Petroscan

PETROSCAN (Monthly e-newsletter) November 2011

CONTENTS: OIL & GAS NEWS BPRL to drill 20 oil, gas blocks overseas MRPL to raise $250 million Hedge funds, refiners brace for oil crisis 2010 Platts Rank 42. Indian Oil Corp. Ltd. ONGC reports two discoveries India HPCL looks at buying Syrian crude-Sources Cairn India restarts exploration campaign in KG onshore block Tata Motors top Indian company for R&D, pips RIL & Infosys: European Commission POLYMER & PETROCHEMICALS Making fuel and plastic production more efficient NEW & RENEWABLE ENERGY L&T Infra Finance to focus on renewable energy sector Top 10 Reasons Why Green Jobs Are Vital to Our Economy Renewable Energy: SOLAR More efficient organic solar cells PetroScan Nov Alternative and renewable Energy - SOLAR United to fly Houston-Chicago on Solazyme biofuel 90% of Americans Support Solar, Despite Attempts to Weaken Public Perception U.S. to require details of fracking on federal land U.S. EPA developing wastewater rules for shale gas Taming Unruly Wind Power Most Solar Manufacturers May Vanish by 2015, Trina CEO Says Chinese Solar Companies Say U.S. Duties Would Hurt Industry Making Fracking Safe in the East and West China’s interest in shale gas development PetroScan-November 2011

FACTS& FIGURES SUSTAINABILITY Global Action Needed by 2017 to Prevent Dangerous Temperatures, IEA Says Lessons from BSR 2011: How Coke, UPS & RMI Deliver Greener Trucking, Transport ConAgra chief talks sustainability Oscar for carbon emission reduction goes to…

HSE

Green, health groups threaten to sue if EPA doesn’t update soot, dust standards For Some, Psychiatric Trouble May Start in Thyroid The Potential and Peril of Hydraulic Fracturing to Drill for Natural Gas

The Key to Success? Your Corporate Mission Low-carbon Innovation A Uniquely American Strategy for Industrial Renewal

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OIL & GAS NEWS BPRL to drill 20 oil, gas blocks overseas BHARAT Petro Resources (BPRL), the exploration and production arm of Bharat Petroleum Corporation (BPCL), is planning to drill around 20 new wells in its international exploratory blocks in Mozambique, Brazil and Indonesia during 2012-13 at an expenditure of around Rs 1,500 crore.

D Rajkumar, managing director and CEO of BPRL told Financial Chronicle that the company is undertaking rigorous activity in these blocks and has had a great success over the past couple of years.

“We are planning to further drill 10 wells in Mozambique, eight wells in Brazil and two in Indonesia in 2012-13, apart from the discovery made in Mozambique worth 30 to 50 trillion cubic feet of gas, which is the sixth such discovery in Mozambique,“ he said.

The company has one block with exploratory area of 10,700 sq km in Mozambique with Anadarko as the operator.

Another 10 blocks in Brazil with Petrobras as operator in nine blocks in Anadarko and one block in Indonesia with around 2,000 sq km to explore.

BPRL is dependent on its parent for funding issues and hopes to be able to generate funds from 2013-14 for exploration activities based on total reserves they would have by then. “We have the mandate to spend around Rs 1,000 crore in this financial year and Rs 1,500 crore in the next. The funds would be provided by BPCL from their budget, but we hope to generate part funds from 2013-14 onwards,“ Rajkumar said.

BPRL also has nine blocks in India, with ONGC as joint venture partner in seven, Gail in one block and Hindustan Oil Exploration (HOEC) in one block.

On Monday, BPCL said its Barquentine-3 well in Rovuma Basin in Mozambique, where it holds 10 per cent interest “has encountered more than 202 net metres of natural gas pay in two high quality Oligocene-aged fan systems. This well is the six successful well in the complex that includes the Windjammer, Lagosta, Bar quentine and Camarao discoveries,.

Anadarko Mocambique Area I Limitada is the operator of the block, while India's Videocon holds 10 per cent, Cove Energy Mozambique Rovuma offshore holds 8.5 per cent. Another 20 per cent is held by Mitsui E&P Mozambique Area I and the balance 15 per cent is held by Empressa Nacional de Hidrocarbonetos EP , the national oil company of Mozambique.

MRPL to raise $250 million Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals (MRPL), a unit of ONGC, began marketing a $250 million seven-year loan to banks, according to a term sheet seen by Bloomberg News.

Hedge funds, refiners brace for oil crisis OIL consuming nations, hedge funds and big oil refineries are quietly preparing for a Doomsday scenario: An attack on Iran that would halt oil supplies from OPEC's second largest producer. Most political analysts and oil traders say the probability of military action is low, but they caution the risks of such an event have risen as the West and Israel grow increasingly alarmed by signs that Tehran is building nuclear weapons.

That has Chinese refiners drawing up new contingency plans, hedge funds taking out options on $170 crude, and energy experts scrambling to determine how a disruption in Iran's oil supply however remote the possibility would impact world markets. With production of about 3.5 million barrels per day, Iran supplies 2.5 per cent of the world's oil.

“I think the market has paid too little attention to the possibility of an attack on Iran. It's still an unlikely event, but more likely than oil traders have been ex pecting,“ says Bob McNally, once a White House energy advisor and now head of consultancy Rapidan Group. Rising tensions were clear this week as Iranian protesters stormed two British diplomatic missions in Tehran in response to sanctions, smashing windows and burning the British flag. The attacks prompted condemnation from London, Washington and the United Nations. Iran warned of “instability in global security.“ While traders in Europe prepare for a possible EU boycott of imports from Iran, mounting evidence elsewhere points to longodds preparation for an even more severe outcome. In Beijing, the foreign ministry has asked at least one major Iranian crude oil importer to review its contingency planning in case Iranian shipments stop. In India, refiners are leafing through an unpublished report produced in March to look at fall-back options in the event of a major disruption. And the International Energy Agency, the club of industrialised nations founded after the Arab oil embargo that coordinated the PetroScan-November 2011

release of emergency oil stocks during Libya's civil war, last week circulated to member countries an updated four-page factsheet detailing Iran's oil industry and trade.

2010 Platts Rank 42. Indian Oil Corp. Ltd.

Shri R S Butola, TITLES: Chairman, Member of Committee for Deleasing of Immoveable Properties, Member of Establishment Committee, Member of Planning & Projects Committee and Member of Contracts Committee Company Info State or country: India Geographical Location: Asia Assets: $40,850 mil Revenues: $67,824 mil Profits: $1,724 mil Return on invested: capital (ROIC) 7% 3 yr CGR % Revenues 14% Company data as of 5/31/2011 provided by Standard & Poor's Compustat Company Snapshot Indian Oil Corporation Limited, together with its subsidiaries, engages in refining, transporting, and marketing petroleum products in India. It also involves in the exploration and production of crude oil and gas; and marketing of natural gas and petrochemicals.

The company’s products include liquefied petroleum gas, natural gas, petrol/gasoline, diesel/gas oil, aviation turbine fuel/jet fuel, lubricants and greases, marine fuels, kerosene, bulk/industrial fuels, bitumen, petrochemicals, and crude oil.

It also offers special products, such as carbon black feed stock, raw petroleum coke, sulphur, paraffin wax, jute batching oil, micro crystalline wax, mineral turpentine oil, LABFS, toluene, propylene, benzene, and petcoke. The company operates approximately 10 refineries; a network of 10,899 kilometers crude oil, product, and gas pipelines; and 19,463 petrol and diesel stations, including 3517 Kisan Seva Kendras in the rural markets. Indian Oil Corporation’s exploration and production portfolio comprises 11 oil and gas blocks and 2 coal bed methane blocks in India; and 10 blocks in Libya, Iran, Gabon, Nigeria, Timor-Leste, and Yemen.

In addition, it involves in the sale of imported crude oil; explosives and cryogenic businesses; wind mill power generation activities; lube blending and marketing of petroleum products; and plantation of Jatropha and extraction of oil for biodiesels. The company also exports its products to 20 countries in 6 continents. It serves consumer, industrial, agricultural, marine, and defense sectors, as well as private airlines. The company was founded in 1958 and is based in New Delhi, India.

Data provided by

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ONGC reports two discoveries Tweet The author has posted comments on this articleBoby Kurian, TNN | Dec 2, 2011, 02.14AM IST NEW DELHI: Flagship explorer Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) on Thursday announced two "significant oil discoveries", even as the government told Parliament that the state-run company is to spend Rs 25,000 crore in bringing about a dozen marginal fields into production by 2014.

ONGC has told authorities that it made a strike in North Kadi area of Gujarat's Mehsana district, which is the company's major production centre. The discovery is a new layer, called 'play" in industry parlance, and will add to the company's output.

The exact size of the reserve will be known after further tests.

The company made another strike in the Panna area, 40 km from its bread-and-butter Mumbai offshore field and 140 km from the country's financial capital. This discovery will make incremental addition to the output from a cluster that the company is developing.

In a related development, minister of state for petroleum R P N Singh told the Lok Sabha in a written reply that the company was developing marginal fields through 14 projects, three of which have been completed. The 14 projects entailed an investment of Rs 27,305 crore. The Rs 506.22-crore development of D-1 field, Rs 219.77 crore SB-11 development and Rs 1,688.38 crore investment in development of Vasai East in western offshore, have been completed.

Another 11 projects entailing an investment of Rs 24,890 crore are under various stages of implementation.

Singh said the biggest among the projects is B-193 Cluster development at a cost of Rs 5,633.44 crore, which would yield 5.57 million tonnes of oil, and 5.12 billion cubic metres of gas in 15 years. The project is scheduled to be completed by June, 2012.

Another Rs 3,241.03 crore is being spent on Cluster-7 development by March, 2013, to produce 9.73 million tonnes of oil and 4.52 billion cubic metres of gas over 16 years.

ONGC is also investing Rs 3,195.16 crore in producing 6.13 million cubic metres of condensate and 15.14 bcm of gas from C-Series field by 2022-23. Another, 2,218.01 crore is being investment in integrated development of G-1 and GS-15 fields in for producing 0.982 million tons of oil and 5.92 bcm of gas over 15 years period beginning May, 2012.

It is also investing Rs 2,920.82 crore in producing 2.46 million tonnes of oil and 6.56 bcm of gas from B-22 Cluster, Rs 2,523 crore in WO-15 Cluster development for 2.83 million tonnes of oil and 8.58 bcm of gas and 2,163.65 crore in additional development of D-1 field.

ONGC would also invest Rs 1,456.96 crore in B-46 Cluster development to product 1.68 million cubic metres of condensate and 5.273 bcm of gas in 12 years, beginning May, 2012.

India HPCL looks at buying Syrian crude-Sources MUMBAI/NEW DELHI, Nov 23 (Reuters) - Hindustan Petroleum (HPCL) is looking to buy crude from sanctions-hit Syria and has asked state-run Shipping Corp of India (SCI) to arrange a vessel, sources familiar with the plan said on Wednesday.

Sanctions aimed at crude oil exports have warded off regular buyers of Syrian crude, mainly European customers, offering an opportunity to big Asian importers like India and China that have stakes in Syria's oil business.

SCI is scouting for an Aframax vessel for HPCL, the sources said. The issue is complicated because sanctions bar the necessary P&I insurance for ships loading with Syrian oil which means SCI cannot use its own fleet.

"The oil industry has requested SCI to do it. SCI cannot be a direct party, but can be a facilitator. However SCI is not assuring it will be done, but is trying to help them and making some enquiries (for vessels)," a shipping source said.

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At present, India imports no crude from Syria. A trade source said the Indian companies might be attracted to the Syrian crude because of potential discounts.

Syrian oil represents less than one percent of daily global production but accounts for a vital portion of Syrian government earnings, which Western powers say could be used by President Bashar al-Assad for a bloody military crackdown on the opposition.

A joint venture of India's Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) and China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) holds a stake in Syria's main oil producing consortium Al Furat Petroleum Co, operated by state-run Syrian Petroleum Co. and Shell.

Two sources at ONGC said because of EU and U.S. sanctions output of fields in which the Indian firm has a stake has declined from around 84,000 barrels per day to about 70,500 bpd.

"This is a forced cut because the Syrian government asked all operators to reduce output as vessels are not lifting volumes due to sanctions," said one of the ONGC sources.

ONGC had earlier this year tried to ship crude to India from Al Furat for its unit Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd but insurance problems due to sanctions halted the plan.

The shipping source also said Indian Oil Corp is also exploring whether Syrian crude can be brought in through nationalflagged vessels.

HPCL is still looking for a payment mechanism for the Syrian crude, an industry source said.

"There are issues with P&I cover and also with payments. They need to check if a payment could be made to ONGC in rupees," said the industry source, adding HPCL was keen to buy ONGC's share of oil in Syria.

Sanctions on Iran triggered a payments crisis for Indian refiners buying its crude which was only resolved in July by using Turkey's Halkbank as a conduit and there is no channel yet for payments to Syria.

Iran has already lifted crude from Syria, the country's first export since late September. Buyers from Russia and China are also lining up vessels, the International Oil Daily reported on Wednesday.

Oil majors Royal Dutch Shell and Total have cut Syrian oil production as international sanctions make exports impossible, industry sources said earlier this month.

Cairn India restarts exploration campaign in KG onshore block Cairn India and its partner ONGC have restarted exploration activity in the discovered Krishna Godavari basin onshore block. Cairn had discovered oil and gas in its East Coast block in August 2010.

The initial discovery in one well had shown a flow of 75 barrels a day of oil and 0.27 million cubic feet a day of gas. It is light crude oil, according to sources. Light crude oil flows freely at room temperature and receives a higher price on the commodity markets because it can yield a higher percentage of petrol and diesel.

Cairn India's exploration campaigns had taken a backseat in India as it got involved with the proposed stake sale of the parent, Cairn Energy to Vedanta Resources. However, now with the deal inching closer to reality, the company has overcome uncertainty.

Sources in the know of the development said that after re-processing the technical data of the onshore block KG-ONN2003/1 this well is being drilled based on the results from the first well.

Drilling one onshore well costs around $35-40 million. Cairn India has a participating interest of 49 per cent, and is the operator. ONGC holds the balance 51 per cent.

The initial discovery has opened up a new play in the southern part of KG basin, which is one of the most established basins, sources said, adding that the basin has seen significant success in both shallow and deep waters, Last year, Cairn had initiated a multi-well exploration drilling campaign in the block that it had won in the fifth round of the New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP-V). Cairn already has experience in the prolific East Coast, as it is producing from the Ravva fields.

Tata Motors top Indian company for R&D, pips RIL & Infosys: European Commission PTI Nov 30, 2011, 07.20pm IST NEW DELHI: Automobile giant Tata Motors has pipped giants like Reliance Industries and Infosys to become India's topranked company for research and development (R&D), as per a list compiled by the European Commission.

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In its annual R&D Scorecard of the companies from across the world, the European Union's executive body European Commission (EC) has ranked Tata Motors at the top among the 18 Indian companies on its list, compiled on the basis for investment towards R&D and business innovation initiatives.

Polymer & petrochemicals Making fuel and plastic production more efficient Breakthrough culminates a decade’s worth of research A University of Minnesota team of researchers has overcome a major hurdle in the quest to design a specialized type of molecular sieve that could make the production of gasoline, plastics and various chemicals more cost effective and energy efficient. The breakthrough research, led by chemical engineering and materials science professor Michael Tsapatsis in the university's College of Science and Engineering, is published in the most recent issue of the journal Science.

After more than a decade of research, the team devised a means for developing free-standing, ultra-thin zeolite nanosheets that as thin films can speed up the filtration process and require less energy. The team has a provisional patent and hopes to commercialize the technology.

“In addition to research on new renewable fuels, chemicals and natural plastics, we also need to look at the production processes of these and other products we use now and try to find ways to save energy,” Tsapatsis said.

Separating mixed substances can demand considerable amounts of energy—currently estimated to be approximately 15 % of the total energy consumption—part of which is wasted due to process inefficiencies. In days of abundant and inexpensive fuel, this was not a major consideration when designing industrial separation processes such as distillation for purifying gasoline and polymer precursors. But as energy prices rise and policies promote efficiency, the need for more energy-efficient alternatives has grown.

One promising option for more energy-efficient separations is high-resolution molecular separation with membranes.

They are based on preferential adsorption and/or sieving of molecules with minute size and shape differences. Among the candidates for selective separation membranes, zeolite materials (crystals with molecular-sized pores) show particular promise.

While zeolites have been used as adsorbents and catalysts for several decades, there have been substantial challenges in processing zeolitic materials into extended sheets that remain intact. To enable energy-savings technology, scientists needed to develop cost-effective, reliable and scalable deposition methods for thin film zeolite formation.

The University of Minnesota team used sound waves in a specialized centrifuge process to develop “carpets” of flaky crystal-type nanosheets that are not only flat, but have just the right amount of thickness. The resulting product can be used to separate molecules as a sieve or as a membrane barrier in both research and industrial applications.

“We think this discovery holds great promise in commercial applications,” said Kumar Varoon, a University of Minnesota chemical engineering and materials science Ph.D. candidate and one of the primary authors of the paper published in Science. “This material has good coverage and is very thin. It could significantly reduce production costs in refineries and save energy.”

This story is reprinted from material from the University of Minnesota, with editorial changes made by Materials Today.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.

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L&T Infra Finance to focus on renewable energy sector INFRASTRUCTURE financing firm L&T Infrastructure Finance is shifting focus to funding projects in the renewable energy sector in view of the myriad problems affecting the thermal power sector, such as difficulty in getting environmental clearances, coal linkages and access to uninterrupted coal supply.

Projects in the renewable energy sector comprise over 50 per cent of the company’s total exposure to the power sector, company officials said on Monday.

“We have consciously decided to diversify into the renewable energy space due to the various issues affecting the thermal power sector. Loans to solar, hydel and wind energy projects comprise more than 50 per cent of our business now. Only when a thermal power project appears to be absolutely trouble-free, we shall look at it,” said Suneet K Maheshwari, chief executive of L&T Infra Finance.

Out of L&T Infra Finance’s total loan book of Rs 8,790 crore as on September, the majority of the loans of about 36 per cent is to the power sector, followed by those to sectors such as telecom and roads. Loans to the coal-fired thermal power sector, which constituted 20 per cent of the company’s loan book in the financial year 2010-11, have been brought down to 16 per cent. Meanwhile, lending to the renewable energy sector has grown from 8 per cent of the loan book in 2010-11 to about 18 per cent. A shift in focus away from thermal plants may also mean the loan book size would shrink.

An average thermal power plant with a capacity of 500 mw would require an investment of around Rs 3,000 crore, while the average size of a solar power plant is just about 5 mw and would require an investment of only Rs 60-80 crore.

“A solar plant takes eight to 12 months to get commissioned unlike thermal plants that take years. Also, there are no hassles of obtaining many clearances or land acquisition troubles in the renewable energy sector. We only have to focus on the technology. We will be able to build our book size by funding more projects in the solar, wind and hydel segments,” said N Sivaraman, president of L&T Finance Holdings.

Top 10 Reasons Why Green Jobs Are Vital to Our Economy Millions of Competitive Jobs Created and Sustained

By Christina C. DiPasquale, Kate Gordon | September 7, 2011 Green jobs are integral to any effort to jumpstart our economy and reduce as rapidly as possible our 9.1 percent unemployment rate. The rapid growth of green jobs will boost demand in our economy by reducing unemployment, make America more competitive in the global economy, and protect our public health—all of which will result in greater economic productivity and long-term economic prosperity. Here are the top 10 reasons why this is the case today and into the future: 1. There are already 2.7 million jobs across the clean economy. Clean energy is already proving to be larger job creation engine than the heavily subsidized fossil-fuels sector, putting Americans back to work in a lackluster economy.

2. Across a range of clean energy projects, including renewable energy, transit, and energy efficiency, for every million dollars spent, 16.7 green jobs are created. That is over three times the 5.3 jobs per million dollars that are created from the same spending on fossil-fuel industries.

3. The clean energy sector is growing at a rate of 8.3 percent. Solar thermal energy expanded by 18.4 percent annually from 2003 to 2010, along with solar photovoltaic power by 10.7 percent, and biofuels by 8.9 percent over the same period. Meanwhile, the U.S. wind energy industry saw 35 percent average annual growth over the past five years, accounting for 35 percent of new U.S. power capacity in that period, according to the 2010 U.S. Wind Industry Annual Market Report. As a whole, the clean energy sector’s average growth rate of 8.3 percent annually during this period was nearly double the growth rate of the overall economy during that time.

