By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
The new energy bill signed this week makes it official. When 2012 hits, stores can no longer sell the cheap but inefficient incandescent light bulbs that are fixtures in most homes.
Even so, light bulb manufacturers say that worries about greenhouse gases and the high cost of energy had them moving away from conventional incandescents way before Congress weighed in. For quite some time, they note, they have been trying to soften the light emitted by compact fluorescent lights, bring down the cost of light-emitting diodes — and yes, find ways to increase the efficiency of incandescents.
Many of the products are already on the market, and more will be available before the deadline kicks in,
“Sure, you’ll see more compact fluorescents five years from now, but you would have seen them without any energy bill,” said the chief executive of Osram Sylvania, Charlie Jerabek.
Michael B. Petras Jr., vice president of GE Consumer and Industrial — the unit that includes General Electric’s lighting business — broadened the thought to all forms of lighting. “You’ll see different light sources for your decorative chandelier, for your recessed lighting and for your under-cabinet lights,” he said. “And I can assure you that all the kinds of light sources are already getting a lot more efficient.”
Including incandescents.
Congress has not specifically outlawed incandescent bulbs, only inefficient ones.
In February, G.E. said that it was developing a high-efficiency incandescent that will radiate more than twice the light of conventional incandescents. It expects to make that one commercially available by 2010, and one that is twice as efficient a few years later.
And so far, consumers have been slow to give new products a chance. Compact fluorescents, for example, are already ubiquitous in stores. Many retailers, led by Wal-Mart, have promoted the economics of the bulbs — though compact fluorescents generally cost six times what incandescents do, they last six times as long and use far less energy.
The EnergyStar program of the Environmental Protection Agency has been pushing compact fluorescents for almost nine years.
“People realize that incandescents are an old, inefficient technology,” an EnergyStar spokeswoman, Maria Vargas, said.
The promotions have had modest success. Mr. Jerabek said Sylvania’s sales of compact fluorescents doubled in 2006 over 2005, and doubled again this year. But, he notes, they still account for 15 percent of bulbs in use in homes.
Sylvania recently introduced a fluorescent that Mr. Jerabek said mimicked the light of incandescents. He concedes that incandescents are about 10 percent warmer, but he insists that “the average consumer would have trouble detecting the difference.”
Compact fluorescent lights have problems beyond light quality. They contain mercury, and few recycling centers will accept them. So at the end of life, they still pose an environmental hazard.
“We’re working to reduce mercury, but the amount will never go to zero,” Mr. Petras said.
That is why Mr. Jerabek, for one, calls compact fluorescent lights “a temporary fix.”
Manufacturers are putting a lot of stock in light-emitting diodes — or L.E.D.’s. They operate with chips made of nontoxic materials and last for about 50,000 hours, compared with 1,000 hours for an incandescent and 6,000 for a compact fluorescent. A tiny L.E.D. can shed as much light as a cumbersome bulb, which makes them easier to integrate into a home’s décor. And, they are extremely energy efficient.
But today, they are too expensive to use for all lighting applications. And, while manufacturers are able to make pretty good colored L.E.D.’s — the kind that are already available for Christmas tree lights — they have yet to perfect a white L.E.D. that would be useful for lighting homes.
Manufacturers are working to get the costs down and the white lighting quotient up. Most predict that white L.E.D.’s will be commercially viable in a few years.
“Most C.F.L.’s meet the EnergyStar specs now, and all of us are optimistic about the prospects for L.E.D.’s,” Ms. Vargas said.
But even though the energy bill has not changed the direction of lighting research, most manufacturers are relieved to have a federal standard in place.
“If each state passed its own rules for light bulb efficiency, we’d have to make 50 different types,” Mr. Jerabek said. “Now we can all standardize our production techniques.”
Dec-22, 2007
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Motorhead Messiah
Johnathan Goodwin can get 100 mpg out of a Lincoln Continental, cut emissions by 80%, and double the horsepower. Does the car business have the guts to follow him?
From: Issue 120 | November 2007 | Page 74 | By: Clive Thompson
“Check it out. It's actually a jet engine," says Johnathan Goodwin, with a low whistle. "This thing is gonna be even cooler than I thought." We're hunched on the floor of Goodwin's gleaming workshop in Wichita, Kansas, surrounded by the shards of a wooden packing crate. Inside the wreckage sits his latest toy--a 1985-issue turbine engine originally designed for the military. It can spin at a blistering 60,000 rpm and burn almost any fuel. And Goodwin has some startling plans for this esoteric piece of hardware: He's going to use it to create the most fuel-efficient Hummer in history.
Goodwin, a 37-year-old who looks like Kevin Costner with better hair, is a professional car hacker. The spic-and-span shop is filled with eight monstrous trucks and cars--Hummers, Yukon XLs, Jeeps--in various states of undress. His four tattooed, twentysomething grease monkeys crawl all over them with wrenches and welding torches.
Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that's up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it'll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will be the turbine, Goodwin's secret ingredient. Whenever the truck's juice runs low, the turbine will roar into action for a few seconds, powering a generator with such gusto that it'll recharge a set of "supercapacitor" batteries in seconds. This means the H3's electric motor will be able to perform awesome feats of acceleration and power over and over again, like a Prius on steroids. What's more, the turbine will burn biodiesel, a renewable fuel with much lower emissions than normal diesel; a hydrogen-injection system will then cut those low emissions in half. And when it's time to fill the tank, he'll be able to just pull up to the back of a diner and dump in its excess french-fry grease--as he does with his many other Hummers. Oh, yeah, he adds, the horsepower will double--from 300 to 600.
"Conservatively," Goodwin muses, scratching his chin, "it'll get 60 miles to the gallon. With 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You'll be able to smoke the tires. And it's going to be superefficient."
He laughs. "Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!"
This is the sort of work that's making Goodwin famous in the world of underground car modders. He is a virtuoso of fuel economy. He takes the hugest American cars on the road and rejiggers them to get up to quadruple their normal mileage and burn low-emission renewable fuels grown on U.S. soil--all while doubling their horsepower. The result thrills eco-evangelists and red-meat Americans alike: a vehicle that's simultaneously green and mean. And word's getting out. In the corner of his office sits Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1987 Jeep Wagoneer, which Goodwin is converting to biodiesel; soon, Neil Young will be shipping him a 1960 Lincoln Continental to transform into a biodiesel--electric hybrid.
His target for Young's car? One hundred miles per gallon.
