich lifestyle? It would be like suffering the same fate as those countries that resisted imposing high taxes on oil. Japan and the EU set high taxes, and their vehicle industries were given incentive to develop more efficient engines, which they did (up to 30% more efficient in fact). The US, on the other hand chose to keep the price of petrol near the market value, and as a result are heavily dependent on oil. There was no incentive for GM to innovate, and as a result GM have given their market share up to Toyota, and pretty much gone bust. The same will happen with anyone still intensively using carbon.

The book is focused largely on an Australian context, however the whole way through reading it, I felt that I could have easily substituted "New Zealand" every time I read "Australia". Apart from the huge solar resource Australia have of course, we have a lot in common. Perhaps we are even in a better position than Australia, as we have a lot of hydro, more wind generated power, are less dependent on coal fired power stations, and already have less emissions per capita. Creating a highly innovative CleanTech economy will create new, high tech jobs that won't be able to be outsourced to China. It's about being at the forefront of change, and I believe we have the goods here in NZ to make it a reality.

You can preview the book here.

Fuel from Algae

The other day I saw this article in Scientific American. Exxon Mobil, one of the largest petrochemical companies in the world, have recently announced they are putting US$600 million into research on new biofuels from algae.

For those that don't know, biofuels are renewable fuels that are derived from natural sources such as plant biomass or, in this case, algae. They are made by fermenting sugar rich crops to produce bioethanol, or by chemically converting vegetable oils into biodiesel.

They fall into several categories. 1st generation biofuels, made from sugar, starch, or vegetable oil, have come under a lot of criticism because they are made from food crops, diverting food away from the human food chain which is quite controversial given the growth of the world’s population.

2nd generation biofuels, made from waste biomass, the stalks of wheat, corn, wood, and jatropha (the biofuel Air NZ used for its trial biofuel flight was made from jatropha) promise a more politically acceptable solution, because they are non-food crops and often grow successfully in infertile areas.

3rd generation biofuels are made from algae. Algae are an extremely efficient producer of biofuel, producing many times more energy per acre than other alternatives. The hard part about algae production however, is growing the algae in a controlled way and harvesting it efficiently.

A NZ company, Aquaflow Bionomic is active in this area. They produce biodiesel in the Nelson/Marlborough area. As the article points out, Exxon Mobil’s investment goes a long way to validating their choice of technology.


Exxon Mobil is conducting this research in conjunction with a company called Synthetic Genomics in the USA. My question is, why not in NZ? I froth at the mouth with the prospect of US$600 million being pumped into a technology like this. Especially one that NZ’ers are already successfully involved in! With the right amount of money, NZ could really turn itself into a hotbed of biofuel/CleanTech innovation. I’m not sure of the duration of the EM/SG research program, but when you consider that the NZ Government’s TOTAL research spending last year was about NZ$900 million, you can see that our commitment to advancing this type of science and technology is really quite laughable. Aquaflow are rumored to be involved with Boeing and a number of other big multinationals. Lets hope so, because the money obviously isn't going to come from the NZ Government.

Plastic Not-So Fantastic

A report has recently been released regarding the impact of plastics on the environment and human health. It aims to present the first comprehensive review of the impact of plastics on the environment and human health, and offers possible solutions. If it is the first of its kind, it baffles me that it has taken so long for a study of this scale to be conducted given our widespread use of plastic materials. Whether or not you believe what the report has to say regarding the toxicity of plastics (check out the comments, as usual there is a lot more substance there!), the fact of the matter is we are poor at disposing and recycling plastic materials and the effect of this on our environment is clear in some areas. What we need are more biodegradable packaging products.

Nonetheless, it is a perfect introduction to the basis of my PhD research, as I know some of you have wondered exactly what it is I did all those years at university (apart from corridor cricket, darts, and long lunches at KK Malaysia!).

The essence of our research group is to add value to natural products, particularly those that NZ is a world class producer of, like paper and wool. There is a big drive at the moment from the packaging industry to develop products that offer the technical characteristics of plastics, but with the biocompatibility of natural materials like paper.

My research looked at creating high tech packaging products by using the electronic, magnetic, and optical properties of nanoparticles (really tiny particles, 10,000x thinner than a human hair). These particles by themselves are hard to utilise due to their small size, but if we can capture them on a surface we can begin to create useful materials. I looked at a number of low cost coating methods and simple inkjet printing (like you can do at home) to impart these properties on sheets of paper.