4. The production of cleaner cars and trucks is employing over 150,000 workers across the United States today.

These job numbers are likely to increase as improved car and light truck standards recently announced by President Barack Obama will require more skilled employees and encourage further investment.

5. Median wages are 13 percent higher in green energy careers than the economy average. Median salaries for green jobs are $46,343, or about $7,727 more than the median wages across the broader economy. As an added benefit, nearly half of these jobs employ workers with a less than a four-year college degree, which accounts for a full 70 percent of our workforce.

6. Green jobs are made in America, spurring innovation with more U.S. content than other industries. Most of the products used in energy efficiency retrofits are more than 90 percent made in America. Sheet metal for ductwork is over PetroScan-November 2011

99 percent domestically sourced, as are vinyl windows (98 percent) and rigid foam insulation (more than 95 percent).

Even major mechanical equipment such as furnaces (94 percent) and air conditioning and heat pumps (82 percent) are predominantly American made.

7. We have a positive trade balance in solar power components such as photovoltaic components and solar heating and cooling components of $1.9 billion, and are exporting components to China. Contrast this with the oil industry, where in 2010 alone we imported over $250 billion in petroleum-related products. As our nation’s basic manufacturing base declines, we risk losing our place in the forefront of innovation if we don’t invest in advanced manufacturing in the green sector.

8. Three separate programs for energy efficiency retrofits have employed almost 25,000 Americans in three months. The Weatherization Assistance Program, Energy Efficiency Block Grant Program, and State Energy Programs have collectively upgraded over half a million buildings since the programs began to ramp up from April 1, 2011 and June 30, 2011, providing immediate new and sustainable job opportunities to tens of thousands of construction workers eagerly searching for work.

9. Clean energy jobs are better for U.S. small businesses. Specialty construction companies that perform energy retrofits show very high rates of small business participation in the construction. Ninety-one percent of the firms involved in retrofits are mall businesses with less than 20 employees.

10. An abundance of jobs in the green sector are manufacturing jobs with an upward career track. Forty-one percent of the nation’s green jobs offer medium to long-term career building and training opportunities, and 26 percent of green jobs are in the manufacturing sector, compared to 9 percent in the traditional economy.

The bottom line: Green jobs being created through smart investments in our energy infrastructure are expanding employment opportunities while reducing pollution of our air and water, providing an alternative to foreign oil, and allowing us to export more American-made goods abroad.

Christina C. DiPasquale is Associate Director of Press Relations at the Center for American Progress. Kate Gordon is Vice President for Energy Policy at the Center.

New & Renewable Energy Renewable Energy: SOLAR Nano gold rush : Researchers use tiny gold particles to boost organic solar cell efficiency 19 August 2011 In the world of solar energy, organic photovoltaic solar cells have a wide range of potential applications, but they are still considered an upstart. While these carbon-based cells, which use organic polymers or small molecules as semiconductors, are much thinner and less expensive to produce than conventional solar cells made with inorganic silicon wafers, they still lag behind in their ability to efficiently convert sunlight into electricity.

Now, UCLA researchers and their colleagues from China and Japan have shown that by incorporating gold nanoparticles into these organic photovoltaics — taking advantage of the plasmonic effect, by which metal helps to enhance the absorption of sunlight — they can significantly improve the cells' power conversion.

In a paper recently published in ACS Nano, the team of researchers, led by Yang Yang, a professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and director of the Nano Renewable Energy Center at UCLA's California NanoSystems Institute, demonstrate how they sandwiched a layer of gold nanoparticles between two light-absorbing subcells in a tandem polymer solar cell in order to harvest a greater fraction of the solar spectrum.

They found that by employing the interconnecting gold-nanoparticle layer, they were able to enhance power conversion by as much as 20 percent. The gold nanoparticles create a strong electromagnetic field inside the thin organic photovoltaic layers by a plasmonic effect, which concentrates light so that much more of it can be absorbed by the subcells.

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The team is the first to report a plasmonic-enhanced polymer tandem solar cell, having overcome the difficulties involved in incorporating metal nanostructures into the overall device structure.

"We have successfully demonstrated a highly efficient plasmonic polymer tandem solar cell by simply incorporating gold nanoparticles layer between two subcells," Yang said. "The plasmonic effect happening in the middle of the interconnecting layer can enhance both the top and bottom subcells simultaneously — a 'sweet spot' — leading to an improvement in the power conversion efficiency of the tandem solar cell from 5.22 percent to 6.24 percent. The enhancement ratio is as high as 20 percent."

The research team included Xing Wang Zhang from the Key Lab of Semiconductor Materials Science at the Institute of Semiconductors at Beijing's Chinese Academy of Science and Ziruo Hong from the Graduate School of Science and Engineering at Japan's Yamagata University.

Experimental and theoretical results demonstrate that the enhancement effect was attained from local near-field enhancement of the gold nanoparticles. The results show that the plasmonic effect has great potential for the future development of polymer solar cells. The team's proposed interlayer structures as an open platform can be applied to various polymer materials, opening up opportunities for highly efficient, multi-stacked tandem solar cells.

This story is reprinted from material from UCLA, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier.

More efficient organic solar cells Taking the pulse of charge-separation processes 28 October 2011 The use of organic photovoltaics for the production of electricity from sunlight offers an attractive and promising basis for an innovative and environmentally friendly means of energy supply. They can be manufactured quite economically and, because they are as bendable as plastic wrap, they can be processed flexibly.

The problem is that they are yet markedly less efficient than conventional inorganic semiconductor cells. The most crucial process in the conversion of light into electric current is the generation of free charge carriers. In the first step of photoconversion, upon absorption of light one component of the organic solar cell, usually a polymer, releases electrons that are taken up by the second component of the cell - in this case silicon nanoparticles - and can then be transported further. “The mechanisms and the timescale of charge separation have been the subject of controversial scientific debate for many years,” says LMU physics professor Eberhard Riedle.

In cooperation with investigators at the Technical University in Munich and at Bayreuth University, Riedle and his group have now been able to dissect the process in detail. To do so, the researchers used a novel hybrid cell type containing both organic and inorganic constituents, in which silicon serves as the electron acceptor.

Based on the insights obtained with this system, they developed a processing strategy to improve the structural order of the polymer - and found that this enhances the efficiency of charge separation in organic semiconductors by up to twofold. Their findings provide a new way to optimize the performance of organic solar cells.

The key to this breakthrough lies in a unique, laser-based experimental setup, which combines extremely high temporal resolution of 40 femtoseconds (fs) with a very broadband detection. This allowed the team to follow the ultrafast processes induced by photon absorption in real time as they occur. Instead of the fullerenes used in typical organic cells, the researchers used silicon as the electron acceptor, a choice that has two major advantages.

“First, with these novel hybrid solar cells, we were able to probe the photophysical processes taking place in the polymer with greater precision than ever before, and secondly through the use of silicon, a much larger segment of the solar PetroScan-November 2011

spectrum can be harnessed for electricity,” says Riedle. It turns out that free charge carriers – so called polarons – are not generated immediately upon photoexcitation, but with a delay of about 140 fs. Primary photoexcitation of a polymer molecule first leads to the formation of an excited state, called an exciton. This then dissociates, releasing an electron, which is then transferred to the electron acceptor.

The loss of electrons leaves behind positively charged “holes” in the polymer and, as oppositely charged entities are attracted to one another by the Coulomb force, the two have a tendency to recombine. “In order to obtain free charge carriers, electron and hole must both be sufficiently mobile to overcome the Coulomb force,” explains Daniel Herrmann, the first author of the new study.

The team was able to show, for the first time, that this is much easier to achieve in polymers with an ordered, regular structure than with polymers that are chaotically arranged. In other words, a high degree of self-organization of the polymer significantly increases the efficiency of charge separation. “The polymer that we used is one of the few known to have a tendency to self-organize. This tendency can be inhibited, but one can also increase the polymer’s intrinsic propensity for self-organization by choosing appropriate processing parameters,” Herrmann explains. By cleverly optimizing the processing of the polymer P3HT, the researchers succeeded in doubling the yield of free charge carriers – and thereby significantly enhancing the efficiency of their experimental solar cells.

This story is reprinted from material from LMU Munich, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.

Joachim Loos Printable polymer or hybrid solar cells (PSCs) have the potential to become one of the leading technologies of the 21st century in conversion of sunlight to electrical energy.

Because of their ease of processing from solution fast and low cost mass production of devices is possible in a roll-to-roll printing fashion. The performance of such printed devices, in turn, is determined to a large extent by the threedimensional organization of the photoactive layer, i.e. layer where light is absorbed and converted into free electrical charges, and its contacts with the charge collecting electrodes. In this review I briefly introduce our current understanding of morphology-performance relationships in PSCs with specific focus on electron tomography as analytical tool providing volume information with nanometer resolution.

To read full article follow link to the right PetroScan Nov Alternative and renewable Energy - SOLAR United to fly Houston-Chicago on Solazyme biofuel

Sun, Nov 6 2011 (Reuters) - United Airlines, the world's largest air carrier, will make the first U.S. commercial flight using an "advanced biofuel" on Monday, algae-based biofuel maker Solazyme Inc (SZYM.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) said.

The flight from Houston to Chicago will take the Boeing (BA.N: Quote, Profile, Research,Stock Buzz) 737-800 from the former home city of Continental Airlines to the base of United, which took over Continental last year to form United Continental Holdings Inc (UAL.N:Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz).

The Solajet fuel blend includes 60 percent petroleum-based jet fuel and 40 percent biofuel, Solazyme said.

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Shares of South San Francisco-based Solazyme were floated on Nasdaq in May, but have nearly halved in value since then as prospects for its industry have dimmed along with the broader economy, given its reliance on government funding. (Reporting by Braden Reddall in San Francisco; Editing by Gary Hill) 90% of Americans Support Solar, Despite Attempts to Weaken Public Perception 11/02/2011 SustainableBusiness.com News Nearly 9 of 10 Americans - 89% - support the solar industry - and they want the federal government to continue investing in it, even after attempts to weaken public perception via attacks on the the Dept of Energy's support for now-bankrupt Solyndra.

For the fourth consecutive year, 89% of Americans - 80% of Republicans, 90% of Independents and 94% of Democrats say they think it's important for the US to develop and use solar energy, according to the 2011 SCHOTT Solar Barometer(TM), a nationally representative survey conducted annually by independent polling firm Kelton Research.

The highly publicized Solyndra bankruptcy only moved the numbers down slightly, from 94% in previous polls to this years result of 89% percent.

And 82% think it's important for the federal government to support U.S. solar manufacturing, and a majority of Independent voters (51%) think it is "extremely important."

When asked which source of energy should get government support, solar remains most popular at 39%, down from the previous 45% in 2010. 21% of respondents said natural gas should be supported, and only 12% were in favor of support for wind (down from 19%), nuclear (9%) and coal (3%).

82% of Americans want federal incentives for the solar industry in the form of federal tax credits and grants, similar to those that traditional sources of energy like oil, natural gas and coal have received for decades. 71% of Republicans agree, as well as 82% of Independents and 87% of Democrats.

"In this tough economy, Americans want to see solutions coming from Washington," says Rhone Resch, Solar Energy Industries Association CEO. "For members of Congress trying to find ways to create jobs, solar is a win-win. Thanks in part to proven policy successes like the 1603 Treasury Program, the solar industry doubled its workforce in the last two years and now employs more than 100,000 Americans at 5,000 businesses spanning every state."

Americans also want to buy products made using solar energy. 51% say they'd be more likely to purchase a product if they knew it was made using solar energy. 61% of 18-44 year-olds say that.

Despite the cost of solar modules decreasing by 30% since the beginning of 2010 and residential solar leasing models that allow people to go solar with no upfront cost, 48% cite cost as their biggest concern with choosing solar energy.

"For the fourth year in a row, an overwhelming majority of Americans agree on the importance of solar power," said Rachel Bonsignore, Associate Director, Kelton Research. "This year's survey continues the trend of remarkably consistent support for solar."

Learn more: Website: http://www.seia.org/galleries/pdf/SCHOTT_Solar_Barometer_2011.pdf PetroScan Shale Oil & Gas U.S. to require details of fracking on federal land Mon, Oct 31 2011

By Ayesha Rascoe WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Interior Department plans to issue a proposal soon forcing companies to reveal the chemicals they use in the so-called fracking drilling process on federal lands, as the Obama administration responds to public safety concerns over the shale exploration boom.

David Hayes, deputy secretary at the Interior Department, told a federal shale gas advisory panel on Monday that the department hopes to issue disclosure rules for hydraulic fracturing on federal lands in "a couple of months." It plans to finalize the guidelines about 12 months after that.

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Hydraulic fracturing involves injecting a mix of water, sand, and chemicals into shale formations at high pressures to extract oil and gas.

"The high level of concern about the nature of fracking chemicals suggests the complete disclosure of all chemical components and composition of fracking fluids would improve public confidence," Hayes told the Energy Department's shale gas panel.

Calling the current hydraulic fracturing rules that were developed in 1982 "outdated," Hayes said the department is also working to develop rules focused on ensuring well integrity and managing waste water.

Hayes' comments come nearly a year after the department first announced it was considering disclosure regulations for the drilling practice.

Advances in the technique have led to a drilling boom that has prompted a public backlash over concerns about possible water contamination and air pollution.

Hayes stressed that the department is aware of industry efforts to increase transparency for shale drilling and does not want its rules to be burdensome or to duplicate other efforts.

About 14 percent of all U.S. natural gas production occurred on federal land during the last fiscal year. The department estimates that hydraulic fracturing is used for about 90 percent of gas wells drilled on public lands.

WALKING A FINE LINE The Obama administration has walked a fine line on the issue of hydraulic fracturing, lauding the energy security benefits of shale gas, while also stressing the importance of addressing environmental concerns about the practice.

Last week, in another sign that the administration was inching forward with regulations for hydraulic fracking, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would be developing rules for disposing of wastewater from shale gas wells.

Proponents of shale oil and gas development have said that over-regulation of the shale drilling will limit production of a massive domestic fuel resource.

In the wake of the controversy surrounding fracking, the shale gas advisory committee was created by the Obama administration to offer recommendations on the best path forward for shale output.

In its preliminary report released in August, the panel called for the creation of national database of information about shale gas wells, and for overhaul of the management of the millions of gallons of water used in the process.

The panel's final report is due out in November.

(Reporting by Ayesha Rascoe; editing by Jim Marshall and Andrea Evans) U.S. EPA developing wastewater rules for shale gas Thu, Oct 20 2011

By Ayesha Rascoe WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Thursday it will develop rules for the booming shale gas industry to dispose of its wastewater, which has been linked to polluted surface water.

The move is one of several that signal the Obama administration plans to push ahead with regulating whatever aspects of shale gas production fall under its authority.

"Where we know problems exist, the EPA will not hesitate to protect Americans whose health may be at risk," said Cynthia Dougherty, a water regulator with the EPA, at a congressional hearing on water resources and shale gas production.

The EPA said it would propose rules for shale gas wastewater in 2014, while regulations for the disposal of coal-bed methane wastewater would come a year earlier in 2013.

Hydraulic fracturing -- a technique that involves injecting a mix of water, sand and chemicals into the ground to extract hydrocarbons -- has unlocked vast U.S. shale oil and gas reserves.

The practice has been mostly exempt from U.S. EPA oversight, but the agency does have authority over wastewater from oil and gas production when it is sent to public treatment plants or released into surface water.

But the rapid expansion of shale drilling has prompted a public backlash, with landowners near shale gas wells and green groups complaining of its environmental impact.

At the same time, shale producers have maintained that the drilling was safe and have warned that onerous federal regulations could limit development.

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Kevin Book, an analyst with Clearview Energy Partners, said that while the EPA's decision to develop standards for waste water was important, preemptive regulations from states ultimately posed more of a risk to shale production.

"The EPA isn't the thing operators should worry about," Book said. "The headline risk from federal water regulations is likely to be a footnote to state rules likely to already be in place."

Still, the American Natural Gas Alliance said in a statement it still believes states are best qualified to assess appropriate water disposal requirements for their shale plays.

"As EPA officials move forward we encourage them to partner with the states and take into serious consideration state regulators' existing on-the-ground expertise and ongoing oversight activities," Daniel Whitten, a spokesman for the group.

Some water used in the drilling is recycled, but the EPA said a significant amount requires disposal and some ends up in treatment plants not equipped to deal with such waste.

The EPA said it has reviewed data that found "elevated levels" of pollutants as a result of improper water disposal.

In light of these findings, the EPA said it will begin gathering data and public input to develop standards that shale gas wastewater would have to meet before going to a treatment facility.

The planned rules announced Thursday will not apply to shale oil development, an EPA spokeswoman said.

PROTECTING PUBLIC, ENSURING ACCESS The Obama administration has walked a fine line on shale production, supporting increased natural gas output for energy security benefits and lower carbon emissions, but stressing the need to protect the environment and public health.

"We can protect the health of American families and communities at the same time we ensure access to all of the important resources that make up our energy economy," EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said in a statement. "The American people expect and deserve nothing less."

Green groups and fracking critics applauded the EPA's decision to develop standards.

"Proper treatment of this polluted water is vital to ensure clean drinking water for the millions of Americans that share water with the natural gas industry," said Deb Nardone, the Sierra Club's Natural Gas Reform Campaign Director.

(Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Dale Hudson, Andrea Evans and David Gregorio) PetroSacn Nov'11 Alternative & Renewable Energy WIND Taming Unruly Wind Power

By MATTHEW L. WALD For decades, electric companies have swung into emergency mode when demand soars on blistering hot days, appealing to households to use less power. But with the rise of wind energy, utilities in the Pacific Northwest are sometimes dealing with the opposite: moments when there is too much electricity for the grid to soak up.

So in a novel pilot project, they have recruited consumers to draw in excess electricity when that happens, storing it in a basement water heater or a space heater outfitted by the utility. The effort is rooted in some brushes with danger.

In June 2010, for example, a violent storm in the Northwest caused a simultaneous surge in wind power and in traditional hydropower, creating an oversupply that threatened to overwhelm the grid and cause a blackout.

As a result, the Bonneville Power Administration, the wholesale supplier to a broad swath of the region, turned this year to a strategy common to regions with hot summers: adjusting volunteers’ home appliances by remote control to balance supply and demand.

When excess supply threatens Bonneville’s grid, an operator in a control room hundreds of miles away will now dial up a volunteer’s water heater, raising the thermostat by 60 more degrees. Ceramic bricks in a nearby electric space heater can be warmed to hundreds of degrees.

The devices then function as thermal batteries, capable of giving back the energy when it is needed. Microchips run both systems, ensuring that tap-water and room temperatures in the home hardly vary.

“It’s a little bit of that Big Brother control, almost,” said Theresa Rothweiler, a teacher’s aide in the Port Angeles, Wash., school system who nonetheless signed up for the program with her husband, Bruce, a teacher.

She said she had been intrigued by an ad that Bonneville placed in the local paper that asked consumers to help enable the grid to absorb more renewable energy, especially wind.

“We’re always looking at ways to save energy, or be more efficient or green, however you want to put it,” said Ms. Rothweiler, who worries about leaving the planet a livable place for her 21-year-old daughter, Gretchen. Bonneville paid for the special technology, which runs around $1,000 per home.

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The initial goal of Bonneville’s pilot program is to gain experience in charging and “discharging” the water heaters and space heaters to see how much response operators can count on as the use of these thermal batteries expands.

Mark K. Lauby, director of reliability assessment at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which enforces standards on the grid, said that such storage innovations would be “the holy grail” as the nation shifts to greater reliance on renewable energy.

While the threat of excess supply is most severe in the Pacific Northwest, other regions may land in the same situation in coming years because a surplus would threaten to destabilize the electric system as much as a shortage.

California, for example, is committed to getting a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

That would be harder if it had to turn off the wind machines on their best generating days to prevent the grid from being overwhelmed.

For decades, the Bonneville Power Administration rarely had a problem with excess supply. Its backbone is hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River, and while the operators must often run all of the falling water through its power-producing turbines for environmental reasons, the grid could adjust the supply by turning off fossil fuel plants.

That balance began to shift over the last few years as entrepreneurs built hundreds of wind machines nearby in the Columbia River Gorge, an area that utility executives now call a “wind ghetto.” While the wind turbines produce electricity far below their capacity most hours of the year, they get busy when a storm rolls through, which is when river flows are highest, too.