This is more than a mere American Chopper--style makeover. Goodwin's experiments point to a radically cleaner and cheaper future for the American car. The numbers are simple: With a $5,000 bolt-on kit he co-engineered--the poor man's version of a Goodwin conversion--he can immediately transform any diesel vehicle to burn 50% less fuel and produce 80% fewer emissions. On a full-size gas-guzzler, he figures the kit earns its money back in about a year--or, on a regular car, two--while hitting an emissions target from the outset that's more stringent than any regulation we're likely to see in our lifetime. "Johnathan's in a league of his own," says Martin Tobias, CEO of Imperium Renewables, the nation's largest producer of biodiesel. "Nobody out there is doing experiments like he is."
Nobody--particularly not Detroit. Indeed, Goodwin is doing precisely what the big American automakers have always insisted is impossible. They have long argued that fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel cars are a hard sell because they're too cramped and meek for our market. They've lobbied aggressively against raising fuel-efficiency and emissions standards, insisting that either would doom the domestic industry. Yet the truth is that Detroit is now getting squeezed from all sides. This fall, labor unrest is brewing, and after decades of inertia on fuel-economy standards, Congress is jockeying to boost the target for cars to 35 mpg, a 10 mpg jump (which is either ridiculously large or ridiculously small, depending on whom you ask). More than a dozen states are enacting laws requiring steep reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Meanwhile, gas prices have hovered around $3 per gallon for more than a year. And European and Japanese carmakers are flooding the market with diesel and hybrid machines that get up to 40% better mileage than the best American cars; some, such as Mercedes's new BlueTec diesel sedans, deliver that kind of efficiency and more horsepower.
General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, in short, have a choice: Cede still more ground--or mount a technological counterattack.
Goodwin's work proves that a counterattack is possible, and maybe easier than many of us imagined. If the dream is a big, badass ride that's also clean, well, he's there already. As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways. "They could do all this stuff if they wanted to," he tells me, slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. "The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use." He doesn't have an engineering degree; he didn't even go to high school: "I've just been messing around and seeing what I can do."
All of which raises an interesting possibility. Has this guy in a far-off Kansas garage figured out the way to save Detroit?
America's most revolutionary innovations, it has long been said, sprang from the ramshackle dens of amateurs. Thomas Edison was a home-schooled dropout who got his start tinkering with battery parts; Chester Carlson invented the photocopier in his cramped Long Island kitchen. NASA, desperate for breakthroughs to help it return to the moon, has set up million-dollar prizes to encourage private citizens to come forward with any idea, no matter how crazy. As the theory goes, only those outside big industries can truly reinvent them.
Goodwin is certainly an outsider. He grew up in a dirt-poor Kansas family with six siblings and by age 13 began taking on piecework in local auto shops to help his mother pay the bills. He particularly enjoyed jamming oversized engines into places no one believed they'd fit. He put truck engines inside Camaros, Grand Nationals, and Super Bees; he even put a methanol-fueled turbocharger on a tiny Yamaha Banshee four-wheeler. "We took that thing from 35 horsepower to 208," he recalls. "It was crazy. We couldn't put enough fins on the back to keep it on the ground." After dropping out of school in the seventh grade, he made a living by buying up totaled cars and making them as good as new. "That," he says, "was my school."
Along the way, Goodwin also adopted two views common among Americans, but typically thought to be in conflict: a love of big cars and a concern about the environment. He is an avid, if somewhat nonideological, environmentalist. He believes global warming is a serious problem, that reliance on foreign oil is a mistake, and that butt-kicking fuel economy is just good for business. But Goodwin is also guiltlessly addicted to enormous, brawling rides, precisely the sort known to suck down Saudi gasoline. (I spied one lonely small sports car in the corner of his garage, but he confessed he has no plans to work on it right now.) When he picked me up from my hotel, he drove a four-door 2008 Cadillac Escalade XL that should have had its own tugboat. He parallel parked it in one try.
If Goodwin is an artist, though, his canvas has been the Hummer. His first impression of the thing was inauspicious. In 1990, he bought an H1 in Denver and began driving it back to Kansas. Within 50 miles, the bolts in the transmission shook loose, forcing him to stop to fix it. "By the time I made it home, after three roadside repairs, I pretty much knew that the Hummer was not all it should be," he told me. He didn't think much of the 200 horsepower engine, either, which did "zero to 60 in two days. It was a piece of junk."
So Goodwin decided to prove that environmentalism and power could go together--by making his new lemon into exhibit A. First, he pulled the gas engine so he could drop in a Duramax V8, GM's core diesel for large trucks. Diesel technology is crucial to all of Goodwin's innovations because it offers several advantages over traditional gasoline engines. Pound for pound, diesel offers more power and torque; it's also inherently more efficient, offering up to 40% better mileage and 20% lower emissions in engines of comparable size. What's more, many diesel engines can easily accept a wide range of biodiesel--from the high-quality stuff produced at refineries to the melted chicken grease siphoned off from the local KFC.
"Think about it," Goodwin laughs. "A 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and will do zero to 60 in five seconds!"
Putting a diesel engine in the Hummer, however, required Goodwin to crack GM's antitheft system, which makes it a pain to swap out the engine. In that system, the engine communicates electronically with the body, fuel supply, and ignition; if you don't have all the original components, the car won't start. Goodwin jerry-rigged a set of cables to trick the engine into believing the starter system had broken, sending it into "fail-safe mode"--a backdoor mechanism installed at the factory. (At one point in his story, Goodwin wanders over to a battered cardboard box in the corner of the garage and hauls out an octopuslike tangle of wires--"the MacGyver," his hacking device. "I could have sold this for a lot of money on eBay," he chuckles.)
Once he'd picked the car's lock, Goodwin installed the Duramax and a five-speed Allison--the required transmission for a Duramax, which also helps give it race-car-like control and a rapid take off. After five days' worth of work, the Hummer was getting about 18 mpg--double the factory 9 mpg--and twice the original horsepower. He drove it over to a local restaurant and mooched some discarded oil from its deep fryer, strained the oil through a pair of jeans, and poured it into the engine. It ran perfectly.