Because the paper materials we made are electrically, magnetically, and optically active, we hope to use the findings of this research to create anticounterfeit packaging technologies (optical materials), for shielding equipment that is sensitive to electromagnetic radiation such as cellular and wireless network frequencies (electronic and magnetic paper), and in antistatic packaging for sensitive components (electronic paper). The image below is of the VUW logo inkjet printed with nanoparticles. Under normal light conditions this is invisible - just a white piece of paper, yet under UV light it glows orange. This forms the basis of the anticounterfeit packaging technology I was talking about above.


Hopefully someone can find a use for it!

Powerhouse Wind Ltd.

An interesting article came up in my feed this morning, and follows on nicely from the CleanTech post last week. The article is published in Idealog, an excellent NZ magazine that showcases some great kiwi ideas, across business, design, science and the web etc. Check it out if you get the chance.

Powerhouse Wind Limited are a Dunedin based company working in the area of wind turbines. The team have a background in desiging high-volume, mass-market consumer products (some of them are ex-Fisher & Paykel) and they've used these skills to develop a small scale wind turbine capable of powering a household.

Their design is radically different to most already available in that it only has one blade with two counterweights, while most have three blades. There are several benefits to this - the turbine can align itself more efficiently to the wind, and that it is quieter. With an average wind speed of about 5-6 meters per second, the turbine can generate about 3,200 kWh, which is enough to power an energy efficient house. The target price is $20,000, which seems high but if you work it out it is a good investment over time. My flat spends about $200 a month on power (I think), so it will pay for itself in 8 years, not to mention the savings you make by selling surplus electricity generated back into the grid.

I think this is a really clever approach, as it builds upon the trend toward a distributed energy generation system, where the energy is generated on-site with minimal energy lost in its transmission, unlike centralised generation (wind farms for example) that transmit over long distances and inefficiently. If one day everyone is generating their own power, Powerhouse Wind will be sitting in a good position, having amassed years and years of experience ahead of a field that currently only seems to be interested in large scale turbines for big wind farms. I wish them luck!

Would you buy one?

CleanTech

Following on from the post about IRENA and Masdar City the other day, I thought I would talk a little bit about about CleanTech. CleanTech is a broad definition for products and technologies that improve performance, productivity and efficiency, while at the same time reducing costs, energy input, pollution or waste. These technologies have an incredibly broad range of application in Energy Generation (wind, solar, biofuel, wave), Energy Storage (advanced batteries, fuel cells), Agriculture (organic pesticides, land management), Energy Efficiency (building, lighting), Waste Treatment, and Water and Air Purification. The list is extensive.

Some people, including myself, view CleanTech as the next big boom, because in a world that is becoming short on resources (water, energy, food, for example), countries that are efficient or even sustainable will find themselves in a powerful position.

NZ is doing its bit in this part, although as is often the case, we could, and should be doing more. We, like Masdar City, could have the potential to become a 'hotbed' of innovation in this area. We could leverage our clean-green image, our brains and ingenuity and our ability to take on new technologies because of our size, to create more of these types of companies. For example, the electric car will become more prevalent throughout the next 20 years, and so imagine if NZ positioned itself to become the biggest manufacturer of advanced batteries for electric cars? Or infact experts in any of the areas I listed above! This is similar to what Denmark has done with wind turbines. We could really create a name for ourselves and although there are clearly economic and regulatory issues associated with the uptake of renewable energy sources, I believe the payoff could be huge if we back ourselves NOW!

Here are a few early stage NZ companies operating in this area that have taken the plunge already. I'll try and talk in more detail about what these companies are doing in the coming weeks because they have some amazing ideas. But in the meantime please check them out:

Aquaflow Bionomic (biodiesel from algae)
Carbonscape (carbon capture and storage)
Crest Energy (tidal power)
Lanzatech (bioethanol from waste)
Neptune Power (tidal power in Cook Strait)
Novatein (plastics from waste materials)
Wellington Drive Technologies (energy efficient electric motors)

The world's first zero-carbon city

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) was formed in January 2009, tasked with fostering the uptake of renewable energy around the globe. They will work with academia, the energy industry, economists, environmentalists and a range of other institutions to help create and implement renewable energy policies. So far, over 100 countries have signed on.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) are putting forward a case to host the secretariat of IRENA in a newly built zero-carbon city called Masdar City.

They city will be powered entirely by solar and wind power, as well as waste-to-energy technologies. Water will be retreated and recycled and all waste will be recovered, recycled and reused. People will move around in Personal Rapid Transport systems, which are essentially pods moving around in predetermined loops. I think a few years ago they were thinking of putting one in Courtenay Place, Wellington! The city will also house over 1,500 renewable energy related companies, providing a cluster of renewable technology innovation.

Only in the UAE...