The agency can simply shut down the wind machines, and it did so intermittently this summer when excess power threatened the grid. But that angered the wind operators, who earn money from the electricity they sell and from tax and other credits based on their production.

This June, several wind companies appealed Bonneville’s policy to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, calling it discriminatory, and in August they filed a federal court challenge that is still pending.

For Bonneville, the full dangers of excess supply first hit home during the June 2010 emergency, when a severe storm whipped through the region. The transmission network had so much power that the agency turned off all its fossil fuel generation, gave electricity away to neighboring networks and even told the system’s only nuclear plant to slash its production by 78 percent, a highly unusual step.

The region squeaked through, but the agency was stretching its resources “to their limits,” said Doug Johnson, a spokesman for Bonneville. At one point the system was running almost entirely on renewable energy.

“This is probably about the only place in the country where that could happen,” said Michael Milstein, another spokesman with the agency.

The problem was complicated by environmental rules involving the hydroelectric dams.

The dams were built with spillways, or paths where operators can divert water without passing it through the powerproducing turbines. But when the water goes through the spillways, it picks up nitrogen bubbles that can kill juvenile fish, so there are strict limits on their use.

Operators can usually keep the system in balance without excessive use of spillways, but in the June 2010 case, they were coping with as many as 2,000 megawatts of wind power, roughly double Seattle’s power use or what two nuclear plants can deliver.

Wind installations have grown since then. So Bonneville began advertising for volunteers to accept extra electricity, mainly homeowners with electric heat and with water heaters of recent vintage.

Plumbers install a mixing valve on the water heaters to keep the faucet temperature safe, and new wiring and a small computer keep track of energy flows.

The agency says that some 200 homes will soon have the adapted water heaters, space heaters or both. In hundreds more, it is installing more traditional controls that will allow it to turn water heaters off. Another utility in the region, Portland General Electric, is about to begin a similar program paid for by the federal Energy Department.

For the time being, the storage devices collectively can absorb the output of only a handful of wind turbines.

A 100-gallon home water heater can store about 26 kilowatt-hours, or about a day’s worth of electricity for a typical house, or less if the house relies on electricity for heat.

The ceramic bricks in the space heater can store 40 kilowatt-hours, or more in some larger configurations. The heat can be drawn off by passing air and delivered to living spaces by a fan, with the bricks also functioning as a thermal battery.

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Some of this equipment dates from the late 1980s and was originally designed for offering “time of use” rates, so that a homeowner could buy electricity during hours when it was cheaper and store it. But coordination over a broad area by a utility to manage regional flows is new.

One nagging question is who will pay for the installations if they are carried out on a larger scale.

While Bonneville pays for them now, Philip D. Lusk, the power resources manager for the utility department of the city of Port Angeles — the Rothweilers’ retail supplier — said the agency might have to find additional ways of compensating consumers to get the thousands of volunteers it will eventually need to make the system effective.

If the installations are judged to benefit everyone because they improve stability, the cost might be spread among all ratepayers. But if Bonneville decides that they mainly benefit the wind generators because they never have to unplug their turbines, the agency could try to charge that industry.

Either way, said Mr. Johnson, the Bonneville spokesman, the agency will have to come up with a solution to “the cranky nature of wind.”

Alternative & Renewable Energy - SOLAR Most Solar Manufacturers May Vanish by 2015, Trina CEO Says November 09, 2011, 12:27 PM

By Natalie Obiko Pearson Nov. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Most of the biggest solar-equipment makers may disappear in the next few years as plunging prices erode margins and drive the weakest out of business, according to Trina Solar Ltd., the fifth-largest supplier of solar panels.

“This is the decade of mergers and acquisitions,” Jifan Gao, chief executive officer of Changzhou, China-based Trina, said in an interview. “From now until 2015 is the first phase, when about two-thirds of the players will be shaken out.”

Three U.S. solar companies including Solyndra LLC have gone bankrupt this year and more, led by First Solar Inc. and Yingli Green Energy Holding Co., slashed sales and margin forecasts, reflecting slower growth in demand and stiffer competition. SunPower Corp. and Roth & Rau AG of Germany agreed to takeovers.

Gao, who founded Trina in 1997, predicted that only about five companies may survive through 2020 in each of the three major manufacturing segments. He defined those as photovoltaic panels, ingots and wafers, and the raw material polysilicon.

“Globally, that would be stable and sustainable,” Gao said last week in Singapore, without naming survivors or his expectations for his own company.

SunPower and First Solar, the largest U.S. solar-gear manufacturers, this month said they will reorganize after cutting their forecasts.

Meyer Burger Technology Ltd., Europe’s biggest manufacturer of the factory equipment for making solar gear, today said it would delay the full takeover of Roth & Rau. Roth & Rau Surprise The decision was made after the German competitor issued a profit warning yesterday that may cause Baar, Switzerlandbased Meyer Burger to take impairments of as much as 60 million euros ($83 million), compared with its $376 million takeover price.

Deals for solar companies worldwide total more than $3.3 billion this year, up from $2.5 billion last year and more than half the record $6.1 billion set in 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Trina ranks fifth by factory capacity among the world’s biggest makers of traditional panels from crystalline silicon. The leaders are China’s Suntech Power Holdings Co. and LDK Solar Co., followed by Ontario-based Canadian Solar Inc. and Germany’s SolarWorld AG, according to Bloomberg industry data that lists Trina with a 1.2-gigawatt capacity at Dec. 31.

Gao said Trina has since increased that to 1.9 gigawatts.

Hemlock Semiconductor Corp., owned by Dow Corning Corp., is the top maker of polysilicon, followed by Wacker Chemie AG of Germany, OCI Co. Ltd. of South Korea and GCL Poly Energy Holdings Ltd. of China, according to Bloomberg industry data.

‘Flying to Quality’ Investors and project developers are increasingly looking at cash and survivability of manufacturers, executives said.

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“Customers are flying to quality,” seeking suppliers who are considered reliable enough for banks to lend on projects, Suntech CEO Zhengrong Shi said last week. The top six manufacturers took 55 percent of the panel market in the second quarter, up from 26 percent last year, he said.

The Bloomberg Industry Global Leaders Large Solar Energy index has lost 59 percent this year, more than 10 times the 5.7 percent decline in the MSCI World Index. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index has gained 0.3 percent in the period.

German solar-panel maker Q-Cells SE, whose 2012 convertible bond trading at a discount to face value of about 58 percent, has said it’s open to takeover bids. Orkla ASA said on Sept. 14 it’s looking for ways to exit from its 39.7 percent stake in Norwegian panel and polysilicon maker Renewable Energy Corp ASA. Quick Innovation Survivors will need strong technology, economies of scale and the ability to innovate quickly, “but also very strong financial performance, very healthy balance sheets,” Gao said.

A ranking of 35 companies in the Bloomberg Global Leaders Large Solar Index shows Conergy AG, which makes panels in Germany, has the weakest balance sheet with a total debt exceeding total equity by more than tenfold, data compiled

by Bloomberg show. LDK Solar and Canadian Solar also rank among the five most leveraged companies with short and long-term borrowings more than double shareholder equity.

The Chinese companies have a “huge” cost advantage over their European, American and Japanese competitors because of better operational management and an ability to react faster to market conditions, Gao said.

The spot price of solar panels has fallen about 40 percent this year as manufacturers particularly in China ramped up their production capacity, according to New Energy Finance. The 10 largest silicon panel manufacturers doubled their manufacturing capacity last year, the data show.

Operating Margins Many solar-equipment companies are losing money at the operating level, as the average operating margin fell to 0.1 percent in the third quarter compared with 13.7 percent a year earlier, Bloomberg industry data show.

At Trina, second-quarter panel shipments jumped 78 percent from the year-earlier period, while its operating margin shrunk to 5.7 percent from 22.5 percent.

Prices will fall further, which will spur the market to expand many-fold by 2020 because solar power will become more affordable across the world, Fang Peng, chief executive of JA Solar Holdings Co., told a conference in Singapore this week.

“The industry has a very bright future even if right now we’re in winter,” Peng said.

--Editors: Todd White, Reed Landberg To contact the reporter on this story: Natalie Obiko Pearson in Mumbai at npearson7@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.ne Chinese Solar Companies Say U.S. Duties Would Hurt Industry November 09, 2011, 1:44 PM

By William McQuillen Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Chinese solar-equipment makers said tariffs sought by U.S. competitors would make it harder to expand the use of renewable energy.

China, the U.S. and other countries are all encouraging use of alternative energy sources, driving costs down across the board, so it would be unfair to penalize China, Richard Weiner, an attorney for the Chinese Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products, told investigators with the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington yesterday.

“This ill-advised attack is threatening the whole industry in the United States,” Weiner told the panel.

U.S. solar-equipment makers led by the U.S. unit of Bonn- based SolarWorld AG have asked the government to slap duties on more than $1 billion of Chinese imports. Solyndra LLC, a California maker of solar panels that received $535 million in U.S. loan guarantees, blamed cheap Chinese imports for its collapse in September.

China uses cash grants, preferential loans, discounts on raw materials, tax incentives and currency manipulation to boost exports of solar cells, the main device used in solar panels, SolarWorld attorneys and executives told the commission.

The panel is scheduled to vote on Dec. 2 on whether the U.S. industry may have been harmed and there is reason to proceed with an investigation, Catherine DeFilippo, the director of the ITC’s investigations said following testimony. The ITC will report the vote to the Commerce Department Dec. 5.

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Suntech, Trina Suntech Power Holdings Co. and Trina Solar Ltd., two of the biggest China-based makers of crystalline silicon panels, argued against duties. China-based Yingli Green Energy Holding Co.’s U.S. unit, Canadian Solar Inc.’s U.S. unit and San Francisco- based Recurrent Energy also argued against the tariffs.

Adding tariffs would only increase the cost of solar panels, which would then be passed on to the consumer, Neil Ellis, an attorney for the Chinese businesses, told the investigators.

China’s rapid growth is only possible with support from the government as it seeks to run out U.S. competitors by selling products for less than cost, said Timothy Brightbill, an attorney for SolarWorld. Chinese modules made up 8 percent of the U.S. market in 2008 and about 50 percent this month, Brightbill said.

‘Even for China’ “Even for China, this volume increase is remarkable,” Brightbill told the panel. More than 1,700 U.S. jobs have been lost recently, he said.

China provided $30 billion in credit to its biggest solar manufacturers last year, about 20 times the amount provided by the U.S., Jonathan Silver, executive director of the Energy Department’s loan program, told a congressional panel Sept.

14. Silver resigned on Oct. 6.

“Without subsidies from the Chinese government and the dumping practices of its producers, the Chinese would not be able to flood the U.S. market with unfairly priced product,” Gordon Brinser, president of SolarWorld Industries America told the panel.

United Steelworkers The United Steelworkers union has petitioned the Obama administration to investigate China’s aid to alternative-energy companies.

“The United States will do everything we can to defend our core interest and make sure our manufacturers are not discriminated against or put in to a competitive disadvantage because of another country’s industrial policy,” U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said Nov. 7 in an interview. “All we ask, we want everybody to play by the rules.”

Kirk said many U.S. companies are conflicted about filing a complaint because they are manufacturing in China.

The trade petition follows one by the U.S. wind-energy industry that China forces manufacturers to make products there.

Those charges prompted the U.S. to file a case with the World Trade Organization in December.

The solar complaint adds to trade disputes. The U.S. Senate last month passed a bill aimed at opening the way to impose duties to punish China for not revaluing its currency.

--Editors: Andrea Snyder, Larry Liebert To contact the reporter on this story: William McQuillen in Washington at bmcquillen@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Liebert at lliebert@bloomberg.net Alternative & Renewable Energy: Shale Gas 1.0: Making Fracking Safe in the East and West http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/10/china_fracking.html/print.html Environmental Safeguards on Shale Gas Production Needed as China Begins Development

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SOURCE:

AP/Alex Brandon A natural gas drilling rig is seen in Springville, Pennsylvania.

By Melanie Hart, Daniel J. Weiss | October 21, 2011 Download this brief (pdf) Read this brief in your web browser (Scribd) New and improved horizontal drilling, combined with hydraulic fracturing technologies, enable the United States to develop its abundant supply of natural gas from shale rock deep below the earth’s surface. China holds huge shale reserves as well and plans to follow suit. It would like to import technologies from the United States to do so, but the United States and its oil companies should not supply China with hydraulic fracturing technology without combining that technology with safety standards and environmental best practices. This includes capturing fugitive greenhouse gas emissions, monitoring the chemicals used in fracking fluid, and treating the wastewater to avoid contaminating local waterways.

This brief will review the factors leading China to seriously consider shale gas development and the potential problems the country faces in making this development a reality. It then examines shale development in the United States before closing with recommendations on how both countries can safely extract shale gas.

We start with a brief look at what shale gas is and the potential environmental problems shale development can produce if it does not follow best practices.

What is shale gas?

Shale gas is natural gas trapped in shale rock deep below the earth’s surface. Until recently, it was inaccessible for development due to its depth and concentration. New advances in horizontal drilling, combined with hydraulic fracking technology have enabled producers to capture this once elusive resource.

Environmental concerns in shale gas development Shale gas can reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Natural gas burns much more cleanly than coal or oil, so it produces less acid rain, smog, and toxics that damage public health and contribute to global warming. This is why many experts believe that shale gas could be the bridge between our fossil fuel reliance in the 20th century and clean renewable energy in this one.

Shale gas production, however, presents many pollution threats to the people of both nations that could negate its benefits. This includes surface and drinking water contamination, air pollution, and global warming pollution.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese General Secretary Hu Jintao recognized the importance of shale gas development to their nations by agreeing to the U.S.-China Shale Gas Resource Initiative in November 2009. This agreement fosters cooperation between these two nations by providing U.S. assistance to assess, develop, and promote investment in China’s shale gas reserves and to help develop operational best practices and effective environmental safeguards in China.

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Our two nations are already making good progress on the exploration and development aspects of this agreement. But environmental cooperation is lagging behind. This is partly because the United States is still struggling to develop the most effective regulatory model for safeguards here at home.

Significantly more work is needed to ensure that both countries maximize the benefits from shale gas development— namely reducing oil imports and pollution—while minimizing the environmental risks.

Below we outline the available shale gas resources, primary pollution concerns, and environmental regulatory bodies in both nations.

China’s interest in shale gas development From the Chinese perspective, the more homegrown energy supplies they can add to their current energy mix the better.

China and the United States are the world’s largest energy consumers and greenhouse gas emitters. Both nations are blessed with ample homegrown energy supplies, but both also import significant amounts of oil. China also imports increasing amounts of coal and natural gas to power its ever-expanding economy.

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Price and supply fluctuations in China’s oil and coal imports triggered disruptive electricity blackouts in 2011, and that has increased their interest in shale gas, which should be a more stable and predictable energy source since China’s resources appear to be abundant and the central government can more easily control the pricing for domestically produced energy supplies.

Over the long term, Chinese shale gas will be cheaper than importing liquefied natural gas over long-distance pipelines from Central Asia. But at least in the short term, shale gas will not be a game-changer in China as it has been in the United States where development is less costly and already underway.

China’s shale gas developments thus far The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that China has 1.275 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable shale gas reserves. If that estimate is correct, China has the largest shale gas reserves in the world. (see chart) China has seven major onshore shale basins (see map below). But only two—Sichuan and Tarim—are well suited for commercial development. Those two basins contain marine shale with sufficiently high organic content and sufficiently low clay content to make the quality of the natural gas (based on the organic matter) worth the development costs.

The Chinese government thus far has only issued permits for the Sichuan basin, which is located much closer to China’s urban and industrial demand markets and therefore offers a much better business case for developers.

China has not produced any shale gas for commercial use, and it is not clear how quickly it will ramp up production.

China’s National Energy Agency set a draft production target of 6.5 billion cubic meters or 229 billion cubic feet annually by 2015 and 2.8 trillion cubic feet annually by 2020. It is not clear, however, if those NEA targets are feasible or if they will receive central government approval.

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China’s major state-owned energy companies are new to the shale gas industry, so they are teaming up with major international companies for shale gas exploration. The bilateral shale gas initiative with the United States led to multiple U.S.-China industry partnerships. Chevron, Shell, BP, EOG Resources, Newfield Exploration, ConocoPhillips, Schlumberger, and Baker Hughes have all been working on the ground in China to help the Chinese explore their shale potential.

Those partnerships are starting to pay off. Sinopec (working with BP) completed China’s first successful hydraulic fracturing exercise (successfully used U.S. fracturing technology to extract shale gas) in May 2010. And PetroChina (working with Royal Dutch Shell) drilled China’s first horizontal shale gas exploration well in Sichuan’s Weiyuan block in March 2011.

China’s Ministry of Land Resources, or MLR, launched the first round of bidding for China’s first commercial development permits in June 2011. Only six state-owned energy companies were allowed to submit bids: PetroChina, Sinopec, Cnooc, Shaanxi Yanchang petroleum, CUCBM, and Henan Provincial Coal Seam Gas. The MLR divided the Sichuan basin into exploration and development blocks and put four blocks up for bid. According to Chinese regulations, each shale block must receive at least three bids before it can be auctioned off. Only two blocks received enough bids—Nanchuan and Xiushan—so only those two blocks were licensed. SinoPec and Henan Coal Seam Development Corp. were the two winners.

The MLR is currently preparing to open up the second and third rounds of bidding. The second round will take place in the fourth quarter of 2011. That round will be open to private companies. The major foreign oil companies mentioned above are hoping to leverage their technology and know-how to gain access to China’s shale market, but the secondround bidding will be limited to Chinese majority enterprises only.

China faces technical challenges PetroScan-November 2011

China faces several hurdles to developing its shale gas reserves. For one, there are several characteristics of China’s shale deposits that will raise development costs. Compared to the United States, China’s shale deposits are generally located deeper underground. They also contain more nonhydrocarbon gasses—particularly hydrogen sulfide, possibly carbon dioxide and nitrogen—and they are located in rougher (more hilly/mountainous) terrain.

China also lacks the technology to develop these deposits. China’s oil companies are depending heavily on the United States for shale technology. Their firms are acquiring overseas assets to gain horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technology in addition to the exploration partnerships mentioned above. PetroChina, for example, purchased stakes in Australia’s Arrow Energy, and Sinopec recently announced a deal to acquire Daylight Energy, a Canadian shale producer. CNOOC purchased stakes in Chesapeake Energy (United States) and Exoma Energy (Australia).

But the proven technology solutions developed for the U.S. market may not be a good fit in China since China’s shale deposits differ geologically from those in the United States. And Chinese firms may struggle to adjust those solutions to fit local conditions. In addition, U.S. energy companies have limited influence on how their Chinese partners use U.S. technology and whether they employ the operational best practices developed in the United States—China is only awarding exploration and development rights to majority Chinese entities, so that means that the U.S. participants are always minority partners and cannot exert operational control.

Water shortages are another challenge. Shale development requires vast amounts of water, and that will be difficult in China where water supplies are already scarce. This is one reason why Chinese leaders are only issuing permits for the Sichuan basin, where water scarcity is less of a problem than the arid Tarim basin.

China’s pipeline infrastructure is also a potential bottleneck. The central government is working to increase pipeline capacity. But infrastructure expansion takes time, and current pipeline constraints will further slow Chinese shale development.

China’s Ministry of Land and Resources announced a development target of expanding shale gas from 8 percent to 12 percent of China’s natural gas production by 2020. Natural gas currently accounts for 4 percent of China’s domestic energy consumption, and Chinese leaders are aiming to increase that to 10 percent by 2020. At best, then, Chinese leaders are shooting for shale gas to account for around 1 percent of overall energy consumption by 2020.

Even in the best case scenario the actual greenhouse gas reductions from switching from coal to shale gas would be minimal in the near term since shale gas will only account for a small percentage of China’s energy mix. The biggest short-term environmental issue, therefore, is the potential local environmental impacts from shale gas development.

Environmental challenges with Chinese shale gas As in the United States, some in China are concerned that shale gas development could trigger a major pollution crisis.

U.S. environmental impact studies suggest that sound equipment and operational best practices are critical for protecting groundwater and limiting fugitive gasses from shale extraction. But development companies will not follow those best practices without strict environmental regulation. And environmental regulation is not something China is good at.

China’s Environmental Protection Ministry, or MEP, is underfunded, and the ministry struggles to accurately monitor what is going on at the local level. Even when local-level Environmental Protection Bureaus, or EPBs, possess accurate information about local production operations, those officials are subordinate to the regional provincial, municipal, and county-level People’s government units (similar to state, municipal, and county governments in the United States), and the People’s government officials (who are responsible for the region as a whole) generally prioritize economic growth over environmental protection.