But Goodwin wanted more. While researching alternative fuels, he learned about the work of Uli Kruger, a German who has spent decades in Australia exploring techniques for blending fuels that normally don't mix. One of Kruger's systems induces hydrogen into the air intake of a diesel engine, producing a cascade of emissions-reducing and mileage-boosting effects. The hydrogen, ignited by the diesel combustion, burns extremely clean, producing only water as a by-product. It also displaces up to 50% of the diesel needed to fuel the car, effectively doubling the diesel's mileage and cutting emissions by at least half. Better yet, the water produced from the hydrogen combustion cools down the engine, so the diesel combustion generates fewer particulates--and thus fewer nitrogen-oxide emissions.
"You can feed it hydrogen, diesel, biodiesel, corn oil--pretty much anything but water."
"It's really a fantastic chain reaction, all these good things happening at once," Kruger tells me. He has also successfully introduced natural gas--a ubiquitous and generally cheap fuel--into a diesel-burning engine, which likewise doubles the mileage while slashing emissions. In another system, he uses heat from the diesel engine to vaporize ethanol to the point where it can be injected into the diesel combustion chambers as a booster, with similar emissions-cutting effects.
Goodwin began building on Kruger's model. In 2005, he set to work adapting his own H1 Hummer to burn a combination of hydrogen and biodiesel. He installed a Duramax in the Hummer and plopped a carbon-fiber tank of supercompressed hydrogen into the bed. The results were impressive: A single tank of hydrogen lasted for 700 miles and cut the diesel consumption in half. It also doubled the horsepower. "It reduces your carbon footprint by a huge, huge amount, but you still get all the power of the Duramax," he says, slapping the H1 on the quarter panel. "And you can feed it hydrogen, diesel, biodiesel, corn oil--pretty much anything but water."
Two years ago, Goodwin got a rare chance to show off his tricks to some of the car industry's most prominent engineers. He tells me the story: He was driving a converted H2 to the SEMA show, the nation's biggest annual specialty automotive confab, and stopped en route at a Denver hotel. When he woke up in the morning, there were 20 people standing around his Hummer. Did I run over somebody? he wondered. As it turned out, they were engineers for GM, the Hummer's manufacturer. They noticed that Goodwin's H2 looked modified. "Does it have a diesel engine in it?"
"Yeah," he said.
"No way," they replied.
He opened the hood, "and they're just all in and out and around the valves and checking it out," he says. They asked to hear it run, sending a stab of fear through Goodwin. He'd filled it up with grease from a Chinese restaurant the day before and was worried that the cold morning might have solidified the fuel. But it started up on the first try and ran so quietly that at first they didn't believe it was really on. "When you start a diesel engine up on vegetable oil," Goodwin says, "you turn the key, and you hear nothing. Because of the lubricating power of the oil, it's just so smooth. Whisper quiet. And they're like, 'Is it running? Yeah, you can hear the fan going.'"
One engineer turned and said, "GM said this wouldn't work."
"Well," Goodwin replied, "here it is."
Goodwin's feats of engineering have become gradually more visible over the past year. Last summer, Imperium Renewables contacted MTV's show Pimp My Ride about creating an Earth Day special in which Goodwin would convert a muscle car to run on biodiesel. The show chose a '65 Chevy Impala, and when the conversion was done, he'd doubled its mileage to 25 mpg and increased its pull from 250 to 800 horsepower. As a stunt, MTV drag-raced the Impala against a Lamborghini on California's Pomona Raceway. "The Impala blew the Lamborghini away," says Kevin Kluemper, the lead calibration engineer for GM's Allison transmission unit, who'd flown down to help with the conversion. Schwarzenegger, who was on the set that day, asked Goodwin on the spot to convert his Wagoneer to biodiesel.
Observers of Goodwin's work say his skill lies in an uncanny ability to visualize a mechanical system in precise detail, long before he picks up a wrench. (Goodwin says he does much of his mental work during long drives.) "He has talent unknown to any mortal," says Mad Mike, Pimp My Ride's host. "He has this ability to see things so exactly, and I still don't know how he does it."
For his part, Goodwin argues he's merely "a problem solver. Most people try to make things more complicated than they are." He speaks of the major carmakers with a sort of mild disdain: If he can piece together cleaner vehicles out of existing GM parts and a bit of hot-rod elbow grease, why can't they bake that kind of ingenuity into their production lines? Prod him enough on the subject and his mellowness peels away, revealing a guy fired by an almost manic frustration. "Everybody should be driving a plug-in vehicle right now," he complains, in one of his laconic engineering lectures, as we wander through the blistering Kansas heat to a nearby Mexican restaurant. "I can go next door to Ace Hardware and buy a DC electric motor, go out to my four-wheel-drive truck, remove the transmission and engine, bolt the electric motor onto the back of the transfer case, put a series of lead-acid batteries up to 240 volts in the back of the bed, and we're good to go. I guarantee you I could drive all around town and do whatever I need, go home at night, and hook up a couple of battery chargers, plug one into an outlet, and be good to go the next day.
"Detroit could do all this stuff overnight if it wanted to," he adds.
In reality, Goodwin's work has begun to influence some of Detroit's top auto designers, but through curious and circuitous routes. In 2005, Tom Holm, the founder of EcoTrek, a nonprofit that promotes the use of alternative fuels, heard about Goodwin through the Hummer-junkie grapevine and hired him. When Holm showed GM the vehicles Goodwin converted, the company was duly impressed. Internally, Hummer executives had long been looking for a way to blunt criticism of the H2's gas-guzzling tendencies and saw Goodwin's vehicles as an object lesson in what was possible. So GM decided to flip the switch: It announced the same year that, beginning in 2008, it would convert its gasoline Hummers to run on ethanol; by 2010, it said, Hummers would be biodiesel-compatible.
"It was an influence," concedes Hummer general manager Martin Walsh, of the EcoTrek vehicles. "We wanted to be environmentally responsible by having engines in Hummers that run on renewable fuels." But until I contacted Hummer for this story, GM didn't know that the man behind those machines was none other than Goodwin.
GM's commitment is a start, however halting. Overall, though, Detroit still seems to be all but paralyzed by the challenges of fuel economy, emissions, and alternative fuels. And it's not just about greed or laziness: Talk to car-industry experts, and they'll point out a number of serious barriers to introducing radically new alternative-fuel vehicles on a scale that will make a difference. One of the highest is that low-emission fuels--biodiesel, ethanol, electricity, hydrogen, all of which account for less than 3% of the nation's fuel supply--just aren't widely available on American highways. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem. People won't buy alternative-fuel cars until it's easy to fill them up, but alternative fuel makers won't ramp up production until there's a viable market.