So where there are Chinese shale developments, if exploration and development activity produces harmful emissions or other pollution you can be sure that the local People’s government (which earns tax revenue from commercial developments in their region) will use its budgetary and personnel authority to keep the local EPB quiet.

As in the United States, China’s shale market developments are already outpacing legislation. Chinese leaders are working on a major environmental protection bill, the “Technology Policy for Preventing Environmental Pollution from Oil and Natural Gas Extraction.” But the current draft does not include guidelines for shale gas development, and it would be difficult to add in shale-specific guidelines at this point in the drafting process. China’s guidelines for conventional gas will not be adequate for addressing the specific environmental concerns associated with shale.

China faces bigger air pollution risks since its shale gas deposits generally contain more poisonous hydrogen sulfide than U.S. deposits. Hydrogen sulfide is a toxic pollutant, and it is also highly corrosive, so it can corrode drilling equipment and PetroScan-November 2011

increase fugitive emissions of other pollutants such as methane. Preventing these problems will require strict emission standards and advanced drilling and gas purifying technology—two things China will struggle with.

But even though China’s environmental regulators are relatively weak and underfunded, we can expect China to be stricter on water issues than U.S. regulators. In general, China’s Water Ministry has more political power than the MEP because China suffers from severe water shortages. And when China’s water supplies are too low or too polluted that shuts down industrial production. (Air pollution does not have the same immediate economic impact.)

China has a history of shutting down factories or forbidding certain production practices because they use or contaminate too much water. The central government capped coal production in the 12th five-year plan to address water concerns, and Chinese leaders already restrict permits for new coal liquefaction projects due to their high water consumption rates.

Water shortages are one reason China is only issuing development permits for the Sichuan shale basin, not for the Tarim. China’s water concerns will almost certainly result in tighter regulations for wastewater treatment at shale development sites, which is something we already see in other Chinese industries.

United States shale gas development Pulitzer Prize-winning energy author Daniel Yergin notes how quickly natural gas from shale formations joined the energy mix in the United States: Shale gas really has been a revolution that's happened extremely rapidly…It's gone from being virtually none of our natural gas production to about 30 percent of our total natural gas production.

This big change in the U.S. energy portfolio is the result of technological advancements to produce significant amounts of shale gas. These gas reserves are locked within shale rock deep in the earth. Improvements in horizontal drilling combined with hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” enables companies to free and collect the natural gas otherwise trapped in the shale rock

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The ability to collect this formerly unavailable natural gas has increased projected resources by one-third to 2.5 trillion cubic feet of gas. This is “enough to supply over 100 years of use” according to the Energy Information Administration.

Annual U.S. shale gas production increased by 15 times between 2000 and 2010, from 0.3 trillion cubic feet to 4.5 trillion cubic feet. Shale gas composed a much greater portion of the U.S. natural gas supply between 2000 to 2009, growing from 2 percent to 14 percent. EIA projects that in 2035 shale gas will provide nearly half of all total U.S. natural gas supply.

The largest shale gas play is the Marcellus that runs from upstate New York through Western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky. As of January 2009, it held more than half of the “undeveloped technically recoverable shale gas” remaining in shale plays according to EIA. Two of the early plays developed were the Barnett shale around Ft. Worth and the Haynesville play on both sides of the Texas-Louisiana border. These two hold an estimated 6 percent and 10 percent, respectively, of the undeveloped shale gas.

Environmental challenges with U.S. shale gas production Producing natural gas from these and other shale plays is no simple task, though. The fracking process involves injecting huge volumes of water mixed with sand and chemicals deep underground to fracture rock formations and release trapped gas. This process risks contamination of underground drinking water supplies, as well as the contamination of surface water from the discharge of wastewater that is a byproduct of drilling. In addition, fracking can release previously trapped methane gas—a potent greenhouse gas pollutant. Finally, the surface fracking operations—including diesel trucks and generators—release the ingredients for smog, which also poses health risks.

Unlike air and water pollution from most other industrial sources, the federal government has very limited ability to require shale gas producers to reduce their water, air, and global warming pollution. Under pressure from big oil companies, Congress has exempted oil and gas production from numerous health and safety laws. (see table above) Consequently, the states have primary responsibility for establishing and enforcing safeguards for shale gas production.

For instance, many citizen groups and neighbors adjacent to fracking operations would like companies to provide full public disclosure of the toxic and other chemicals used in their fracking fluids. These operations are currently exempt PetroScan-November 2011

from the Toxic Release Inventory reporting requirements under the federal Community Right to Know law, but states can require such disclosure.

Some companies have volunteered to disclose some information about the chemical components of their fracking fluid.

But this is no substitute for industrywide reporting.

Some states have begun to require some disclosure in 2011: Earlier this year, Texas became the latest state to draft regulations requiring the disclosure of chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process. Michigan and Montana issued similar regulations over the summer, joining Arkansas, Wyoming, and Pennsylvania as states recently active in regulating hydraulic fracturing.

It is also up to the states to establish drinking water safeguards for fracking. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 exempts fracking from the safe underground disposal requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act. The U.S. Department of Energy, however, found that “state laws generally give the state oil and gas director or agency the discretion to require whatever is necessary to protect human health and the environment.” This means that agencies responsible for natural gas production—not agencies with responsibility and expertise for health or environmental protection—develop and implement drinking water safeguards for fracking.

Such an oversight system may be why ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization, “reported about hundreds of cases of water contamination in more than six states where drilling and fracking are taking place” since 2008.

Fracking can also contaminate surface rivers and lakes due to the discharge of its wastewater into these waters or sewage treatment plants not designed to remove fracking-related pollutants. These contaminants pass through partially or completely untreated into the receiving waters.

A New York Times investigation found that: A well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground.

Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.

Wastewater… is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water.

Air pollution is also a byproduct of fracking. The Environmental Protection Agency determined that fracking produces carcinogens such as benzene and toluene, volatile organic compounds that contribute to smog, and methane.

Fortunately, EPA has the authority to require reductions of these pollutants, and this July it proposed standards to achieve: …nearly 95 percent reduction in VOCs emitted from new and modified hydraulically fractured gas wells. This significant reduction would be accomplished primarily through use of a proven technology to capture natural gas that currently escapes to the air. That gas would then be made available for sale…the proposed rule is anticipated to quickly result in a net savings of nearly $30 million annually.

The proposed reduction standards must be finalized by February 2012.

In President Barack Obama’s March 30, 2011 energy proposal he noted that shale gas could play a large role in U.S. energy policy, particularly with the mitigation of these environmental impacts: Recent technology and operational improvements in extracting natural gas resources, particularly shale gas, have increased gas drilling activities nationally and led to significantly higher natural gas production estimates for decades to come.

The Administration is taking steps to address these [environmental] concerns and ensure that natural gas production proceeds in a safe and responsible manner.

As part of this effort the president asked Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to convene an Advisory Board Shale Gas Production Subcommittee. Its charge was: To identify, within 90 days, any immediate steps that can be taken to improve the safety and environmental performance of fracking and to develop, within six months, consensus recommended advice to the agencies on practices for shale extraction to ensure the protection of public health and the environment.

The first set of recommendations was issued on August 11, 2011. They focused on immediate steps that shale gas producers could take to reduce the pollution threat posed by fracking.

They included the following steps: · “Improve public information about shale operations,” and make it easily available.

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“Improve air quality: Reduce emissions of air pollutants, ozone precursors, and methane as quickly as practicable. The Subcommittee supports adoption of rigorous standards for new and existing sources of methane, air toxics, ozone precursors and other air pollutants.” · “Protection of Water Quality” by industry adoption of “best practices” for well development and construction, and other operations. Conduct baseline assessments of water contamination before fracking begins to better assess new contamination. · Prompt public “disclosure of fracturing fluid composition.” · Reduce “the use of diesel fuel…there is no technical or economic reason to use diesel… [reduce] the use of diesel engines for surface power in favor of natural gas engines or electricity where available.”

The subcommittee is in the midst of a second 90-day review period when it plans to focus more on the “regulatory schemes in place” to reduce environmental contamination, as well as “the creation of a timetable and action plan for implementation of the Subcommittee's recommendations.” The second review should speed oil and gas companies’ implementation of the earlier recommendations, as well as provide guidance about the appropriate federal and state enforcement roles. In addition, the Natiponal Academy of Sciences should undertake a comprehensive and credible study of the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions from the production and use of shale gas.

Bilateral shale gas cooperation: Safeguards are essential in both nations The U.S.-China Shale Gas Resource Initiative aims to provide U.S. technical assistance to China across all aspects of shale gas development, including safety and environmental protection. So far, however, China’s policymakers have paid little attention to safeguards. This follows the U.S. model. Shale gas production here has far outpaced the establishment and enforcement of pollution protections.

Environmental protection remains a low priority for both sides. Neither nation wants to risk the commerical potential of China's shale gas by vigorously pursuing einvornmental protection there. Most of the U.S. companies involved in these bilateral exploration and development projects want to exchange assessment and extraction technology for Chinese commercial market access. The Chinese want technology transfers from the United States that include the more mature and advanced technologies that the United States often holds back due to intellectual property right concerns.

Now that the initial exploration phase in China is complete, the United States must help prevent the environmental consequences of Chinese shale gas production. If China does not follow best practices to capture greenhouse gases, it is highly likely that shale development will increase China’s emissions instead of decreasing them. And that will worsen climate change.

A major Chinese environmental disaster, such as groundwater pollution, could be devastating for China’s economy. It could also easily increase public opposition to fracking in the United States, just like the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Japan increased American opposition to nuclear power. The U.S. companies involved in China’s shale industry therefore have a strong incentive to support bilateral environmental protection efforts.

Energy producers with new technologies are far ahead of environmental safeguards. In China, this struggle will be even bigger than it is here in the United States because the Chinese are importing this technology from us and starting a new industry overnight. China’s Environmental Protection Ministry has not conducted extensive studies on shale gas development, and Chinese journalists have recently begun traveling abroad to study our shale developments and learn from our experiences and concerns. But that education process will take time—just as it did here—and China’s environmental activists face more constraints than their U.S. counterparts.

In sum, the United States and its oil companies should not export hydraulic fracking technology without pairing that technology with safety standards and best environmental practices.

Melanie Hart is a Policy Analyst on China Energy and Climate Policy and Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at American Progress.

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FACTS& FIGURES Global Comparison of GDP per Unit of Energy Use

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Global CO2 Emissions from Fossil Fuel Combustion and Cement Manufacture

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China, U.S., India: CO2 Emissions from Fossil Fuel Combustion and Cement Manufacture

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Global Comparison of GDP per Unit of Energy Use

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Emissions Reduction Activities of Global 500 Companies, 2011

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Total Emissions Disclosures of Global 500 Companies, 2009-2011

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Sustainability Global Action Needed by 2017 to Prevent Dangerous Temperatures, IEA Says November 10, 2011 The world needs to take internationally co-ordinated action by 2017 to keep temperatures from rising to dangerous levels, the International Energy Agency said in its World Energy Outlook 2011.

In the outlook paper, released yesterday, the IEA said that to keep the global temperature rise under 2 degrees C, all permissible emissions will have to come from infrastructure already built and “locked in” by 2017. That means that all new infrastructure from then until 2035 will need to be zero-carbon, or else existing emitters will need to be retired before the normal end of their lifetimes – a very expensive proposition.

About 80 percent of this projected “locked in” infrastructure already exists today, Reuters reported.

To keep the rise to 2 degrees C, emissions volumes must not exceed more than 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide, the IEA says. But emissions have already reached 390 ppm.

It said that another $15.2 trillion will need to be invested in low-carbon and energy efficiency technologies by 2035 to keep the warming to two degrees, the level agreed at UN climate change talks in Cancun last year. That cash will come out of a total energy supply investment of $35.6 trillion, the IEA said.

The agency’s warning follows on the heel of grim environmental news earlier in the week, when Oak Ridge National Lab said that GHG emissions jumped six percent in 2010, their largest one-year rise.

In May the IEA said that last year’s rise in GHGs has made it“extremely challenging” to prevent global temperature climbing to dangerous levels.

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Later this month, international negotiators will meet in Durban to try and hammer out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

Signs have not been promising. The European Commission has offered to increase its 2020 emissions reduction target to 30 percent, and the EU is pushing for a deal by 2015. But other countries stand accused of delaying the commitment to 2018 or 2020.

Coke Makes 100% Recycling Pledge for 2012 Olympics Coca-Cola has promised to recycle all clear plastic PET bottles used at the London 2012 Olympics, according to news reports.

The company has partnered with Sita UK, the waste management partner of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (Locog), and aims to recycle the materials into 80 million new Coke bottles within six weeks of the games ending, Marketing reports.

Coke will recycle its own bottles as well as those of other companies.

Locog has a target of zero waste to landfill and has pledged that at least 70 percent of all waste will be reused, recycled or composted. Coke says its own recycling will account for about a fifth of consumer waste produced at the Olympic Park.

In March Coca-Cola Enterprises and ECO Plastics formed a joint venture to develop a facility to more than double the amount of PET bottles recycled in Great Britain.

The Lincolnshire facility will raise the amount of PET bottles recycled from 35,000 tons last year to more than 75,000 tons when the plant is fully operational in 2012. Coca-Cola said the move will supply it with enough material to meet its target of including 25 percent recycled PET in all its plastic packaging in Great Britain by next year.

But across the pond, the company’s joint-venture recycling plant in Spartanburg, S.C., has been plagued by difficulties, closing for restructuring, laying off workers and then re-opening.

For more on Coke’s sustainability strategy for the 2012 Olympics, see this video. (http://www.environmentalleader.com/2011/11/10/coke-makes-100-recycling-pledge-for-2012-olympics/) Lessons from BSR 2011: How Coke, UPS & RMI Deliver Greener Trucking, Transport

By Leslie Guevarra Created 2011-11-03 12:53 In September, Coca-Cola added six all-electric trucks to its fleet of more than 700 alternative fuel vehicles in North America. This spring United Parcel Service, with a green fleet of more than 2,300 vehicles, began its tryout of a lightweight delivery van clad in rugged ABS plastic that's expected to boost fuel efficiency by 40 percent.

"We're often accused of being delusional or pie-in-the-sky, but here are two organizations that are doing what we'd love to see everybody doing," said Ned Harvey, the Rocky Mountain Institute's chief operating officer, at the BSR Conference in San Francisco.

RMI's work in the national push for greener trucking is part of the think-and-do tank's broader efforts for "Reinventing Fire," the organization's name for its vision to wean the U.S. off coal, oil and nuclear power by 2050.

BSR brought together Harvey and sustainability experts from UPS and Coca-Cola to talk about fuel efficiency, reducing emissions and the future of energy in transportation

Coca-Cola's eStar electric truck. .

Coca-Cola and UPS are major players in the drive toward greener transport. Both are members of President Obama's new National Clean Fleets Partnership -- UPS is a charter member and Coca-Cola joined this summer. Both have large and growing green fleets.

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Coca-Cola's efforts are part of a sustainability strategy that includes robust initiatives on water management, greening refrigeration, developing eco-friendly bottles and recycling -- work that tends to get more headlines than fuel efficiency initiatives. Nevertheless, the company's green fleet of heavy-duty hybrid and alternative fuel trucks is the largest in North America, said Bryan Jacob, the company's director of energy management and climate protection. By the end of the year, the fleet will exceed 750 vehicles.

At UPS, the quest for greater fuel efficiency is core to the business and informs every aspect of the company, said Scott Wicker, vice president of corporate plant engineering and chief sustainability officer.

The UPS ABS plastic ligjhtweight delivery van.

"We're always searching for ways to find improvement," Wicker said. "What we're trying to do is future-proof our business."

UPS operates more than 100,000 vehicles for delivery and hauling as well as the 10th largest airline. It pioneered route efficiency tactics that include no left turns, developed exacting logistics management using telematics and set up carbonneutral shipping and responsible packaging programs. And now, Wicker said, UPS is exploring whether taking on the distribution tasks of firms and providing logistics as a service will pencil out on an environmental balance sheet as well as a line of business.

Next Page: The challenges of transitional technology and weaning away from fossil fuel.

At the same time, UPS is trying to find the most effective way to transition from traditional to greener fuels. As a result, the firm's eco-fleet, which is expected to reach 2,600 trucks and vans by year's end, includes propane, liquid natural gas, compressed natural, gas, hybrid electric, hybrid hydraulic and all-electric vehicles. And during its search, UPS has encountered two of the chief challenges posed by transitional technology: • One size does not fit all. "There is no silver bullet," said Wicker, noting that each type of green vehicle is best-suited to a certain transport environment -- city versus highway, suburban versus rural, etc. • Cost. "Typically, these are two times the cost of their gasoline or diesel brethren," said Wicker. "People ask, 'Why don't you just convert your whole fleet?' " For a firm that buys 5,000 to 10,000 new vehicles a year, doing so at current vehicle prices would be cost prohibitive. he said.

Like Harvey from RMI, Wicker suggested collaboration in the marketplace as a way to bring costs down. "With fossil fuels, as demand goes up, price goes up. With technology, as demand goes up, price goes down."

The key to the transition is going step by step, Harvey said. The Reinventing Fire vision lays out ways for the U.S. to get from today's consumption rate of 13.5 million barrels of oil a day at the cost of some $2 billion to virtually no fossil fuels -"that's no coal, oil, nuclear power but with a little bit of natural gas" -- by 2050, he said.

"We believe you can get there and it's a staged process," said Harvey. "That's the beauty of it, you don't have to do it all at once."

Big firms like UPS and Coca-Cola have the resources to test a number of different techniques and technologies, but for most other companies the starting point is vehicle fitness and drivers' behavior and practices, Harvey said.

"The problem is the vast majority of companies using trucks don't know what to do," he said. "What [they] should be talking about now is truck driver behavior."

UPS' work in that area includes use of telematics to optimize routes and obtain a clearer picture of where its trucks are going, how long its taking them to get there, whether they are conforming to routes and whether their drivers are following best practices for safety and fuel efficiency. Measurement has long been an essential element of everyday business at UPS and previously, the company had calculated its routes "down to a 100th of an hour," said Wicker. Technology now provides a mirror of what's happening.

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"I'm often asked," Wicker said, " 'How much more gain are you going to get out of efficiency?' Well, just when you think you've eked out that last bit, a new technology comes along and we find a new way to do what's we're doing."

Image Credits -- Top photo of two red trucks via Shutterstock.com. Inset photos courtesy of The Coca-Cola Company and UPS. Source URL: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2011/11/03/bsr-2011-how-coke-ups-rmi-deliver-greener-trucking-transport ConAgra chief talks sustainability

By Dan Hockensmith November 1, 2011 ATLANTA (Nov. 1, 3:15 p.m. ET) — Robert Weick is vice president of packaging and sustainability at ConAgra Foods Inc. He is responsible for directing all aspects of packaging innovation, commercialization and cost reduction for the Omaha, Neb.-based packaged foods company. Weick also has been an executive in PepsiCo Inc.’s beverages and foods divisions and at Tropicana Products, and worked in product development for Gerber Products Co., Metal Box and International Paper Co. Plastics News reporter Dan Hockensmith interviewed Weick Sept.

12 at the Closure and Container Manufacturers Association’s annual meeting in Atlanta, where Weick discussed ConAgra’s recent moves in the areas of packaging sustainability and closure recycling.

Robert Weick of ConAgra Foods Inc. (Plastics Q: What is the biggest challenge for closures, in ConAgra’s view?

Weick: Closures are not really something that consumers really News photo by Leland Holder) focus upon. They [see] a bottle with a cap on it, or a jar with a lid. A key piece is making sure with our suppliers that the focus doesn’t become the cap — and [that] the cap’s a problem. So is keeping ahead of issues: Last year [at the CCMA meeting] we brought up the fact that polypropylene closures are an increasing percentage of the PET waste stream. As the awareness of sustainability and recycling goes up in the [plastics] industry, there’s a greater potential for awareness to be focused on the role of the closure.

PP as a resin doesn’t have that value stream that draws it into a recycling pathway. Polyester [by comparison] had value as a recycled product early on as fiber — more so now as a recycled material going back into container manufacture and other recycled goods. PP doesn’t have that right now. My focus within ConAgra is working with the industry to create and identify what those opportunities are to use that material.

There are number of groups out there; [the Association of Postconsumer Plastic Recyclers] is very active. The closure manufacturers have not been active as a group; they’re active individually — lightweighting closures and so on — but there’s not a story around it. So if we can create the story, then you have the understanding of everything that the closure industry has been doing [on sustainability] and also a focus on where the opportunities are for them to create that value stream.

Q: What are some of ConAgra’s most recent sustainability achievements?

Weick: We’re very prideful of the fact that we just made the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. That was a goal that [the inhouse sustainability team] set and they deserve the credit, not me.

When I came to ConAgra five years ago, we didn’t have a sustainability organization. [ConAgra’s] program is very grassroots. In the springtime we have a sustainability awards program. We’ve seen plants eliminate water usage, eliminate waste; reductions in energy usage — they have done tremendous things.

Sustainability in packaging has been around at every company for as long as I can remember — it used to be only be called “cost savings.” When I was at PepsiCo, when sustainability became a focus, the initial piece was to look at something that could be measured quickly, which was the amount of packaging waste you reduced. The only PetroScan-November 2011

measureable quantity you had was cost savings. I think it’s a tribute to organizations across the spectrum that sustainability has really taken on a much more complete meaning. Packaging is but one component.

There’s an image that [consumers have] that plastics can be bad. Plastics really aren’t a bad material, but there’s the imagery of millions of bottles in the ocean and on beaches … There are a limited number of structural materials for any packaging, so if you look at it in that perspective, you can’t say that any one of those is better or worse than the other.

Aluminum had a really early value stream that Alcoa drove. Many, many moons ago, I had the privilege of working for a gentleman at Alcoa who had developed their recycling programs. His focus was built around creating value. The value for Alcoa was that it was cheaper to take [post-consumer] cans and to turn them into roll stock than to mine for bauxite.

Q: Some of the big consumer packaged goods companies like Procter & Gamble Co. have indicated that they are looking ahead to a time when they can move packaging away from petroleum-based plastics to bio-based material. Do you envision a point when ConAgra makes a statement to the effect that you want suppliers to move toward bio-based materials?

Weick: It’s an aspiration that we have to have. In the food industry, however, we have a number of challenges to overcome. You have regulatory issues; shelf-life issues; materials performance. Even from the converters’ side, there are challenges that they have to undertake in terms of their ability to run the materials. [Polylactic acid] is a good example: It’s a good material, but if it’s entered into the polyester [recycling] pathway, it becomes a contaminant. So it sounds good to the consumer, but the reality is you take one of your primary pathways and put it in jeopardy.

Talking with P&G, they’ve done a great deal of work looking at material and ensuring that those don’t interrupt existing pathways and recyclability. That’s the important part. For a non-food application there’s arguably more latitude than in the food industry.

Another underlying question is the impacts of going to plant-based materials on the agricultural industry. You see it and you feel it just in the ethanol conversion or increase of ethanol usage for fuel in America, and the major impact it has had on the food industry in terms of prices. Biodiesel and its impact on soybeans and corn — we feel those in the food industry, not so much on the packaging side, but on prices for our [food] ingredients. The consumers feel it at the retail level when the chicken or beef prices go up.

Q: People still throw a lot of food out. Is there a way that ConAgra can influence consumers — an opportunity to sell smaller portions with less packaging — to reduce waste?

Weick: There’s an enabling factor of prepared food in a package providing a controlled, shelf-stable, ready-for-use application that can create a value for consumers. You can create value in portion-controlled meals.

In America, there’s a challenge that I see. When you go out to eat, oftentimes the value is measured by the amount of food that is on the plate. On the [home-] prepared foods side, you have to have a package that delivers the right-sized component for the consumer so that they utilize it and perceive that same value. The antithesis is that they look in their trash can and see a lot of waste packages. There’s a delicate balance.

There has to be an understanding related to the consumer that packages have value in a re-use capability. Our [crystalline PET] trays for frozen foods have up to 40 percent PCR [post-consumer recycled] material. The challenge is making sure there’s enough PCR [material] to go around. Coca-Cola and Pepsi fight in the same space [for PET]; they also have to deal with the fact that so much PCR [material] goes to China for fiber.

Our concern is making sure that we’re doing everything we can working with industry to find solutions and the balance that’s needed out there. If we can do that, our material suppliers will be successful, our converters can be successful and we’ll be successful.

Entire contents copyright 2011 by Crain Communications Inc. All rights reserved.

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Sustainability Oscar for carbon emission reduction goes to…

CALLED the `Oscars of carbon emission reduction', the Gigaton Awards, which honours “outstanding performances as defined by measurable carbon reductions and quantifiable steps towards sustainability“, will be announced and be given away on Saturday (December 3) during the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) underway in Durban, South Africa. In its second year, the awards, an initiative by the Richard Branson co-founded non-profit Carbon War Room, has fifteen companies, which include Fiat, Philips, Danone, Pepsico and Tesco, competing for the top awards in five categories like utilities, telecommunications, industrials, consumer staples and consumer discretionary.

Interestingly, Indian company Suzlon was a winner last year in its inaugural year.

“One of the objectives of Carbon War Room is to work with entrepreneurs and companies who harness the power of entrepreneurship to unlock market driven solutions to climate change.

And the focus is on solutions which are cost effective, can be executed under existing policies and with existing technologies,“ Jigar Shah, CEO, Carbon War Room, told Financial Chronicle.

“To that extent,“ said Shah, “this award is recognition of those companies which are using those un derstanding and executing the best in the last one year. For several companies growth and profits have really grown substantially based on climate change solutions.“ “This award recognises the companies doing the most to achieve climate stability. These companies are inspiration to realise a busi ness-led transition from a fossil-fuel based economy to one based on clean energy,“ said Sunil Paul, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur who founded the Gigaton Throwdown, which spon sors research and awards to educate and inspire the private sector to achieve climate stability and eliminate oil as a strategic commodity. Paul's Gigaton Throwdown “cocreated the award“ with Carbon War Room.

Shah said the award is so named to demonstrate the scale of carbon reduction needed to avoid catastrophic climate change. “The sci ence basically reveals you have to save 17 gigatons of carbon by 2020, annually, to stay below 2 degrees. Therefore, given that wr are in 2011 heading into 2012, we wanted to make it clear that at this stage in the evolution of climate change solutions, you really have to go big.“ The methodology followed for the Gigaton Awards is a combination of data from the Carbon Disclosure Project's Global 500 Report, which is an examination of CO2 reduction strategies at the world's largest companies, annual emissions intensity analysis for each industry, and ethical criteria.

“As we believe strongly in transparency, we are determined to work only with those reporting their carbon emissions. So our attempt is to honor only the best of the best efforts in carbon emissions reduction,“ said Shah.

“Once we have done that, we make sure that each of the companies that win awards intentionally tried to reduce emissions and achieved their target,“ he added.

Talking about Indian companies that are making significant efforts to reduce carbon emissions Shah said companies from India and China have not been “as transparent as they need to be“.

PetroScan HSE Green, health groups threaten to sue if EPA doesn’t update soot, dust standards Posted on October 18, 2011 at 12:52 pm by Puneet Kollipara Green and health groups today threatened to sue the Environmental Protection Agency if it doesn’t formally propose new particulate-matter standards within 60 days, alleging the agency missed a deadline required under the law.

In a “notice of intent to sue” letter to the EPA, the groups say they’ll give the agency 60 days to issue a proposed rule for fine and coarse particulate matter – whether the rule changes the standards or leaves them the same. The groups allege the agency, by not issuing the rule by Monday, failed to meet a Clean Air Act deadline for finishing a five-year review of standards.

The EPA has actually finished all of the studies required in the review, including policy, scientific and risk assessments.

The groups are asking the agency to finish the process by proposing a rule, said Paul Cort, staff attorney at Earthjustice, an Oakland, Calif., environmental law firm, which filed the letter on behalf of the American Lung Association and National Parks Conservation Association.

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“The point of the exercise is to go through that scientific review and propose new standards as appropriate,” Cort, the letter’s author, said in a phone interview.

Particulate matter, which can include soot, smoke, heavy metals and toxic organic compounds emitted from power plants, factories, rural areas and diesel trucks, can cause a range of respiratory problems and tens of thousands of premature deaths every year, health groups say.

EPA said in a statement it is reviewing the groups’ letter. The agency did not say whether it had decided to agree to the groups’ request.

“The agency has already made progress gathering and considering the latest and best health science as part of its review,” the agency said. “Strong measures to safeguard public health, including pollution control measures that have already been adopted or are under development, will continue to reduce pollution from heavy industry, power plants, diesel engines and vehicles, preventing tens of thousands of premature deaths every year.”

Cort said he thinks the agency will have no choice but to propose a stronger fine-particulate-matter standard when all is said and done, because a federal appeals court in 2009 rejected the George W. Bush-era standard from 2006 as not strong enough.

“We don’t think there’s much question that the current standards fail to protect public health or they fail to address some of these other issues like visibility,” Cort said.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said yesterday her agency would not strengthen standards for coarse particulate matter, following fears from farm-state Republican lawmakers that the agency was planning to regulate dust emitted by farms.

Jackson has dismissed Republicans’ concerns. The agency never had any “secret plan” to regulate farm dust, she said at a recent media event sponsored by the Washington newspaper POLITICO. “We’re not prepared to say one way or another whether we agree with that,” Cort said. “But that’s the kind of decision EPA needs to formally make, and not just for coarse particulate matter.”

Environmental, health groups push for tighter car emission standards Posted on October 31, 2011 at 2:01 pm by Puneet Kollipara in Automobiles, Environment,Environmental Protection Agency, Gasoline, Oil Environmental and health groups pushed the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with a rule they say would let the agency cut vehicle emissions of smog-forming pollutants by one-third while costing consumers just a penny more for each gallon of gasoline.

The groups want EPA’s upcoming rule to cut fuel levels of sulfur, which interferes with emission controls in vehicles, by two-thirds and reduce tailpipe emissions of nitrogen oxides, volatile organic and carbon monoxide by about one-third by 2030.

Such a rule would add less than 1 cent to the per-gallon price of gasoline and $150 to the cost of a new car, and the rule would save hundreds of lives a year and reduce lost workdays by more than 50,000 a year, said Paul Billings, vice president of national policy and advocacy for the American Lung Association.

“Those are dramatic benefits, a huge bang for the buck and a kind of regulatory certainty and efficiency the American public needs,” Billings said.

Groups have sought tighter standards since President Barack Obama issued an executive order in May 2010 asking the EPA to review whether existing standards were adequate, said Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, an environmental group in Washington.

“We’re here to remind them,” O’Donnell told reporters today. “It’s time for them to get moving.”

The groups said today moving forward with tighter standards is especially important because the EPA assumed them as a way for jurisdictions to meet ozone standards issued in 2008 under the George W. Bush administration. The Obama administration is implementing those standards, setting an eight-hour ground-ozone level of 75 parts per billion.

The National Association of Clean Air Agencies, whose members include agencies in 51 states and territories and over 165 metropolitan areas, raised that point in a letter to the EPA in June 2011.

The environmental and health groups said today they were concerned that more than 125 million Americans live in areas that continue to struggle to comply with EPA’s air-quality standards for pollutants such as ozone. Houston and Dallas are among the nation’s 25 top ozone-polluted cities, according to the lung group’s 2011 State of the Air report.

But the Obama administration has come under attack from Republicans for regulations that they contend cost jobs and raise energy prices.

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Obama said in early September he would shelve even tighter ozone standards following criticisms from Republicans and industry groups, such as the Chamber of Commerce. Environmental groups have since sued the administrationover that decision.

The American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas trade group in Washington, said in August the tighter vehicle standards would cost $5 billion to $13 billion a year to comply with, force some refineries to shut down, reduce gasoline output and add 12 to 25 cents in per-gallon production costs.

“The administration needs to put its money where its mouth is and stop these out of control regulations,” Howard Feldman, API’s director of regulatory and scientific affairs, said in calling on the White House to reject tighter standards.

Sulfur in fuel is known to interfere with catalytic converters, which reduce tailpipe emissions of the smog-forming pollutants. Lowering the sulfur content of fuel from 30 parts per million right now to 10 parts would yield emission reductions “equivalent to eliminating over 33 million cars from the nation’s highways,” the groups’ report said.

The groups expect EPA’s rule to mirror updated standards that California is pursuing for tailpipe emissions. The state already achieves 10 parts per million for sulfur, the group says.

Existing vehicle technologies have been used to manufacture 2 millions of cars in California that are certified to meet the state’s current tailpipe emissions requirements, said Joseph Kubsh, executive director of Manufacturers of Emission Controls Association.

“That provides a solid base for expanding these technologies to all vehicles,” said Kubsh, whose Arlington, Va., group represents more than 40 companies that make technologies for reducing emissions.

Nano Technology: Emulating, and surpassing, nature 17 October 2011 Design rules will enable scientists to use DNA to build nanomaterials with desired properties Nature is a master builder. Using a bottom-up approach, nature takes tiny atoms and, through chemical bonding, makes crystalline materials, like diamonds, silicon and even table salt. In all of them, the properties of the crystals depend upon the type and arrangement of atoms within the crystalline lattice.

Now, a team of Northwestern University scientists has learned how to top nature by building crystalline materials from nanoparticles and DNA, the same material that defines the genetic code for all living organisms.

Using nanoparticles as “atoms” and DNA as “bonds,” the scientists have learned how to create crystals with the particles arranged in the same types of atomic lattice configurations as some found in nature, but they also have built completely new structures that have no naturally occurring mineral counterpart.

The basic design rules the Northwestern scientists have established for this approach to nanoparticle assembly promise the possibility of creating a variety of new materials that could be useful in catalysis, electronics, optics, biomedicine and energy generation, storage and conversion technologies.

The new method and design rules for making crystalline materials from nanostructures and DNA will be published Oct. 14 by the journal Science.

“We are building a new periodic table of sorts,” said Professor Chad A. Mirkin, who led the research. “Using these new design rules and nanoparticles as ‘artificial atoms,’ we have developed modes of controlled crystallization that are, in many respects, more powerful than the way nature and chemists make crystalline materials from atoms. By controlling the size, shape, type and location of nanoparticles within a given lattice, we can make completely new materials and arrangements of particles, not just what nature dictates.”

“Once we have a certain type of lattice,” Mirkin said, “the particles can be moved closer together or farther apart by changing the length of the interconnecting DNA, thereby providing near-infinite tunability.”

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“This work resulted from an interdisciplinary collaboration that coupled synthetic chemistry with theoretical model building,” said coauthor George C. Schatz, a world-renowned theoretician and the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern. “It was the back and forth between synthesis and theory that was crucial to the development of the design rules. Collaboration is a special aspect of research at Northwestern, and it worked very effectively for this project.”

In the study, the researchers start with two solutions of nanoparticles coated with single-stranded DNA. They then add DNA strands that bind to these DNA-functionalized particles, which then present a large number of DNA “sticky ends” at a controlled distance from the particle surface; these sticky ends then bind to the sticky ends of adjacent particles, forming a macroscopic arrangement of nanoparticles.

Different crystal structures are achieved by using different combinations of nanoparticles (with varying sizes) and DNA linker strands (with controllable lengths). After a process of mixing and heating, the assembled particles transition from an initially disordered state to one where every particle is precisely located according to a crystal lattice structure. The process is analogous to how ordered atomic crystals are formed.

The researchers report six design rules that can be used to predict the relative stability of different structures for a given set of nanoparticle sizes and DNA lengths. In the paper, they use these rules to prepare 41 different crystal structures with nine distinct crystal symmetries. However, the design rules outline a strategy to independently adjust each of the relevant crystallographic parameters, including particle size (varied from 5 to 60 nanometers), crystal symmetry and lattice parameters (which can range from 20 to 150 nanometers). This means that these 41 crystals are just a small example of the near infinite number of lattices that could be created using different nanoparticles and DNA strands.

Mirkin and his team used gold nanoparticles in their work but note that their method also can be applied to nanoparticles of other chemical compositions. Both the type of nanoparticle assembled and the symmetry of the assembled structure contribute to the properties of a lattice, making this method an ideal means to create materials with predictable and controllable physical properties.

Mirkin believes that, one day soon, software will be created that allows scientists to pick the particle and DNA pairs required to make almost any structure on demand.

This story is reprinted from material from Northwestern University, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.

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Biomaterials • Nanotechnology Graphene grows better on certain copper crystals 31 October 2011 New observations could improve industrial production of high-quality graphene By combining data from several imaging techniques, the team found that the quality of graphene depends on the crystal structure of the copper substrate it grows on. Led by electrical and computer engineering professors Joseph Lyding and Eric Pop, the researchers published their findings in the journal Nano Letters.

To produce large sheets of graphene, methane gas is piped into a furnace containing a sheet of copper foil. When the methane strikes the copper, the carbon-hydrogen bonds crack. Hydrogen escapes as gas, while the carbon sticks to the copper surface. The carbon atoms move around until they find each other and bond to make graphene. Copper is an appealing substrate because it is relatively cheap and promotes single-layer graphene growth, which is important for electronics applications.

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“It’s a very cost-effective, straightforward way to make graphene on a large scale,” said Joshua Wood, a graduate student and the lead author of the paper.

“However, this does not take into consideration the subtleties of growing graphene,” he said. “Understanding these subtleties is important for making high-quality, high-performance electronics.”

While graphene grown on copper tends to be better than graphene grown on other substrates, it remains riddled with defects and multi-layer sections, precluding high-performance applications. Researchers have speculated that the roughness of the copper surface may affect graphene growth, but the Illinois group found that the copper’s crystal structure is more important.

Copper foils are a patchwork of different crystal structures. As the methane falls onto the foil surface, the shapes of the copper crystals it encounters affect how well the carbon atoms form graphene.

Different crystal shapes are assigned index numbers. Using several advanced imaging techniques, the Illinois team found that patches of copper with higher index numbers tend to have lower-quality graphene growth. They also found that two common crystal structures, numbered (100) and (111), have the worst and the best growth, respectively. The (100) crystals have a cubic shape, with wide gaps between atoms. Meanwhile, (111) has a densely packed hexagonal structure.

“In the (100) configuration the carbon atoms are more likely to stick in the holes in the copper on the atomic level, and then they stack vertically rather than diffusing out and growing laterally,” Wood said. “The (111) surface is hexagonal, and graphene is also hexagonal. It’s not to say there’s a perfect match, but that there’s a preferred match between the surfaces.”

Researchers now are faced with balancing the cost of all (111) copper and the value of high-quality, defect-free graphene. It is possible to produce single-crystal copper, but it is difficult and prohibitively expensive.

Next, the researchers hope to use their methodology to study the growth of other two-dimensional materials, including insulators to improve graphene device performance. They also plan to follow up on their observations by growing graphene on single-crystal copper.

This story is reprinted from material from the University of Illinois, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.

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Graphene speeds up computers 13 January 2010 New research has shown how graphene-like structures designed on the nanoscale level – geodesic systems shaped like the Eden Project building in Cornwall, UK – could be used as building blocks for a new generation of electronic circuits, giving rise to faster computers, or mobile phones that send data at much higher rates.

Although graphene sheets are difficult and expensive to produce, their use is on the increase, especially in nanoelectronics, electrochemistry and gas sensing. Graphene, a sheet of carbon that is only one atom thick, is the thinnest known and strongest material ever measured, is thought to be about 200 times stronger than steel, and has the ability to carry one million times more electricity than copper.

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While there are various methods for fabricating graphene films, such as through epitaxial growth or self-assembly procedures where graphene oxide films are transferred to a substrate and reduced to graphene by chemical reaction or heating, the approach that was taken by the research team was that of chemical vapor decomposition. This involves the deposition of hydrocarbon molecules onto an iridium surface that is heated between room temperature and 1,000 degrees.

The scientists, from the University of Trieste, the Synchrotron light laboratory in Trieste and the University College London, whose study has been published in [Lacovig et al., Physical Review Letters, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.166101], have shown how mechanisms of graphene growth have been found depending on the metal substrate, very different from those observed for two-dimensional metal islands on metals.

When these molecules hit the surface they lose their hydrogen atoms, leaving the remaining carbon atoms sticking to the iridium, where they start to self-assemble in small “nano-structures”. The nano-structures eventually develop into fully formed graphene sheets; the researchers are now starting to understand how the process takes place, and therefore how it might be controlled.