Goodwin admits all these things are true but believes the country could be weaned off gasoline in a three-step process. The first would be for Detroit to aggressively roll out diesel engines, much as Europe has already begun to do (some 50% of all European cars run diesel). In a single stroke, that would improve the nation's mileage by as much as 40%, and, because diesel fuel is already widely available, drivers could take that step with a minimum of disruption. What's more, given that many diesel engines can also run homegrown biodiesel, a mass conversion to diesel would help kick-start that market. (This could have geopolitical implications as well as environmental and economic ones: The Department of Transportation estimated in 2004 that if we converted merely one-third of America's passenger cars and light trucks to diesel, we'd reduce our oil consumption by up to 1.4 million barrels of oil per day--precisely the amount we import from Saudi Arabia.)
The second step in Goodwin's scheme would be to produce diesel-electric hybrid cars. This would double the mileage on even the biggest diesel vehicles. The third phase would be to produce electric hybrids that run in "dual fuel" mode, burning biodiesel along with hydrogen, ethanol, natural gas, or propane. This is the concept Goodwin is proving out in his turbine-enhanced H3 Hummer and in Neil Young's Lincoln: "At that point, your mileage just goes really, really high, and your emissions are incredibly low," he says. Since those vehicles can run on regular diesel or biodiesel--and without any alternative fuel at all, if need be--drivers wouldn't have to worry about getting stranded on the interstate. At the same time, as more and more dual-fuel cars hit the road, they would goose demand for genuinely national ethanol, hydrogen, and biodiesel grids.
For Goodwin, navigating this process is all about imagination and adaptability. "The point is to design cars that are flexible," he says. "You'll see a change in how vehicles are fueled in the future. Which fuel source will be the exclusive one or the one that'll take over the petroleum base is, you know, anybody's guess, so it's like the wild, wild West of fuel technology right now. I think it'll be a combination between a few different fuels. I know hydrogen will definitely come around."
Imagination and vision, of course, are often rewarded. As global pressure increases on the United States to reduce our carbon emissions, those rewards are likely to get juicier. Under some versions of legislation being considered in Congress, for example, companies voluntarily deploying superefficient vehicles in large fleets could be awarded substantial offsets. Take DHL, the FedEx rival: Goodwin says his company, SAE Energy, is negotiating with the shipper to convert 800 of its vehicles to dual fuel. "We could get them an offset of something like 70 cents a gallon," Goodwin says, "and reduce their cost of fuel by 50%."
Industry insiders and observers agree with many of Goodwin's prescriptions, particularly his concept of fuel flexibility. "We have to have alternatives," says Beau Boeckmann, vice president of California's Galpin Motors, the largest Ford dealership in the country, who recently partnered with Goodwin to convert a 2008 F450 truck to hydrogen and biodiesel. "Only with a combination of things can we get alternative fuels off the ground." Boeckmann believes hydrogen is the true "silver bullet" for ending greenhouse gases but thinks it'll take more than a decade to figure out how to create and distribute it cheaply. Mary Beth Stanek, GM's director of environment, energy, and safety policy, also agrees with the multifuel approach--and points out that this is precisely how Brazil weaned itself from regular gasoline. "They pull up to the pump, and they've got a whole bunch of different choices," she notes. She, too, predicts diesel will make a comeback because of its inherent fuel efficiency: "You will see more vehicles going back to diesel over a lot of different lines."
Yet in reality, American carmakers seem conspicuously slow on the uptake. Stanek is about as ardent a fan of alternative fuels as you're likely to find inside GM, but even she admits no one there is seriously thinking of abandoning the gasoline engine anytime soon. The 300-million-gallon U.S. biodiesel business is a fraction of the 12-billion-gallon ethanol one. And Detroit is extremely cautious about what the market can bear.
A Detroit carmaker does, of course, have to worry about selling millions of cars at reasonable prices. But we've been hearing this refrain for a long, long time. And with European and Japanese carmakers driving ever harder into our market--and with Chrysler having become just another meal for Cerberus Capital--this hardly seems like the time to be overly cautious. (Those ultralow-emission Mercedes BlueTec diesels, for example, include a four-wheel-drive sedan that gets 37 mpg and goes from zero to 60 in 6.6 seconds.) Moreover, after decades of consumer apathy, improving fuel economy and reducing carbon output are becoming urgent national priorities. The green groundswell has arrived, and, given the stakes, anyone who ignores it does so at his peril. If Detroit can't sell diesel now--especially a clean, high-performance, money-saving diesel--it never will.
With U.S. carmakers being stripped for parts, now is hardly the time for them to play it safe.
Goodwin, perhaps, can afford to be a visionary. He has the luxury of converting cars for fancy clients who'll pay handsomely to drive on higher moral ground. (He charges $28,000 for a "basic H2 conversion to diesel--custom concept cars cost far more.") The future of the American car will likely be won by an automaker that can split the difference--one that may innovate more slowly than Goodwin would like, but a hell of a lot faster than the Big Three.
Goodwin himself seems more oracle than implementer, slightly unsure of how his ideas could be brought to the masses. He's working on patenting aspects of his and Kruger's dual-fuel work and would love to license it to the big carmakers. But the truth is, he's a mechanic's mechanic--happiest when he's solving some technical puzzle. He loves getting his hands dirty, "throwing wrenches around" in his shop, pioneering some weird new way to fuel a car. Today, he's thinking about taking his wife's Infiniti, outfitting it with a tank of ether, and powering the engine via blasts of compressed air in the cylinders. "Zero emissions!" he crows. It's the visionary inventor's curse: constantly distracted by shiny objects.
Goodwin eyes the turbine, which he has dragged out to the center of the floor. Just for kicks, he says, he's thinking of mounting it on a wheelie board and firing it up. "I'd love to see how fast that goes," he says. "I'm just not sure how I'm going to steer it."
Feedback: thompson@fastcompany.com
Copyright © 2007 Mansueto Ventures LLC. All rights reserved.
Fast Company, 7 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007-2195
From: Issue 120 | November 2007 | Page 74 | By: Clive Thompson
“Check it out. It's actually a jet engine," says Johnathan Goodwin, with a low whistle. "This thing is gonna be even cooler than I thought." We're hunched on the floor of Goodwin's gleaming workshop in Wichita, Kansas, surrounded by the shards of a wooden packing crate. Inside the wreckage sits his latest toy--a 1985-issue turbine engine originally designed for the military. It can spin at a blistering 60,000 rpm and burn almost any fuel. And Goodwin has some startling plans for this esoteric piece of hardware: He's going to use it to create the most fuel-efficient Hummer in history.