The study is concentrating on how the mechanism moves from a carbon-covered surface to the formation of a fully formed high-quality graphene sheet. As Alessandro Baraldi points out, “The growth of graphene starts with the formation of small islands of carbon with an unusual dome structure, in which only the atoms at the perimeter are bound to the iridium substrate while the central atoms detach from it, making the island bulge upwards at the centre.”

The team also found that the size of these geodesic carbon nanodomes depended on the temperature of the metallic substrate, and the manipulation procedure, suggesting a number of possible ways of controlling the size of graphene sheets at the nanoscale.

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Graphene discovery boosts oil exploration efforts 22 July 2011 Nanoengineered graphene coating harvests energy from flowing water Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a new method to harvest energy from flowing water.

Led by Rensselaer Professor Nikhil Koratkar, the study sought to explain how the flow of water over surfaces coated with the nanomaterial graphene could generate small amounts of electricity. Using a small sheet of the graphene coating, seen above as a dark blue patch connected to gold contacts, the research team demonstrated the creation of 85 nanowatts of power.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a new method to harvest energy from flowing water.

This discovery aims to hasten the creation of self-powered microsensors for more accurate and cost-efficient oil exploration.

Led by Rensselaer Professor Nikhil Koratkar, the researchers investigated how the flow of water over surfaces coated with the nanomaterial graphene could generate small amounts of electricity. The research team demonstrated the creation of 85 nanowatts of power from a sheet of graphene measuring .03 millimeters by .015 millimeters.

This amount of energy should be sufficient to power tiny sensors that are introduced into water or other fluids and pumped down into a potential oil well, Koratkar said. As the injected water moves through naturally occurring cracks and crevices deep in the earth, the devices detect the presence of hydrocarbons and can help uncover hidden pockets of oil and natural gas. As long as water is flowing over the graphene-coated devices, they should be able to provide a reliable source of power. This power is necessary for the sensors to relay collected data and information back to the surface.

“It’s impossible to power these microsensors with conventional batteries, as the sensors are just too small. So we created a graphene coating that allows us to capture energy from the movement of water over the sensors,” said Koratkar, professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the Rensselaer School of Engineering. “While a similar effect has been observed for carbon PetroScan-November 2011

nanotubes, this is the first such study with graphene. The energy-harvesting capability of graphene was at least an order of magnitude superior to nanotubes. Moreover, the advantage of the flexible graphene sheets is that they can be wrapped around almost any geometry or shape.”

Details of the study, titled “Harvesting Energy from Water Flow over Graphene,” were published online today by the journal Nano Letters. The study also will appear in a future print edition of the journal.

It is the first research paper to result from the $1 million grant awarded to Koratkar’s group in March 2010 by the Advanced Energy Consortium.

Hydrocarbon exploration is an expensive process that involves drilling deep down in the earth to detect the presence of oil or natural gas. Koratkar said oil and gas companies would like to augment this process by sending out large numbers of microscale or nanoscale sensors into new and existing drill wells. These sensors would travel laterally through the earth, carried by pressurized water pumped into these wells, and into the network of cracks that exist underneath the earth’s surface. Oil companies would no longer be limited to vertical exploration, and the data collected from the sensors would arm these firms with more information for deciding the best locations to drill.

The team’s discovery is a potential solution for a key challenge to realizing these autonomous microsensors, which will need to be self-powered. By covering the microsensors with a graphene coating, the sensors can harvest energy as water flows over the coating.

“We’ll wrap the graphene coating around the sensor, and it will act as a ‘smart skin’ that serves as a nanofluidic power generator,” Koratkar said.

Graphene is a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms, which are arranged like a chain-link fence. For this study, Koratkar’s team used graphene that was grown by chemical vapor deposition on a copper substrate and transferred onto silicon dioxide. The researchers created an experimental water tunnel apparatus to test the generation of power as water flows over the graphene at different velocities.

Along with physically demonstrating the ability to generate 85 nanowatts of power from a small fragment of graphene, the researchers used molecular dynamics simulations to better understand the physics of this phenomenon.

They discovered that chloride ions present in the water stick to the surface of graphene. As water flows over the graphene, the friction force between the water flow and the layer of adsorbed chloride ions causes the ions to drift along the flow direction. The motion of these ions drags the free charges present in graphene along the flow direction — creating an internal current.

This means the graphene coating requires ions to be present in water to function properly. Therefore, oil exploration companies would need to add chemicals to the water that is injected into the well. Koratkar said this is an easy, inexpensive solution.

For the study, Koratkar’s team also tested the energy harvested from water flowing over a film of carbon nanotubes.

However, the energy generation and performance was far inferior to those attained using graphene, he said.

Looking at potential future applications of this new technology, Koratkar said he could envision self-powered microrobots or microsubmarines. Another possibility is harvesting power from a graphene coating on the underside of a boat.

This story is reprinted from material from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier.

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Nano gold rush For Solar 19 August 2011 Researchers use tiny gold particles to boost organic solar cell efficiency In the world of solar energy, organic photovoltaic solar cells have a wide range of potential applications, but they are still considered an upstart. While these carbon-based cells, which use organic polymers or small molecules as semiconductors, are much thinner and less expensive to produce than conventional solar cells made with inorganic silicon wafers, they still lag behind in their ability to efficiently convert sunlight into electricity.

Now, UCLA researchers and their colleagues from China and Japan have shown that by incorporating gold nanoparticles into these organic photovoltaics — taking advantage of the plasmonic effect, by which metal helps to enhance the absorption of sunlight — they can significantly improve the cells' power conversion.

In a paper recently published in ACS Nano, the team of researchers, led by Yang Yang, a professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and director of the Nano Renewable Energy Center at UCLA's California NanoSystems Institute, demonstrate how they sandwiched a layer of gold nanoparticles between two light-absorbing subcells in a tandem polymer solar cell in order to harvest a greater fraction of the solar spectrum.

They found that by employing the interconnecting gold-nanoparticle layer, they were able to enhance power conversion by as much as 20 percent. The gold nanoparticles create a strong electromagnetic field inside the thin organic photovoltaic layers by a plasmonic effect, which concentrates light so that much more of it can be absorbed by the subcells.

The team is the first to report a plasmonic-enhanced polymer tandem solar cell, having overcome the difficulties involved in incorporating metal nanostructures into the overall device structure.

"We have successfully demonstrated a highly efficient plasmonic polymer tandem solar cell by simply incorporating gold nanoparticles layer between two subcells," Yang said. "The plasmonic effect happening in the middle of the interconnecting layer can enhance both the top and bottom subcells simultaneously — a 'sweet spot' — leading to an improvement in the power conversion efficiency of the tandem solar cell from 5.22 percent to 6.24 percent. The enhancement ratio is as high as 20 percent."

The research team included Xing Wang Zhang from the Key Lab of Semiconductor Materials Science at the Institute of Semiconductors at Beijing's Chinese Academy of Science and Ziruo Hong from the Graduate School of Science and Engineering at Japan's Yamagata University.

Experimental and theoretical results demonstrate that the enhancement effect was attained from local near-field enhancement of the gold nanoparticles. The results show that the plasmonic effect has great potential for the future development of polymer solar cells. The team's proposed interlayer structures as an open platform can be applied to various polymer materials, opening up opportunities for highly efficient, multi-stacked tandem solar cells.

This story is reprinted from material from UCLA, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier.

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Quantum Gas Microscope 18 December 2009 PetroScan-November 2011

Physicists at Harvard University [Bakr et al., Nature 462, (2009) 74 ] have created a quantum gas microscope that can be used to observe single atoms at temperatures so low the particles follow the rules of quantum mechanics, behaving in bizarre ways.

This is the first time scientists have detected single atoms in a crystalline structure made solely of light, called a Bose Hubbard optical lattice. It's part of scientists' efforts to use ultracold quantum gases to understand and develop novel quantum materials.

"Ultracold atoms in optical lattices can be used as a model to help understand the physics behind superconductivity or quantum magnetism, for example," says senior author Markus Greiner, an assistant professor of physics at Harvard and an affiliate of the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms. "We expect that our technique, which bridges the gap between earlier microscopic and macroscopic approaches to the study of quantum systems, will help in quantum simulations of condensed matter systems, and also find applications in quantum information processing."

The quantum gas microscope developed by Greiner and his colleagues is a high-resolution device capable of viewing single atoms -- in this case, atoms of rubidium -- occupying individual, closely spaced lattice sites. The rubidium atoms are cooled to just 5 billionths of a degree above absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius).

"At such low temperatures, atoms follow the rules of quantum mechanics, causing them to behave in very unexpected ways," explains first author Waseem S. Bakr, a graduate student in Harvard's Department of Physics. "Quantum mechanics allows atoms to quickly tunnel around within the lattice, move around with no resistance, and even be 'delocalized' over the entire lattice. With our microscope we can individually observe tens of thousands of atoms working together to perform these amazing feats."

In their paper, Bakr et al., and present images of single rubidium atoms confined to an optical lattice created through projections of a laser-generated holographic pattern. The neighboring rubidium atoms are just 640 nanometers apart, allowing them to quickly tunnel their way through the lattice.

Confining a quantum gas such as a Bose-Einstein condensate in such an optically generated lattice creates a system that can be used to model complex phenomena in condensed-matter physics, such as superfluidity. Until now, only the bulk properties of such systems could be studied, but the new microscope's ability to detect arrays of thousands of single atoms gives scientists what amounts to a new workshop for tinkering with the fundamental properties of matter, making it possible to study these simulated systems in much more detail, and possibly also forming the basis of a single-site readout system for quantum computation.

"There are many unsolved questions regarding quantum materials, such as high-temperature superconductors that lose all electrical resistance if they are cooled to moderate temperatures," Greiner says. "We hope this ultracold atom model system can provide answers to some of these important questions, paving the way for creating novel quantum materials with as-yet unknown properties."

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Management Notepad The Key to Success? Your Corporate Mission Great new products often fail because they're launched by the wrong company. Case in point: the Chevy Volt

By Larry Popelka I’m one of the few owners of a Chevy Volt. I bought mine in December 2010, when the vehicle was first released. It’s an amazing car. I’m averaging 112 miles per gallon of gas. Yet most of my "Green" friends are uninterested. They’d rather own a Toyota Prius—or await for a plug-in from some other company. Why? Because the Volt is made by General Motors (GM) and they just can’t believe GM’s heart is in it.

In fact, a recent survey from online market researcher Compete.com shows that only 9 percent of Toyota Prius shoppers even look at the Volt as an option. Yet the Volt won Motor Trend’s prestigious "Car of the Year" award. What’s the problem?

Most consumers no longer shop for products. They shop for a company. With a plethora of product choices, it has become far too difficult and time-consuming to attempt to evaluate each offering. It is much easier to determine if the company you’re buying from shares your values and is likely to provide a good experience. Toyota (TM) has long supported fuel-efficient vehicles. If Toyota had launched the Volt, chances are it would already be a runaway success.

But GM? It’s hard to associate the company that brought us the Hummer with a green image. How could GM executives possibly care about fuel efficiency? Or even get it right? Are they doing this only to look like good corporate citizens?

GM could fix its public relations problem, but it would take some bold moves, such as making Al Gore chairman. Rather than just saying that GM supports the Green movement, its executives would need to demonstrably lead the charge by actively working to make all its operations more environmentally responsible. Actions of this magnitude are necessary if GM is to change the view of the buying public. Otherwise it’s simply making gestures that are too easy to ignore.

The world has wised up. No one is going to be tricked into buying something by cute TV commercials. In the Internet Age, everyone has the ability to find out everything about your company, market, and products. If you want to sell, you’d better show customers that you care intensely about your product and what it stands for. You need to demonstrate that your motivation is not mere greed but a desire to help improve your customers’ lives—because in so doing, the world will become a better place.

"COOL" APPLE, "INDIFFERENT" MICROSOFT Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple (AAPL) both make great products. Over the past several years, Microsoft gained a reputation of being indifferent about improving its products. By contrast, Apple is the "cool technology" company led by rock star Steve Jobs, whose mission in life is to bring ever-improving technology to us all.

Microsoft has put forth solid new products such as XBox 360 and Kinect. Had either been launched by Apple, they probably would have been blockbusters. In 2002, Microsoft launched the Windows XP Tablet eight years before Apple’s iPad. The tablet got good reviews but never caught on. When Jobs announced Apple’s iPad, it became an overnight hit, even though many of its two million purchasers weren’t entirely sure how they were going to use it.

Many Apple consumers feel a personal connection to Jobs and trust that he will not let them down. Increasingly, consumers are asking: "Who makes this product and what is their story?"

Many corporate executives mistakenly believe that consumers are anti-big company. In fact, most consumers have greater confidence in buying products from big companies—if its values and mission are aligned with theirs.

DISNEY OWNS PARENTAL TRUST Walt Disney (DIS)‘s mission is to provide families with great entertainment in a wholesome environment. Even the street sweepers are kid-friendly and fun at a Disney theme park. Other companies have tried to crack Disney’s market. As a parent, what company would you trust most to entertain your kids?

Big companies that span categories, however, often operate at a disadvantage because it is harder to have a singleminded mission for everything. Some have tried corporate advertising or PR across general "we’re good people" themes.

This just turns them into corporate drones.

A better solution is to create business units or divisions that are run independently. Unilever (UN) has done this effectively with Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, maintaining the company’s mission, values, activism, and Vermont operations. Ditto with Coca-Cola (KO)‘s Odwalla and Kellogg (K)‘s Kashi.

Each of these businesses has a high degree of independence and is often empowered to pursue social goals, product strategies, and communications that are at odds with their parent company. For example, Kashi and its employees PetroScan-November 2011

actively promote healthy lifestyles and education about food nutrition—to the detriment of such stalwart Kellogg products as Sugar Frosted Flakes and Pop Tarts.

MCDONALD’S BLUNDERED WITH CHIPOTLE Like Kellogg, many companies are locked into undesirable missions by legacy products that contribute huge profits but are out of step with societal trends. In these cases, innovation projects that establish new missions are critical. Kashi generated over $500 million in growth for Kellogg over the past decade, offsetting declines in many of its sugar-coated products and helping to position the company for better long-term growth via a more productive mission.

Ten years ago, McDonald’s (MCD) was in a similar position when it invested in Chipotle restaurants, a concept based on using sustainably raised, hormone-free beef. In 2006, McDonald’s sold off its Chipotle stake to refocus on its core. Big mistake. Today Chipotle (CMG) has a market cap of $9 billion (10 percent that of McDonald’s). The revenue growth it generated during those five years would have more than doubled McDonald’s total U.S. topline growth.

The real pain for McDonald’s is still to come. Unlike Kellogg and Kashi, McDonald’s has no on-ramp to a future mission that’s more in tune with emerging consumer values. Every time McDonald’s launches something that really is healthy— such as apple slices in its Happy Meals—the offering is viewed with skepticism by critics who perceive it a PR ploy or an attempt to placate them.

If the Volt were manufactured by a company that really cared about saving world resources, the automaker’s entire team would care about my energy savings, both before and after I bought my vehicle. Instead, I suffered through a lot of red tape to get a charging unit economically installed in my garage. While the GM service team was pleasant enough, it didn’t much care about my charger because the company doesn’t make one and saving energy is not part of its mission. I ended up wasting a lot of time and money solving this problem on my own.

I guess I should have bought from the guys with the right mission.

Larry Popelka is chief executive officer and co-founder of GameChanger, an Alameda, Calif., consultancy that focuses on brand growth and innovation. He can be reached at larry@gamechanger.net.

Low-carbon Innovation A Uniquely American Strategy for Industrial Renewal

SOURCE: AP/Jack Dempsey A wind turbine blade is unveiled during the opening of the Vestas blade factory in Windsor, Colorado.

By Bracken Hendricks, Sean Pool, Lisbeth Kaufman | May 31, 2011 Our nation’s innovation and competitive drive in the 20th century powered the U.S. economy to global leadership, helped win two World Wars and one Cold War, created unprecedented and broad-based economic prosperity, and established PetroScan-November 2011

the technology that enabled the conquest of the moon and today’s Information Age. Today, this same engine of innovation is in serious jeopardy as we look across the competitive landscape of the 21st century.

Though the U.S. economy is slowly recovering from the Great Recession of 2007-2009, more than 23 million Americans remain unemployed or underemployed. Creating new job opportunities remains a top-tier economic challenge, particularly in manufacturing, where job skills are higher, the pay is better, and export opportunities are the greatest. The United States remains the world’s largest manufacturing nation, a position it has held for more than a century, but China is poised to claim this global leadership by 2016, and by some estimates, China has already surpassed the United States.

For decades, the manufacturing sector supplied millions of Americans with stable, well-paying jobs and sustained our country’s ability to innovate and stay ahead of the curve in advanced technology. Yet in recent years, U.S. companies found many reasons to shift manufacturing overseas, among them lower labor costs and environmental standards. But increasingly they are also drawn to foreign government subsidies to attract investment, and the need to be closer to rapidly growing foreign markets. This not only costs jobs but also, as the Harvard Business Review points out, it costs our economy’s ability to make high-tech products and invent new ones. Offshoring manufacturing is undermining America’s global economic position and competitive edge.

Compounding this threat to American competitiveness in coming years are the increasing risks that U.S. businesses will face from global warming. The consequences of global climate change will deliver real, and potentially very large, economic costs. For instance, the uncertainty around how climate change will affect precipitation patterns, which is just one piece of the overall climate puzzle, could cost the U.S. economy as much as $2 trillion and up to 13 million jobs over the next 40 years, according to a recent study conducted by Sandia National Laboratories.

America also suffers from a confused planning environment for infrastructure and economic decision making, which makes it difficult to move forward on any comprehensive plan to bolster sustainable economic growth. Congressional inaction on climate legislation and policies to deploy clean and efficient energy technologies here at home are creating deep uncertainties for business planning.

This partisan standoff inhibits investment in U.S. jobs and industries in the clean-technology arena and across our industrial landscape as companies wait to discover whether the federal government will get serious about clean energy policy. Our competitors in other nations, already retooling their industries and infrastructure for a clean energy future, do not face such uncertainty. Without clear long-term climate and clean energy policies, and a supporting low-carbon economic growth strategy, capital investment in the United States will continue to lag, new hiring and business expansion will remain stalled, and U.S. global market share will erode.

Setting priorities for a uniquely American low-carbon economic growth strategy Jobs, innovation, and economic security As President Barack Obama put it in his 2011 State of the Union address, “this is our generation’s Sputnik moment.”

Faced with high unemployment, increasing global competition, and mounting climate-related risks, the United States has an immediate opportunity to forge progressive economic growth strategies that turn the threats posed by climate change and our rivals’ increased manufacturing and innovation prowess into opportunities.

Decades ago the challenge of the space race launched an earlier generation of public-private partnerships, advanced research and development, and increased domestic manufacturing. Likewise, today, well-crafted policies that reinvest in American jobs in response to the rising threat of climate change can help restore our industrial leadership. These policies should take shape through a cohesive set of federal, state, and local low-carbon economic growth strategies. A strong low-carbon economic growth strategy should focus on developing, producing, and commercializing low-carbon technologies in order to: · Accelerate near-term job creation and economic growth · Promote innovation-led economic competitiveness and export expansion · Increase energy and economic security while reducing climate vulnerability Success at delivering on these three clear national priorities depends on developing domestic markets for low-carbon products and services, with domestic demand strong enough to keep U.S. clean energy manufacturers at home. It is clear that industries and innovation develop in countries and regions with the strongest markets and demand. General Electric Company Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt summed it up best when he observed that countries with policies to create strong demand for renewable energy products will pull companies into their borders because “innovation and supply chain strength develop where the demand is the greatest.”

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Indeed, U.S. company First Solar Inc., a pioneer of building solar power plants in the States, recently signed a deal to build the world’s largest solar plant in China. As First Solar CEO Mike Ahearn said, “this major commitment to solar power is a direct result of the progressive energy policies being adopted in China to create a sustainable, long-term market for solar and a low carbon future for China.” The project will be financed by CLEAN contracts, or feed-in tariffs, that will guarantee pricing and long-term demand for electricity produced. Such long-term and high-volume demand for solar does not yet exist in the United States. Beyond solar, the U.S. clean-technologies market is similarly not yet robust enough to keep many of the most innovative clean-technology companies at home.

In the face of confused policy and unclear signals on sustained domestic market demand for clean energy technology, America is beginning to fall behind our competitors. As a result, we are now importing key technologies and products from other countries—even some that were invented here. The Economic Policy Institute finds that our trade deficit in clean energy products with China alone now totals more than $1 billion a year. We import 10 clean energy technology products from China for every one product we export to China, a deficit that cost at least 8,000 jobs in the United States in 2010 alone.

Low-carbon economic growth strategies that focus on building domestic markets by encouraging American consumer demand could reverse this trend, bringing clean-technology manufacturing back to our nation to balance the sectoral trade deficit with China, bring back jobs, and create new ones as well—in the end bolstering our national economic competitiveness.

Given the broadly shared concern over economic recovery in the United States, this is an ideal moment to implement policies and programs that match the uniquely American economic and innovative strengths of our nation. Strategies that clearly identify opportunities for low-carbon economic expansion nationally, regionally, and locally will build domestic markets, reduce risk for investors, and increase competitive positioning through innovation.

What’s more, the economic fundamentals supporting the expansion of low-carbon industries in our country are sufficiently strong to motivate significant actions within the current American political context. Supporting these industries will improve the efficiency, resilience, and diversity of the U.S. economy, even as climate policy debates proceed at their own pace.

Embracing a uniquely American economic growth strategy for clean energy-driven industrial renewal America is unique among industrialized nations for our disdain for the term “industrial policy.” For many Americans, the very term conjures up an image of managed and centrally planned economies that cuts against the grain of our political and economic culture. In fact, the term is mostly used in other countries as shorthand for a comprehensive competitiveness and jobs strategy rather than as an indication of central planning or a desire to “pick winners and losers.”

Whatever the case, American political traditions generally focus on a more bottom-up economic development, which emphasizes entrepreneurship, individual enterprise, and the role of markets in shaping economic growth. Each of these factors is in fact critical in America’s economic success story. But so is the role of government in fostering our culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. The fact is that past waves of American innovation did not emerge full-blown, independent of public-sector leadership.

Indeed, many of this country’s greatest economic achievements have rested on significant public leadership in investment, strategic planning, and infrastructure capable of supporting rapid growth. Take, for example, technologies as diverse as solar panels, fuel cells, memory foam, microwave ovens, and the crucial imaging equipment used today in digital cameras and cell phones. Each of these technologies was developed for the space program before being commercialized by the private sector to create new industries and jobs.

Modern medicine, too, would not exist as the world knows it without government support. Whether it was mastering the particle physics of magnetic resonance imaging techniques, funding the first steps that led to the creation of the cardiac pacemaker, or discovering the biological basis of diabetes, these life-saving technologies were built on the foundation of our public-private innovation infrastructure. The same story holds true for the physical infrastructure of our ports and railroads, rural electrification, communications, and highways, as well as to the growth of intellectual capital and human capital through workforce training, intellectual property laws, and the world-class research institutions that drive corporate research.

These public investments, and the policies and programs supporting them, have helped create and strengthen the “building blocks of innovation,” from education and workforce training to research and development to manufacturing to infrastructure, that are the foundations of our world-class economy. In this report we argue that these kinds of strategic PetroScan-November 2011

planning and investment tools can be highly effective if they are applied with vigor toward the goal of creating an innovative clean energy economy. Our proposals are designed to build up these uniquely American attributes of economic growth to help our economy become more competitive within a global marketplace that includes countries that have already adopted comprehensive, far-reaching low-carbon growth strategies.

In proposing a low-carbon economic growth strategy, we are fully aware that clean energy deployment in the United States faces numerous market barriers that may not be an issue in other countries. In particular, electricity in this country is regulated within a patchwork of balkanized regional markets, which block the development of coherent national energy plans and slow deployment of new technology, placing even greater hurdles for clean energy than conventional infrastructure.

Energy policy and the mechanisms for project approval and financing in the United States are extremely fragmented across federal agencies such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Authority, state entities including public utility commissions, multistate regional planning agencies, and local jurisdictions. This creates significant barriers to the growth of U.S. clean energy markets and hurts new industries as they try to scale production.

Indeed, the presence of policies that stimulate predictable market demand is one of the greatest drivers of clean energy investments globally. Yet as the United States seeks to establish market share in emerging clean-tech industries, the absence of a coherent national plan has in itself become a barrier to growth. For our domestic clean energy sector to grow, the United States must embrace national policies and programs that account for the quirks and intricacies of our particular structure of state and regional utility regulation. Without such strategies, renewed investment in manufacturing through a focus on clean technology faces major hurdles while our existing carbon-intensive economy becomes less and less competitive.

Even in a policy environment shaped by differentiated state policies and diverging political interests, it should nonetheless be possible to develop a common framework for clean-tech expansion, grounded within deep federalist traditions of economic development, to help speed the growth of a truly national market for advanced low-carbon energy technologies.

This paper explores how to develop just such distinctly American economic growth strategies to drive new investment in domestic low-carbon industries and improve our global competitiveness from the bottom up. We delve into the details in the main part of our report, but here we summarize where we are, where we need to go, and how to get there.

Building on our strengths in innovation and entrepreneurship The U.S. economy is an “innovation-driven” economy, according to the World Economic Forum. We have moved beyond an economy where growth and opportunity are driven by basic factor inputs such as land, labor, and natural resources.

Instead, since the industrial revolution, the American economy has run on the continual advancement of ever more sophisticated technologies, business practices, and institutional structures. As President Obama explains it, “in America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It is how we make our living.” He’s right, of course. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow estimates that technological innovation could have been responsible for as much as 80 percent or more of economic growth during the 20th century.

With this firmly in mind, any American strategies for competitiveness and growth must be innovation-driven. With our high standards of living and laws that enforce fair wages, the United States cannot compete on low wages alone—nor should we want to. Instead, we should focus on America’s strengths as an innovative high-tech leader. The United States became a global economic leader by building a diverse economy driven by a continuous innovation business model—one that values inventing, manufacturing, and continually reengineering value-added products and sophisticated technologies.

Innovation is our area of expertise and it should be at the center of our low-carbon industrial strategy.

With increasing climate pressures, clean technology today is at the leading edge of innovation. Massive waves of new global investment have begun to flow toward remaking the world’s energy systems and increasing the efficiency of energy use across the real economy by engaging advanced technology and skilled labor to reduce demand for material inputs. Even in 2009, deep within the global recession, world investment in clean technology totaled $162 billion, according to the Pew Charitable Trust.

Most of these investments went toward wind and solar technologies that American companies have developed and perfected. This is exactly the context where U.S. companies are best poised to compete with global industries. For the United States to remain competitive in this rapidly changing economic climate, however, policies that foster domestic innovation in low-carbon industries will be essential. Clean technologies offer an ideal business challenge for U.S. PetroScan-November 2011

industry to excel—one that requires creativity, experience, and innovative entrepreneurship—qualities that the United States has demonstrated for centuries.

Key to taking the lead in clean technology will be advancing a uniquely American economic growth strategy that builds on our existing regional ecosystem of economic development policies. Such a strategy should align policies that exist across different branches of government and utilize smart incentives to engage private capital markets in deploying essential low-carbon technologies and reinvigorating investment in cutting-edge infrastructure.

Building innovation networks that are greater than the sum of their parts Organizing and aligning the many elements of low-carbon industrial strategies—innovation policy, economic and workforce development policy, environmental goals, and a range of other policies at multiple levels of governance and affecting many if not all economic sectors—into a coherent national framework is indeed challenging. There are many possible ways to tackle this effort. Our approach in this paper seeks to simplify the problem by answering two basic questions: · What types of participants are needed for low-carbon industrial growth and transformation? · How can policy engage these market participants to incentivize better outcomes in achieving our national goals of creating jobs, promoting long-term economic competitiveness, and reducing our economic vulnerability to climate change and foreign energy dependence?

In offering our answers to these questions, we’ve identified five types of market actors whose participation is essential for low-carbon industrial renewal: · Policymakers and regulators · Researchers · Manufacturers · Investors · Consumers All five of these must work together for innovation to succeed because they are all interdependent. No one of these players can innovate without the rest. The popular conception of clean energy is that we simply need more researchers studying it. But without manufacturers competing to find, market, and produce the best technologies at scale, that research will remain purely academic. Without investors and functioning capital markets to finance those manufacturers’ factories, economies of scale cannot be reached and technologies cannot make it to market. And perhaps more importantly, without consumers of clean energy goods such as homeowners, commercial building owners, construction companies, and utility companies, there is no incentive for the manufacturers or the investors to produce, market, and sell new technology.

As President Obama recently said: When you get a group of people together, and industries together, and institutions like universities together around particular industries, then the synergies that develop from all those different facets coming together can make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

The bottom line is that when these five groups work together by exchanging information, money, and risk, the network they form is more innovative than the sum of its parts. Together they can accomplish what none of them can do alone. As policymakers look for ways to catalyze clean energy innovation and industrial transformation, they should continue to consider how their policies will affect each type of player and choose policies that encourage the interaction—through business deals, contracts, memoranda of understanding, research agreements, and even through the simple relationship between buyer and seller of a piece of sophisticated equipment, with all the feedback, warranties, interaction, and learning that involves.

With this understanding, we’ve organized our discussion of specific policies through the lens of how to engage each of these constituencies and encourage the formation of an informal national clean energy innovation network. We lay out here principles for how policy can align the interests of each of these industrial and economic actors around shared efforts to drive low-carbon innovation in America’s economy.

Coordinating policymakers and regulators Policymakers, regulators, and program officers in federal and state agencies play an important role in every stage of innovation and industrial development, whether by siting new transmission infrastructure, permitting a new wind farm, providing programmatic support to help finance an advanced manufacturing facility, or coordinating public R&D research PetroScan-November 2011

funds. Policymakers, regulators, and government agencies can directly facilitate the growth of low-carbon markets and industries by aligning all efforts to build strong market demand, by influencing government procurement practices, and by offering clear frameworks for business planning within their rulemaking and legislating.

Empowering clean energy researchers From advanced electric vehicle batteries to super-cheap solar panels to the manufacturing processes that produce them, research conducted in government, university, and corporate labs is critical to advancing innovation and the growth of low-carbon industries. Public policies provide important support for scientists and engineers as they work to create lowcarbon solutions to industrial challenges, and ensure their discoveries can move quickly into the market.

Mobilizing clean energy manufacturers Manufacturers who develop the supply chains, production processes, and marketing strategies to scale up the supply of American clean energy products, equipment, and technology play an important role in innovation and form the basis of industrial growth. Public policies play a critical role in helping America’s existing industrial base navigate the transition to a clean energy economy, supporting worker training and retooling manufacturing for low-carbon technologies.

Incentivizing clean energy investors The task of innovating and scaling up a new technological foundation for U.S. industry based on clean energy requires harnessing flows of private capital. Clean energy and energy efficiency standards can send powerful signals to investors on the permanence of clean energy markets, while targeted financing assistance programs can help mitigate risks and unlock private capital for clean energy. These policies can leverage private capital more effectively within stalled capital markets and can improve incentives for private investment in clean energy research, commercialization, and deployment.

Engaging clean energy consumers The consumers of clean energy products and technology provide the critical domestic market demand that makes industrial growth and innovation possible. Without consumers to purchase and use zero-emission vehicles, building owners and construction firms to use energy-efficient building materials, or utilities to invest in and operate renewableenergy-generating technologies, there is no revenue stream for the manufacturers of those goods, no reason for investors to provide capital, and no market application for clean energy research. Consumer-driven demand—from families to businesses to utility companies—is what makes clean energy innovation and industrial transformation possible.

Public policies can increase demand for clean energy goods and services by establishing meaningful incentives for utilities, building owners, and consumers to invest in clean energy technologies instead of fossil-fuel energy generation.

Indeed, policy is essential to dramatically increase the predictability, transparency, and long-term certainty of clean energy markets to reach economies of scale and bring down cost.

Aligning the interests of policymakers, researchers, manufacturers, investors, and consumers Low-carbon industrial growth strategies in the United States must rely in equal measure on existing federal and state authorities alongside strategically supported bottom-up private-sector innovation to respond to emerging market needs.

Government support is necessary to correct current market failures and already existing incentives that discourage lowcarbon development. For instance, the market fails to account for the cost of fossil-fuel pollution and national security threats associated with reliance on high-carbon imported oil, not to mention human health problems and damage to landand water-based ecosystems. The National Resources Defense Council estimates that the externalized costs associated with fossil-fuel-induced climate change will total $271 billion annually by 2025 and $1.87 trillion annually by 2100, without even taking into account the additional environmental and human health costs.

These externalized, uncounted costs make fossil fuels seem cheap, giving them a competitive advantage over lowcarbon energy sources. On top of the externalized costs of fossil fuels, dirty energy has an additional advantage over clean energy—enormous subsidies. The Environmental Law Institute has found that in the United States from 2002 to 2008 through government spending and tax breaks alone, fossil fuels received $70.2 billion, more than twice the $29 billion dedicated to renewable sources of energy. These market failures and reversed incentives are currently preventing all components of the five market actors identified in this report from participating in low-carbon development.

The federal government is indispensable in correcting these failures and creating the incentives for collaboration between inventors, investors, manufacturers, consumers, and state and federal energy regulators. By coordinating these interests, the goal of a clean energy economy is within reach as an engine of renewed prosperity and industrial growth.

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In the pages that follow, we lay out the policies to advance the core needs of each of these key constituencies. First is a call to examine the loosely sewn patchwork of policies influencing American industry and assess American competitiveness across the board. With a strong understanding of policy strengths and weaknesses, the federal government can work to align efforts of various policymakers and programs across federal, state, and local agencies to more effectively support low-carbon innovation in all industries.

Next are policies to ensure our nation’s robust research system is amply supported with public and private money, geared toward solving our energy and climate challenges. We then present policies designed to engage with current and future manufacturers who will create jobs making, marketing, and selling the clean energy technologies that will redefine American industry. Then we discuss ways to incentivize investors to do the work of financing the commercialization and deployment of clean energy technologies.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we recognize that markets consist of both supply and demand, and thus present policies to engage with the consumers and end-users of clean energy technology. This constituency represents building owners, power producers, utility companies, automotive fleet managers, and even the car owners, homeowners, and families who must make choices about how to power their lives. Creating incentives for individual consumers and private companies large and small to buy low-carbon goods and services, and efficient, clean energy products is key to accelerating investment in these strategic industries. Public policy will play an important role at every step in this process.

We conclude with a discussion of the human, physical, and institutional infrastructure that is needed to nourish the roots of low-carbon innovation across all industries. This final section offers overarching policies to ensure our society as a whole continues to educate and support the best and brightest researchers, manufacturers, investors, consumers, and policymakers, who together will build the clean energy industries of the future. All five actors will benefit from a workforce well-educated in science, technology, math, and engineering. They will also profit from the availability of essential transportation, electrical, and other industrial infrastructure upon which business and commerce depend.

Our success as a nation and as a planet in transitioning to a prosperous low-carbon future depends on our ability to engage with all market participants through broad-based industrial strategies that maximize the use of existing building blocks in policy and institutions. Well-crafted low-carbon industrial strategies are one key to ensuring our economy is equipped with the right infrastructure and information to support innovation and sustained growth during a time of rising resource constraints and economic pressures.

Given the tremendous pressure on U.S. budgets, these low-carbon industrial strategies must be carefully structured to deliver benefits through existing institutions and market mechanisms by retooling our standing systems of economic development. This infrastructure has served previous generations effectively but is now in need of serious retooling and reinvestment. Our approach establishes the priorities we must address, the principles upon which to proceed, and outlines the unique challenges posed by the U.S. policy context to create jobs and promote a globally competitive economy in a changing environment.

Download this report (pdf) Download the introduction and summary (pdf) Read the full report in your web browser Bracken Hendricks is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Sean Pool is an Assistant Editor with the Center’s Science Progress project. Lisbeth Kaufman is a Special Assistant at the Center.

Industry says tougher vehicle-emission rules would hurt refiners The oil and natural gas industry dismissed the need for the Environmental Protection Agency's proposed rules to significantly decrease sulfur levels in gasoline, saying it would force refiners to carry out major plant modifications while limiting processing capacity. The American Petroleum Institute noted that the refining sector has spent $112 billion on environmental improvements from 1990 to 2008. "Regulations governing fuel composition, greenhouse gases, and environmental standards have an enormous financial impact on the refining industry, as do financial controls and taxation," said Bob Greco, downstream and industry operations group director at API Industry, government witnesses disagree on need for Tier 3 rules Proposed regulations to further reduce sulfur content in gasoline by nearly 70% potentially could make refiners significantly alter their plant configurations while reducing product inventories and processing capacity, PetroScan-November 2011

witnesses from two petroleum industry associations told a House subcommittee. A US Environmental Protection Agency official, meanwhile, said they are necessary nevertheless to protect public health.

“In the decade since we set the Tier 2 vehicle and fuel standards, there have been advancements in vehicle catalyst technology and computer control technology that should enable significant, cost-effective reductions in motor vehicle tailpipe emissions,” Margo T. Oge, who directs EPA¶s Transportation and Air Quality Office within EPA¶s Air and Radiation Office, told the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee¶s Energy and Environment Subcommittee on Nov. 2.

“Tier 3 vehicle and fuel standards have the potential to cost-effectively reduce [nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and volatile organic compounds] by hundreds of thousands of tons.”

EPA is considering the vehicle and its fuel as an integrated system—an approach that worked well as it developed the Tier 2 standards, which were finalized in 2000, she said in her written testimony. “There [are] extensive data showing that gasoline sulfur degrades the performance of catalytic systems that are key to reducing emissions from gasoline vehicles,” Oge said. “Lowering the sulfur content of gasoline would make emission control technologies more effective for both existing and new vehicles.”

She said gasoline sulfur reductions would help automakers meet new standards while significantly reducing emissions from existing cars and light-duty trucks. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers has urged EPA to bring its regulations in line with California¶s so automakers could build a single version for nationwide sales, she added.

But witnesses from the American Petroleum Institute and National Petrochemical & Refiners Association told the subcommittee that gasoline sulfur emissions already have been reduced dramatically under existing regulations. “The rule could lead to significant domestic fuel supply reductions, higher petroleum product imports, potentially increased consumer costs, increased refinery emissions, closed US refineries, and reduced energy security,” warned Brendan Williams, NPRA¶s senior advocacy director.11/8/11 Industry, government witnesses disagree on need for Tier 3 rules - Print t« ogj.com/«/industry-government-witnesses-disagree-on-need-for-tier-3-ru« 2/2 Unintended consequence EPA¶s Tier 2 regulations have cut sulfur levels by gasoline by 90% since 2004 from an average 300 ppm to an average 30 ppm today, he said. Hydrotreating, the principal technology used to reduce sulfur levels in gasoline and other motor fuels, requires energy consumption which results in greenhouse gas and other criteria pollutant emissions, Williams explained. “As a result, a regulation requiring a reduction of sulfur in petroleum fuel increases emissions that refiners are being told they must reduce under other Clean Air Act regulations,” he said in his written statement.

From 1990 to 2008, domestic refiners invested $112 billion in environmental improvements, according to Bob Greco, API¶s downstream and industry operations group director. “Since 2000 alone, US refiners have spent nearly twice as much on environmental improvements as the government and private sector1 spent on nonhydrocarbon technologies,” he told the subcommittee. “Regulations governing fuel composition, greenhouse gases, and environmental standards have an enormous financial impact on the refining industry, as do financial controls and taxation.”

He suggested that EPA should not issue a Tier 3 proposal without first justifying the costs of reduce vapor pressure as well as sulfur in gasoline. While the agency has said that these changes are necessary to improve air quality and fuel economy, it has not released data which it says justify the proposal, Greco said in his written statement. Researchers at Baker & O¶Brien Inc. studied impacts of several Tier 3 scenarios and found that US refiners could face $10-17 billion of up-front capital costs and $5-13 billion of recurring annual operating expenses, he said.

Overall, the Baker & O¶Brien researchers estimated that 4-7 US refineries could close because their owners could not make the required investments to comply with the new requirements, Greco said. “This would be in addition to the 66 US refineries that have closed in the last 20 years,” he said. The US Department of Energy has identified the cost of compliance with various regulations as a part of the economic stress that caused the shutdowns. The regulatory burden of Tier 3 requirements would add to this stress.”

Other witnesses at the hearing, which examined the broader subject of motor fuel standards¶ conflicts and PetroScan-November 2011

unintended consequences, included Ingrid Burke, co-chair of the National Research Council Committee on Economic and Environmental Impacts of Increasing Biofuels Production; Jay Kesan, program leader of the Biofuel Law & Regulation Program at the University of Illinois College of Law¶s Energy Biosciences Institute; David Hilbert, a thermodynamic development engineer at Mercury Marine in Fond du Lac, Wis.; and Jack Huttner, executive vice president for commercial and government affairs at Gevo Inc., an Engelwood, Colo., renewable chemicals and advanced biofuels company.