Goodwin, a 37-year-old who looks like Kevin Costner with better hair, is a professional car hacker. The spic-and-span shop is filled with eight monstrous trucks and cars--Hummers, Yukon XLs, Jeeps--in various states of undress. His four tattooed, twentysomething grease monkeys crawl all over them with wrenches and welding torches.
Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that's up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it'll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will be the turbine, Goodwin's secret ingredient. Whenever the truck's juice runs low, the turbine will roar into action for a few seconds, powering a generator with such gusto that it'll recharge a set of "supercapacitor" batteries in seconds. This means the H3's electric motor will be able to perform awesome feats of acceleration and power over and over again, like a Prius on steroids. What's more, the turbine will burn biodiesel, a renewable fuel with much lower emissions than normal diesel; a hydrogen-injection system will then cut those low emissions in half. And when it's time to fill the tank, he'll be able to just pull up to the back of a diner and dump in its excess french-fry grease--as he does with his many other Hummers. Oh, yeah, he adds, the horsepower will double--from 300 to 600.
"Conservatively," Goodwin muses, scratching his chin, "it'll get 60 miles to the gallon. With 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You'll be able to smoke the tires. And it's going to be superefficient."
He laughs. "Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!"
This is the sort of work that's making Goodwin famous in the world of underground car modders. He is a virtuoso of fuel economy. He takes the hugest American cars on the road and rejiggers them to get up to quadruple their normal mileage and burn low-emission renewable fuels grown on U.S. soil--all while doubling their horsepower. The result thrills eco-evangelists and red-meat Americans alike: a vehicle that's simultaneously green and mean. And word's getting out. In the corner of his office sits Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1987 Jeep Wagoneer, which Goodwin is converting to biodiesel; soon, Neil Young will be shipping him a 1960 Lincoln Continental to transform into a biodiesel--electric hybrid.
His target for Young's car? One hundred miles per gallon.
This is more than a mere American Chopper--style makeover. Goodwin's experiments point to a radically cleaner and cheaper future for the American car. The numbers are simple: With a $5,000 bolt-on kit he co-engineered--the poor man's version of a Goodwin conversion--he can immediately transform any diesel vehicle to burn 50% less fuel and produce 80% fewer emissions. On a full-size gas-guzzler, he figures the kit earns its money back in about a year--or, on a regular car, two--while hitting an emissions target from the outset that's more stringent than any regulation we're likely to see in our lifetime. "Johnathan's in a league of his own," says Martin Tobias, CEO of Imperium Renewables, the nation's largest producer of biodiesel. "Nobody out there is doing experiments like he is."
Nobody--particularly not Detroit. Indeed, Goodwin is doing precisely what the big American automakers have always insisted is impossible. They have long argued that fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel cars are a hard sell because they're too cramped and meek for our market. They've lobbied aggressively against raising fuel-efficiency and emissions standards, insisting that either would doom the domestic industry. Yet the truth is that Detroit is now getting squeezed from all sides. This fall, labor unrest is brewing, and after decades of inertia on fuel-economy standards, Congress is jockeying to boost the target for cars to 35 mpg, a 10 mpg jump (which is either ridiculously large or ridiculously small, depending on whom you ask). More than a dozen states are enacting laws requiring steep reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Meanwhile, gas prices have hovered around $3 per gallon for more than a year. And European and Japanese carmakers are flooding the market with diesel and hybrid machines that get up to 40% better mileage than the best American cars; some, such as Mercedes's new BlueTec diesel sedans, deliver that kind of efficiency and more horsepower.
General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, in short, have a choice: Cede still more ground--or mount a technological counterattack.
Goodwin's work proves that a counterattack is possible, and maybe easier than many of us imagined. If the dream is a big, badass ride that's also clean, well, he's there already. As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways. "They could do all this stuff if they wanted to," he tells me, slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. "The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use." He doesn't have an engineering degree; he didn't even go to high school: "I've just been messing around and seeing what I can do."
All of which raises an interesting possibility. Has this guy in a far-off Kansas garage figured out the way to save Detroit?
America's most revolutionary innovations, it has long been said, sprang from the ramshackle dens of amateurs. Thomas Edison was a home-schooled dropout who got his start tinkering with battery parts; Chester Carlson invented the photocopier in his cramped Long Island kitchen. NASA, desperate for breakthroughs to help it return to the moon, has set up million-dollar prizes to encourage private citizens to come forward with any idea, no matter how crazy. As the theory goes, only those outside big industries can truly reinvent them.
Goodwin is certainly an outsider. He grew up in a dirt-poor Kansas family with six siblings and by age 13 began taking on piecework in local auto shops to help his mother pay the bills. He particularly enjoyed jamming oversized engines into places no one believed they'd fit. He put truck engines inside Camaros, Grand Nationals, and Super Bees; he even put a methanol-fueled turbocharger on a tiny Yamaha Banshee four-wheeler. "We took that thing from 35 horsepower to 208," he recalls. "It was crazy. We couldn't put enough fins on the back to keep it on the ground." After dropping out of school in the seventh grade, he made a living by buying up totaled cars and making them as good as new. "That," he says, "was my school."
Along the way, Goodwin also adopted two views common among Americans, but typically thought to be in conflict: a love of big cars and a concern about the environment. He is an avid, if somewhat nonideological, environmentalist. He believes global warming is a serious problem, that reliance on foreign oil is a mistake, and that butt-kicking fuel economy is just good for business. But Goodwin is also guiltlessly addicted to enormous, brawling rides, precisely the sort known to suck down Saudi gasoline. (I spied one lonely small sports car in the corner of his garage, but he confessed he has no plans to work on it right now.) When he picked me up from my hotel, he drove a four-door 2008 Cadillac Escalade XL that should have had its own tugboat. He parallel parked it in one try.
If Goodwin is an artist, though, his canvas has been the Hummer. His first impression of the thing was inauspicious. In 1990, he bought an H1 in Denver and began driving it back to Kansas. Within 50 miles, the bolts in the transmission shook loose, forcing him to stop to fix it. "By the time I made it home, after three roadside repairs, I pretty much knew that the Hummer was not all it should be," he told me. He didn't think much of the 200 horsepower engine, either, which did "zero to 60 in two days. It was a piece of junk."