Contact Nick Snow at nicks@pennwell.com.

To access this Article, go to: http://www.ogj.com/content/ogj/en/articles/2011/11/industr\-government-witnesses-disagree HSE For Some, Psychiatric Trouble May Start in Thyroid

By HARRIET BROWN In patients with depression, anxiety and other psychiatric problems, doctors often find abnormal blood levels of thyroid hormone. Treating the problem, they have found, can lead to improvements in mood, memory and cognition.

Now researchers are exploring a somewhat controversial link between minor, or subclinical, thyroid problems and some patients’ psychiatric difficulties. After reviewing the literature on subclinical hypothyroidism and mood, Dr. Russell Joffe, a psychiatrist at the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, and colleagues recently concluded that treating the condition, which affects about 2 percent of Americans, could alleviate some patients’ psychiatric symptoms and might even prevent future cognitive decline.

Patients with psychiatric symptoms, Dr. Joffe said, “tell us that given thyroid hormones, they get better.”

The thyroid, a bow-tie-shaped gland that wraps around the trachea, produces two hormones: thyroxine, or T4, and triiodothyronine, known as T3. These hormones play a role in a surprising range of physical processes, from regulation of body temperature and heartbeat to cognitive functioning.

Any number of things can cause the thyroid to malfunction, including exposure to radiation, too much or too little iodine in the diet, medications like lithium, and autoimmune disease. And the incidence of thyroid disease rises with age. Too much thyroid hormone (hyperthyroidism) speeds the metabolism, causing symptoms like sweating, palpitations, weight loss and anxiety. Too little (hypothyroidism) can cause physical fatigue, weight gain and sluggishness, as well as depression, inability to concentrate and memory problems.

“In the early 20th century, the best descriptions of clinical depression were actually in textbooks on thyroid disease, not psychiatric textbooks,” Dr. Joffe said.

But doctors have long disagreed about the nature of links between psychiatric symptoms and thyroid problems.

“It’s the chicken-and-egg question,” said Jennifer Davis, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University. “Is there an underlying thyroid problem that causes psychiatric symptoms, or is it the other way around?”

Dr. Davis said it is common for people with thyroid problems to be given a misdiagnosis of psychiatric illness.

Leah Christian, 29, tried antidepressants 10 years ago for depression and anxiety. They did not help. “I just stayed down,” said Ms. Christian, a child care worker in San Francisco.

A few years ago, still struggling, she asked her doctor to refer her to a therapist. The doctor ran a thyroid panel first and found that Ms. Christian had an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, a common cause of hypothyroidism.

Ms. Christian was given levothyroxine, a synthetic thyroid hormone replacement. Her depression and anxiety disappeared, she said: “Turns out, all my symptoms were thyroid-related.”

In a sense, she was lucky; her hormone levels were clearly in the abnormal range. “Normal” levels of thyroid stimulating hormone, or TSH, range from 0.4 to 5. (The higher the TSH level, the less active the thyroid.) Most endocrinologists agree that a score of 10 or over requires treatment for hypothyroidism.

But for people with scores between, say, 4 and 10, things get murkier, especially for those who experience such vague psychiatric symptoms as fatigue, mild depression or just not feeling like themselves.

Some doctors believe these patients should be treated. “If somebody has a mood disorder and subclinical hypothyroidism, that could be significant,” said Dr. Thomas Geracioti, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

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Dr. Geracioti has used thyroid hormones to treat performers with debilitating stage fright; one high-level musician recovered completely, he said.

The idea of treating subclinical hypothyroidism is controversial, especially among endocrinologists. Thyroid hormone treatment can strain the heart and may aggravate osteoporosis in women, noted Dr. Joffe. On the other hand, failing to treat the condition can also stress the heart, and some studies suggest it may increase risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

And then there is the misery quotient, which is hard to quantify. “People tend to discount the quality-of-life issues related to residual depression and anxiety,” Dr. Joffe said.

Women are far more likely to develop thyroid problems than men, especially past age 50, and some experts believe that gender accounts for some reluctance to treat subclinical disease. “There’s a terrible bias against women who come in with subtle emotional complaints,” Dr. Davis said. “These complaints tend to be pushed aside or attributed to stress or anxiety.”

Psychiatric symptoms can be vague, subtle and highly individual, noted Dr. James Hennessey, director of clinical endocrinology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Another complication: It’s not clear to many experts what “normal” thyroid levels really are.

“A patient might have a TSH of 5, which many clinicians would say isn’t high enough to be associated with symptoms,” Dr. Hennessey said. “But if that person’s set point was around 0.5, that 5 would represent a tenfold increase in TSH, which might very well represent disease for that individual.”

In a study published in 2006, researchers in Anhui Province, China, used brain scans to evaluate patients with subclinical hypothyroidism both before and after treatment. They found tangible improvements in both memory and executive function after six months of levothyroxine therapy.

With funds from the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Joffe and researchers at Boston University recently began a trial to tease apart the relationship between subclinical hypothyroidism and certain mood and cognitive symptoms in people over age 60. The results won’t be known for at least a few years. But some clinicians aren’t waiting.

“I personally feel patients with TSH between 5 and 10, especially with psychiatric symptoms, warrant a trial of thyroid medication,” Dr. Hennessey said.

2.0: Drilling Down on Fracking Concerns The Potential and Peril of Hydraulic Fracturing to Drill for Natural Gas

SOURCE:

AP/Ralph Wilson A Chesapeake Energy natural gas well site is seen near Burlington, Pennsylvania.

By Tom Kenworthy, Daniel J. Weiss, Lisbeth Kaufman, Christina C. DiPasquale | March 21, 2011 PetroScan-November 2011

Download this brief (pdf) A widely used oil-and-gas drilling technique, hydraulic fracturing, is spreading rapidly to develop vast reserves of natural gas trapped in deep underground shale formations. Hydraulic fracking, however, is coming under more rigorous oversight by the press and state and federal agencies because of its contribution to air and water pollution. This attention is welcome, both to ensure that health and safety will be protected if gas is to be more widely used as a cleaner replacement for coal in electric plants and foreign oil as a transportation fuel. We must also more accurately measure carbon dioxide and other pollution from the combustion of gas compared to coal and oil.

This issue brief explores the ecological and economic issues of “fracking,” as it is increasingly coming to be known in the areas of the country where natural gas is tapped due to the technology. Cutting to the chase, our conclusion is this— hydraulic fracturing needs to be done carefully and be well-monitored, with particular attention paid to the full scope of carbon dioxide released into our atmosphere to gauge accurately the consequences of global warming due to the expanded use of natural gas.

What is fracking and what does it do and cause?

Not so long ago, the subject of hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas wells to stimulate production from deep rock formations was largely the province of petroleum engineers, drilling companies, and a small number of environmental activists.

No more. The rapid expansion of shale gas wells because of hydraulic fracturing is now the subject of widespread nationwide attention. Combined with advanced horizontal drilling techniques, which open up new ways to tap natural gas reserves, hydraulic fracturing (also called hydrofracking, or simply fracking) opens up vast new natural gas reserves from the Barnett Shale formation in Texas to the Marcellus Shale that runs from the northeast tip of Tennessee to upstate New York. With the inclusion of newly accessible shale gas plays, the United States now boasts estimated reserves of gas that could last a century or more.

As a result, natural gas is becoming an increasingly important component of the U.S. electricity generation and energy mix, sometimes touted as a potential magic bullet for moving us to a lower-carbon future. But the environmental consequences of the surge in gas drilling using hydraulic fracturing mean we should be cautious—we should continue to push for a diverse portfolio of cleaner energy while also exploring the safest ways to tap these new reserves using hydraulic fracturing.

The process, which involves injecting huge volumes of water mixed with sand and chemicals deep underground to fracture rock formations and release trapped gas, is becoming increasingly controversial, with concerns about possible contamination of underground drinking water supplies alongside revelations of surface water contamination by the wastewater that is a byproduct of drilling.

Concerns about this technique led late last year to a partial moratorium in New York state on new drilling permits that allow fracking. Nationally, advocates want to repeal a 2005 congressional exemption of fracking from oversight under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Many activists also want to require drilling companies to publicly disclose the chemicals it uses, as other industries do under the Community Right to Know law. Industry historically resists such calls, though a number of companies have recently dropped their opposition, saying they will publicize the chemicals they use.

These natural gas operations also produce smog-forming pollutants, contributing to air pollution problems in places such as western Wyoming and the Fort Worth area. Indeed, natural gas wells produce so much air pollution that smog in the area around Pinedale, Wyoming is sometimes as bad as in Los Angeles. And these shale gas wells can release fugitive methane, which is a potent global warming pollutant.

In a recent investigation, for example, The New York Times reported on rivers and waterways that serve public water systems in Pennsylvania being contaminated with naturally occurring radioactive materials, such as radium, as a result of drilling activities. The series has also raised serious questions about the adequacy of oversight by state and federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency. In its first story, the newspaper reported: With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself. While the existence of the toxic wastes has been reported, thousands of internal documents obtained by The New York Times from the Environmental Protection Agency, state regulators and drillers show that the dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.

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In its second story, the newspaper reported that even though the industry is moving toward more recycling of drilling wastewater, public health dangers remain: Nor has recycling eliminated environmental and health risks. Some methods can leave behind salts or sludge highly concentrated with radioactive material and other contaminants that can be dangerous to people and aquatic life if they get into waterways.

Some well operators are also selling their waste, rather than paying to dispose of it. Because it is so salty, they have found ready buyers in communities that spread it on roads for de-icing in the winter and for dust suppression in the summer. When ice melts or rain falls, the waste can run off roads and end up in the drinking supply.

And in its final report, the newspaper was highly critical of EPA investigations into the possible environmental harms from fracking: More than a quarter-century of efforts by some lawmakers and regulators to force the federal government to police the industry better have been thwarted, as E.P.A. studies have been repeatedly narrowed in scope and important findings have been removed.

Responding to the revelations by The New York Times series, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA), the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, called for EPA to conduct an investigation.

These disturbing revelations raise the prospect that natural gas production could pollute our rivers and streams. The natural gas industry has repeatedly claimed that fracking can be done safely. We now know we need a full investigation into exactly how fracking is done and what it does to our drinking water and our environment. Americans should not have to consume radioactive materials from their drinking water as a byproduct of natural gas production.

In response, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson told Congress she would travel to Pennsylvania to prod EPA officials there about the charges. “We intend to do our jobs,” she said. The EPA is currently designing a two-year study of fracking’s effects on the environment and health, but The New York Times reported in its third article that some areas of inquiry had been dropped because of pressure from the oil and gas industry.

Separately, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection released the results of 2010 testing of seven rivers for radioactivity, reporting that “all samples showed levels at or below the normal naturally occurring background levels of radioactivity.” The EPA has asked the agency to conduct more tests.

Lessons from Pennsylvania Pennsylvania is an excellent example of the promise and peril of fracking. The size and extent of the natural gas development boom in Pennsylvania—57,469 producing wells at the end of 2010, up by more than 8,000 in four years— poses new challenges and necessitates new safeguards to protect public health and the environment.

Examples of the problems stemming from the boom in hydraulic fracturing include the contamination of drinking water in Dimock Township, a mud spill in Sproul State Forest, and a 32-mile fish kill in Dunkard Creek that wiped out at least 16 species of freshwater mussels and 18 species of fish.

Total dissolved solids, or TDS, a measure of all elements dissolved in water including carbonates, sulfates, and nitrates are found in high concentrations in fracturing wastewater. Pennsylvania’s waterways cannot dilute all of these pollutants.

In 2008 and 2009, TDS levels exceeded drinking water standards in the Monongahela River, the source of drinking water for some residents of Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania’s water treatment plants are not equipped to remove them from the water supplied to residents.

Recognizing this problem, the state imposed more stringent TDS discharge limitations in 2009 to end the practice of unlimited discharges of drilling waste to rivers and streams. An even higher standard was applied specifically to the natural gas sector that took effect in August 2010. It seeks to ensure that TDS in streams in Pennsylvania do not exceed the safe drinking water standard of 500 milligrams per liter.

Still needed, however, is a requirement that drillers track their wastewater from the time it is withdrawn to the time it is disposed. There should be full public transparency, including the disclosure of chemicals used, and their amounts. As The New York Times detailed, there is also inadequate testing for radium and most of the municipal and industrial plants that treat drilling wastewater are not designed to remove such pollution.

In 2009, ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism group, found similar problems in New York. ProPublica reported that the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation tested 13 samples of drilling wastewater and found “they PetroScan-November 2011

contain levels of radium-226, a derivative of uranium, as high as 267 times the limit safe for discharge into the environment and thousands of times the limit safe for people to drink.”

Clearly, water testing needs to be done on a more regular and thorough basis. Similarly, we must conduct rigorous predrilling testing near well sites and inspections of well sites at every phase of the drilling process. In addition, regular testing of drinking water needs to be done not just for radium and dissolved solids but also for methane, chlorides, and metals.

With the right technology, fracking can be cleaner Fracking requires enormous amounts of water, up to 5 million gallons of water for a single well. After the fracturing procedure completes, 15 to 80 percent of the fluid returns to the surface as waste water, often contaminated by fracturing chemicals and subsurface contaminants including toxic organic compounds, heavy metals, and naturally occurring radioactive materials. Untreated, this wastewater can have detrimental environmental and health effects.

While studies find that natural gas drilling releases dangerous pollutants into air and water, drilling and fracking do not have to be so dirty. Advanced technologies to scrub air of emissions and purify water produced at the well-head are available and ready to deploy. Working with energy companies, the EPA’s Natural Gas Star Program supports techniques to capture and reuse methane, a greenhouse gas that traps heat at 23 times the rate of carbon dioxide. And despite the claims of some in the gas industry, those technologies can be employed at little or no cost.

Currently, the most common practice for disposing of wastewater is to inject untreated water back into empty wells. Some drilling companies evaporate wastewater in large ponds, leaving condensed waste products that must then be trucked to treatment plants or to other states that have less stringent waste treatment rules. Wastewater is also often reused or just dumped into waterways. All those methods have environmental risks and costs.

But a number of companies are developing and deploying cost-effective water purification systems to make “flow back” waste water clean and reusable. 212resources Corp., headquartered in Salt Lake City, provides water recovery services with a patented vapor compression, turbulent flow, and flash evaporation systems to purify a variety of wastewater constituents.

Another company, Purestream Technology, also in Salt Lake City, offers a technology that sits at the well head and treats massive volumes of wastewater, scrubbing out hydrocarbons, toxic organic compounds, heavy metals, excess oil and gas, and naturally occurring radioactive materials, leaving water that is more pure than standard EPA approved drinking water. The waste product from this method is a fraction of that of evaporation ponds, and can be easily and more cheaply trucked to a treatment plant. The pure water resulting from this process can be evaporated back into the environment or can be safely used again in additional fracking processes, saving millions of gallons of water for more sustainable uses.

Purestream’s system is now deployed by West Virginia-based PDC Mountaineer LLC, at the Marcellus Shale in Taylor County, West Virginia. The system will evaporate and purify waste water at the site of drilling. The company has also contracted with SM Energy Co. to deploy at their second Marcellus Shale site in McKean County, Pennsylvania.

Natural gas drilling can also release damaging air pollution, including volatile organic compounds such as the potent greenhouse gas methane, along with nitrogen oxides. Current practices to dispose of such air pollutants involve flaring volatile organic compounds, which only adds pollution and wastes precious fuel sources.

Purestream’s system uses water and controlled exhaust pressure to reduce air pollution. This system scrubs and destroys 99 percent of smog-forming volatile organic compounds and nitrogen-oxide gases. It also reduces soot, or particulate matter. These pollutants can spark asthma attacks and other respiratory ailments.

Instead of releasing the methane and other volatile organic compounds into the air, Purestream’s system mines them as a power source, using the heat generated from their combustion to power the air and water purification systems. Another company, Anguil Environmental Systems Inc., headquartered in Milwaukee, offers a similar technology, the Regenerative Thermal Oxidizer, which destroys air pollution through a process of high temperature thermal oxidation, using a mix of temperature, residence time, turbulence, and oxygen. It also reuses the thermal energy to generate itself.

The search for answers Policymakers need to get to the bottom of the many questions relating to hydraulic fracturing, ensuring that the public health and environment are well protected from the production of shale gas. Also, a better understanding of whether switching to natural gas will produce significant reductions in carbon dioxide pollution is essential before we commit to a massive expansion of natural gas use.

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The Center for American Progress advised such a cautious approach in an August 2009 report about the potential for natural gas to serve as a “bridge fuel” to a lowercarbon economy written by CAP president and CEO John Podesta and United Nations Foundation president Timothy E. Wirth. While advocating the expansion of natural gas to replace dirty coal and foreign oil, they also detailed their concerns about the toxic chemicals that fracking can employ, the release of the potent greenhouse gas methane associated with natural gas production, and air pollution problems: There are other legitimate public health and global warming concerns about the impacts from natural gas production. Adjacent communities are concerned about the public health impacts from the use and release of toxic substances, both naturally occurring and those used in the natural gas production process such as benzene, formaldehyde, or radioactive materials. The process also yields significant amounts of air pollution. The gas production from the Barnett Shale in the five counties near Dallas-Fort Worth creates more emissions of smogforming compounds than motor vehicles.

Any proposal to incentivize the development of natural gas must also address the potential health and global warming impacts of developing this resource. It makes little sense to encourage natural gas use as a lower greenhouse gas alternative to coal or oil combustion if natural gas production yields sizeable amounts of toxic, air, or global warming pollution.

In the 2009 report, Podesta and Wirth recommend a comprehensive EPA analysis, after which state governments—or the federal government in the absence of state action— can determine appropriate measures to protect public health and the environment: As a first step, the EPA must undertake a comprehensive scientific analysis of the air, land, water, and global warming impacts from natural gas production, including a lifecycle greenhouse gas analysis. It should review the effectiveness of federal and state programs at protecting people, air, land, and water from gas production side effects. The EPA should also review new and emerging technologies to reduce this pollution. Based on the science, the analysis should recommend best management practices for companies and additional government safeguards that require pollution reductions.

The issue of the total carbon pollution resulting from natural gas production is a critical one. Resolving questions about it could well determine whether natural gas becomes, as Exelon Corporation CEO John W. Rowe said recently, “a genuine elixir that will deliver the cleaner energy we need to compete in the world.”

But previous assumptions that gas yields half or less carbon pollution than coal are coming under new scrutiny. What is needed is a definitive new EPA study of the so-called lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions—from extraction to distribution, to use to release into the atmosphere—from natural gas, one that takes into account changing industry practices as shale gas becomes more important and better estimates of fugitive methane emissions from sources such as leaky pipes and valves.

The United States and other nations face an urgent need to reduce carbon dioxide and other global warming pollution.

Already the abundance of inexpensive natural gas has led the Energy Information Administration to project that gas will be the fastest growing source for electricity generation between now and 2035. Ample, inexpensive supplies of natural gas could reduce pollution by replacing dirty coal plants, and powering trucks and buses by gas. But it is imperative to ensure that we don’t exacerbate one major public health threat while trying to solve another one.

Actions to achieve more certainty on that point include: · Giving EPA the authority to oversee hydraulic fracturing under the Safe Drinking Water Act, and requiring full public disclosure of the chemicals used in the process under the Community Right to Know law · Requiring drillers to track and disclose what happens to wastewater from withdrawal from wells to its disposal · Mandating adequate tests for radioactive elements and other contaminants in wastewater and regular testing of water supplies near drill sites before, during, and after drilling, to detect contaminants · EPA shall develop air and water emission limits based on best management practices, and the states shall enforce them. To pay for enforcement and wastewater treatment costs, gas producers should pay a very small fee per trillion cubic feet · EPA’s voluntary Natural Gas Star program to capture fugitive methane should be made mandatory for wells above a certain size. EPA reports that current participants turn a profit from selling the methane, so this will not add to producers costs PetroScan-November 2011

Making a comprehensive and credible study of the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions from the production and use of natural gas Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress who focuses on energy and environmental issues. Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy at the Center. Lisbeth Kaufman is a Special Assistant with the Center’s Energy team, and Christina C. DiPasquale is Associate Director of Press Relations at the Center.

Download this brief (pdf) ·

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