So Goodwin decided to prove that environmentalism and power could go together--by making his new lemon into exhibit A. First, he pulled the gas engine so he could drop in a Duramax V8, GM's core diesel for large trucks. Diesel technology is crucial to all of Goodwin's innovations because it offers several advantages over traditional gasoline engines. Pound for pound, diesel offers more power and torque; it's also inherently more efficient, offering up to 40% better mileage and 20% lower emissions in engines of comparable size. What's more, many diesel engines can easily accept a wide range of biodiesel--from the high-quality stuff produced at refineries to the melted chicken grease siphoned off from the local KFC.
"Think about it," Goodwin laughs. "A 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and will do zero to 60 in five seconds!"
Putting a diesel engine in the Hummer, however, required Goodwin to crack GM's antitheft system, which makes it a pain to swap out the engine. In that system, the engine communicates electronically with the body, fuel supply, and ignition; if you don't have all the original components, the car won't start. Goodwin jerry-rigged a set of cables to trick the engine into believing the starter system had broken, sending it into "fail-safe mode"--a backdoor mechanism installed at the factory. (At one point in his story, Goodwin wanders over to a battered cardboard box in the corner of the garage and hauls out an octopuslike tangle of wires--"the MacGyver," his hacking device. "I could have sold this for a lot of money on eBay," he chuckles.)
Once he'd picked the car's lock, Goodwin installed the Duramax and a five-speed Allison--the required transmission for a Duramax, which also helps give it race-car-like control and a rapid take off. After five days' worth of work, the Hummer was getting about 18 mpg--double the factory 9 mpg--and twice the original horsepower. He drove it over to a local restaurant and mooched some discarded oil from its deep fryer, strained the oil through a pair of jeans, and poured it into the engine. It ran perfectly.
But Goodwin wanted more. While researching alternative fuels, he learned about the work of Uli Kruger, a German who has spent decades in Australia exploring techniques for blending fuels that normally don't mix. One of Kruger's systems induces hydrogen into the air intake of a diesel engine, producing a cascade of emissions-reducing and mileage-boosting effects. The hydrogen, ignited by the diesel combustion, burns extremely clean, producing only water as a by-product. It also displaces up to 50% of the diesel needed to fuel the car, effectively doubling the diesel's mileage and cutting emissions by at least half. Better yet, the water produced from the hydrogen combustion cools down the engine, so the diesel combustion generates fewer particulates--and thus fewer nitrogen-oxide emissions.
"You can feed it hydrogen, diesel, biodiesel, corn oil--pretty much anything but water."
"It's really a fantastic chain reaction, all these good things happening at once," Kruger tells me. He has also successfully introduced natural gas--a ubiquitous and generally cheap fuel--into a diesel-burning engine, which likewise doubles the mileage while slashing emissions. In another system, he uses heat from the diesel engine to vaporize ethanol to the point where it can be injected into the diesel combustion chambers as a booster, with similar emissions-cutting effects.
Goodwin began building on Kruger's model. In 2005, he set to work adapting his own H1 Hummer to burn a combination of hydrogen and biodiesel. He installed a Duramax in the Hummer and plopped a carbon-fiber tank of supercompressed hydrogen into the bed. The results were impressive: A single tank of hydrogen lasted for 700 miles and cut the diesel consumption in half. It also doubled the horsepower. "It reduces your carbon footprint by a huge, huge amount, but you still get all the power of the Duramax," he says, slapping the H1 on the quarter panel. "And you can feed it hydrogen, diesel, biodiesel, corn oil--pretty much anything but water."
Two years ago, Goodwin got a rare chance to show off his tricks to some of the car industry's most prominent engineers. He tells me the story: He was driving a converted H2 to the SEMA show, the nation's biggest annual specialty automotive confab, and stopped en route at a Denver hotel. When he woke up in the morning, there were 20 people standing around his Hummer. Did I run over somebody? he wondered. As it turned out, they were engineers for GM, the Hummer's manufacturer. They noticed that Goodwin's H2 looked modified. "Does it have a diesel engine in it?"
"Yeah," he said.
"No way," they replied.
He opened the hood, "and they're just all in and out and around the valves and checking it out," he says. They asked to hear it run, sending a stab of fear through Goodwin. He'd filled it up with grease from a Chinese restaurant the day before and was worried that the cold morning might have solidified the fuel. But it started up on the first try and ran so quietly that at first they didn't believe it was really on. "When you start a diesel engine up on vegetable oil," Goodwin says, "you turn the key, and you hear nothing. Because of the lubricating power of the oil, it's just so smooth. Whisper quiet. And they're like, 'Is it running? Yeah, you can hear the fan going.'"
One engineer turned and said, "GM said this wouldn't work."
"Well," Goodwin replied, "here it is."
Goodwin's feats of engineering have become gradually more visible over the past year. Last summer, Imperium Renewables contacted MTV's show Pimp My Ride about creating an Earth Day special in which Goodwin would convert a muscle car to run on biodiesel. The show chose a '65 Chevy Impala, and when the conversion was done, he'd doubled its mileage to 25 mpg and increased its pull from 250 to 800 horsepower. As a stunt, MTV drag-raced the Impala against a Lamborghini on California's Pomona Raceway. "The Impala blew the Lamborghini away," says Kevin Kluemper, the lead calibration engineer for GM's Allison transmission unit, who'd flown down to help with the conversion. Schwarzenegger, who was on the set that day, asked Goodwin on the spot to convert his Wagoneer to biodiesel.
Observers of Goodwin's work say his skill lies in an uncanny ability to visualize a mechanical system in precise detail, long before he picks up a wrench. (Goodwin says he does much of his mental work during long drives.) "He has talent unknown to any mortal," says Mad Mike, Pimp My Ride's host. "He has this ability to see things so exactly, and I still don't know how he does it."
For his part, Goodwin argues he's merely "a problem solver. Most people try to make things more complicated than they are." He speaks of the major carmakers with a sort of mild disdain: If he can piece together cleaner vehicles out of existing GM parts and a bit of hot-rod elbow grease, why can't they bake that kind of ingenuity into their production lines? Prod him enough on the subject and his mellowness peels away, revealing a guy fired by an almost manic frustration. "Everybody should be driving a plug-in vehicle right now," he complains, in one of his laconic engineering lectures, as we wander through the blistering Kansas heat to a nearby Mexican restaurant. "I can go next door to Ace Hardware and buy a DC electric motor, go out to my four-wheel-drive truck, remove the transmission and engine, bolt the electric motor onto the back of the transfer case, put a series of lead-acid batteries up to 240 volts in the back of the bed, and we're good to go. I guarantee you I could drive all around town and do whatever I need, go home at night, and hook up a couple of battery chargers, plug one into an outlet, and be good to go the next day.
"Detroit could do all this stuff overnight if it wanted to," he adds.
In reality, Goodwin's work has begun to influence some of Detroit's top auto designers, but through curious and circuitous routes. In 2005, Tom Holm, the founder of EcoTrek, a nonprofit that promotes the use of alternative fuels, heard about Goodwin through the Hummer-junkie grapevine and hired him. When Holm showed GM the vehicles Goodwin converted, the company was duly impressed. Internally, Hummer executives had long been looking for a way to blunt criticism of the H2's gas-guzzling tendencies and saw Goodwin's vehicles as an object lesson in what was possible. So GM decided to flip the switch: It announced the same year that, beginning in 2008, it would convert its gasoline Hummers to run on ethanol; by 2010, it said, Hummers would be biodiesel-compatible.
"It was an influence," concedes Hummer general manager Martin Walsh, of the EcoTrek vehicles. "We wanted to be environmentally responsible by having engines in Hummers that run on renewable fuels." But until I contacted Hummer for this story, GM didn't know that the man behind those machines was none other than Goodwin.
GM's commitment is a start, however halting. Overall, though, Detroit still seems to be all but paralyzed by the challenges of fuel economy, emissions, and alternative fuels. And it's not just about greed or laziness: Talk to car-industry experts, and they'll point out a number of serious barriers to introducing radically new alternative-fuel vehicles on a scale that will make a difference. One of the highest is that low-emission fuels--biodiesel, ethanol, electricity, hydrogen, all of which account for less than 3% of the nation's fuel supply--just aren't widely available on American highways. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem. People won't buy alternative-fuel cars until it's easy to fill them up, but alternative fuel makers won't ramp up production until there's a viable market.
Goodwin admits all these things are true but believes the country could be weaned off gasoline in a three-step process. The first would be for Detroit to aggressively roll out diesel engines, much as Europe has already begun to do (some 50% of all European cars run diesel). In a single stroke, that would improve the nation's mileage by as much as 40%, and, because diesel fuel is already widely available, drivers could take that step with a minimum of disruption. What's more, given that many diesel engines can also run homegrown biodiesel, a mass conversion to diesel would help kick-start that market. (This could have geopolitical implications as well as environmental and economic ones: The Department of Transportation estimated in 2004 that if we converted merely one-third of America's passenger cars and light trucks to diesel, we'd reduce our oil consumption by up to 1.4 million barrels of oil per day--precisely the amount we import from Saudi Arabia.)
The second step in Goodwin's scheme would be to produce diesel-electric hybrid cars. This would double the mileage on even the biggest diesel vehicles. The third phase would be to produce electric hybrids that run in "dual fuel" mode, burning biodiesel along with hydrogen, ethanol, natural gas, or propane. This is the concept Goodwin is proving out in his turbine-enhanced H3 Hummer and in Neil Young's Lincoln: "At that point, your mileage just goes really, really high, and your emissions are incredibly low," he says. Since those vehicles can run on regular diesel or biodiesel--and without any alternative fuel at all, if need be--drivers wouldn't have to worry about getting stranded on the interstate. At the same time, as more and more dual-fuel cars hit the road, they would goose demand for genuinely national ethanol, hydrogen, and biodiesel grids.
For Goodwin, navigating this process is all about imagination and adaptability. "The point is to design cars that are flexible," he says. "You'll see a change in how vehicles are fueled in the future. Which fuel source will be the exclusive one or the one that'll take over the petroleum base is, you know, anybody's guess, so it's like the wild, wild West of fuel technology right now. I think it'll be a combination between a few different fuels. I know hydrogen will definitely come around."
Imagination and vision, of course, are often rewarded. As global pressure increases on the United States to reduce our carbon emissions, those rewards are likely to get juicier. Under some versions of legislation being considered in Congress, for example, companies voluntarily deploying superefficient vehicles in large fleets could be awarded substantial offsets. Take DHL, the FedEx rival: Goodwin says his company, SAE Energy, is negotiating with the shipper to convert 800 of its vehicles to dual fuel. "We could get them an offset of something like 70 cents a gallon," Goodwin says, "and reduce their cost of fuel by 50%."
Industry insiders and observers agree with many of Goodwin's prescriptions, particularly his concept of fuel flexibility. "We have to have alternatives," says Beau Boeckmann, vice president of California's Galpin Motors, the largest Ford dealership in the country, who recently partnered with Goodwin to convert a 2008 F450 truck to hydrogen and biodiesel. "Only with a combination of things can we get alternative fuels off the ground." Boeckmann believes hydrogen is the true "silver bullet" for ending greenhouse gases but thinks it'll take more than a decade to figure out how to create and distribute it cheaply. Mary Beth Stanek, GM's director of environment, energy, and safety policy, also agrees with the multifuel approach--and points out that this is precisely how Brazil weaned itself from regular gasoline. "They pull up to the pump, and they've got a whole bunch of different choices," she notes. She, too, predicts diesel will make a comeback because of its inherent fuel efficiency: "You will see more vehicles going back to diesel over a lot of different lines."
Yet in reality, American carmakers seem conspicuously slow on the uptake. Stanek is about as ardent a fan of alternative fuels as you're likely to find inside GM, but even she admits no one there is seriously thinking of abandoning the gasoline engine anytime soon. The 300-million-gallon U.S. biodiesel business is a fraction of the 12-billion-gallon ethanol one. And Detroit is extremely cautious about what the market can bear.
A Detroit carmaker does, of course, have to worry about selling millions of cars at reasonable prices. But we've been hearing this refrain for a long, long time. And with European and Japanese carmakers driving ever harder into our market--and with Chrysler having become just another meal for Cerberus Capital--this hardly seems like the time to be overly cautious. (Those ultralow-emission Mercedes BlueTec diesels, for example, include a four-wheel-drive sedan that gets 37 mpg and goes from zero to 60 in 6.6 seconds.) Moreover, after decades of consumer apathy, improving fuel economy and reducing carbon output are becoming urgent national priorities. The green groundswell has arrived, and, given the stakes, anyone who ignores it does so at his peril. If Detroit can't sell diesel now--especially a clean, high-performance, money-saving diesel--it never will.
With U.S. carmakers being stripped for parts, now is hardly the time for them to play it safe.
Goodwin, perhaps, can afford to be a visionary. He has the luxury of converting cars for fancy clients who'll pay handsomely to drive on higher moral ground. (He charges $28,000 for a "basic H2 conversion to diesel--custom concept cars cost far more.") The future of the American car will likely be won by an automaker that can split the difference--one that may innovate more slowly than Goodwin would like, but a hell of a lot faster than the Big Three.
Goodwin himself seems more oracle than implementer, slightly unsure of how his ideas could be brought to the masses. He's working on patenting aspects of his and Kruger's dual-fuel work and would love to license it to the big carmakers. But the truth is, he's a mechanic's mechanic--happiest when he's solving some technical puzzle. He loves getting his hands dirty, "throwing wrenches around" in his shop, pioneering some weird new way to fuel a car. Today, he's thinking about taking his wife's Infiniti, outfitting it with a tank of ether, and powering the engine via blasts of compressed air in the cylinders. "Zero emissions!" he crows. It's the visionary inventor's curse: constantly distracted by shiny objects.
Goodwin eyes the turbine, which he has dragged out to the center of the floor. Just for kicks, he says, he's thinking of mounting it on a wheelie board and firing it up. "I'd love to see how fast that goes," he says. "I'm just not sure how I'm going to steer it."
Feedback: thompson@fastcompany.com
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Friday, October 26, 2007
Sob pressão, governo deve legalizar plantio do pinhão-manso
QUINTA, 25 OUTUBRO 2007 . VALOR ECONÔMICO
A explosão do plantio de soja transgênica no fim dos anos 90 forçou o governo legalizar o seu plantio. Agora o mesmo acontece com o pinhão-manso. Pressionado por produtores e usineiros, o governo vai alterar a legislação para que a produção comercial de sementes e mudas seja legalizada.
A Lei no 10.711/03 estabelece que somente variedades de plantas inscritas no Registro Nacional de Cultivares podem ser produzidas em escala comercial. No caso da soja, por exemplo, há mais de 400 variedades inscritas. Como o pinhão-manso não era utilizado para produção comercial, ainda não tinha o registro e, por isso, há cerca de 45 dias, uma carga de 10 toneladas foi apreendida no Mato Grosso. “Isso motivou os produtores a pedirem uma solução ao governo, que afinal é o que mais defende o plantio do pinhão-manso para biodiesel”, afirma Mike Lu, presidente da recém-criada Associação Brasileira dos Produtores de Pinhão-Manso (ABPPM).
Sob pressão política, o Ministério da Agricultura aceitou inscrever a planta no Registro Nacional de Cultivares, mesmo sem estudos sobre a origem genética da cultura. No entanto, o pinhão foi inscrito como espécie, e não como variedade ou cultivar. A produção ficará condicionada à assinatura de um termo de compromisso entre produtores e processadores e depende do crivo da Consultoria Jurídica do Ministério da Agricultura.
“O problema é que não existem estudos sobre o pinhão-manso no Brasil. Hoje não sabemos sequer quais são as variedades disponíveis”, afirma Marcos Drummond, pesquisador da Embrapa Semi Árido. Segundo ele, estudos internacionais afirmam que a planta pode produzir 8 mil quilos por hectare, mas estudos feitos pela Embrapa apontam uma produtividade média de 1,1 mil quilos por hectare com irrigação. “Houve muita pressão pelo governo para que a Embrapa desse aval ao plantio, mas o que podemos dizer até agora é que a planta tem potencial, mas ainda falta saber qual a melhor variedade e a melhor maneira de cultivá-lo”, diz Drummond.
Álvaro Nunes Viana, diretor de Fiscalização de Insumos Agrícolas do ministério, pondera que o artigo 47 da Lei de Sementes permite a inscrição como espécie. “Há limitações ao plantio. Não tem um sistema, a maturação não é uniforme e há risco de disseminação de pragas e doenças. Não podemos ficar omissos, em nome do interesse público, e também não podemos endossar totalmente”.
O acordo político patrocinado pelo ministro da Agricultura, Reinhold Stephanes, prevê um plano de monitoramento para garantir critérios de cultivo. “A Embrapa e a Epamig vão aproveitar para obter dados para o sistema de cultivo”, diz Viana. “Temos que alertar para os riscos de um fracasso”, afirma.
De acordo com a ABPPM, enquanto o quilo de soja (que rende 200 ml de óleo) é vendida a R$ 0,67 em média, o quilo da semente de pinhão-manso custa R$ 0,30 e gera em torno de 400 ml de óleo bruto. Conforme dados da Embrapa, a área plantada com pinhão-manso no país saltou de 500 hectares em 2006 para 20 mil neste ano. E a previsão é aumentar para 50 mil hectares no próximo ano, o que exigiria uma produção adicional de 300 toneladas de sementes.
Cibelle Bouças e Mauro Zanatta
A explosão do plantio de soja transgênica no fim dos anos 90 forçou o governo legalizar o seu plantio. Agora o mesmo acontece com o pinhão-manso. Pressionado por produtores e usineiros, o governo vai alterar a legislação para que a produção comercial de sementes e mudas seja legalizada.
A Lei no 10.711/03 estabelece que somente variedades de plantas inscritas no Registro Nacional de Cultivares podem ser produzidas em escala comercial. No caso da soja, por exemplo, há mais de 400 variedades inscritas. Como o pinhão-manso não era utilizado para produção comercial, ainda não tinha o registro e, por isso, há cerca de 45 dias, uma carga de 10 toneladas foi apreendida no Mato Grosso. “Isso motivou os produtores a pedirem uma solução ao governo, que afinal é o que mais defende o plantio do pinhão-manso para biodiesel”, afirma Mike Lu, presidente da recém-criada Associação Brasileira dos Produtores de Pinhão-Manso (ABPPM).
Sob pressão política, o Ministério da Agricultura aceitou inscrever a planta no Registro Nacional de Cultivares, mesmo sem estudos sobre a origem genética da cultura. No entanto, o pinhão foi inscrito como espécie, e não como variedade ou cultivar. A produção ficará condicionada à assinatura de um termo de compromisso entre produtores e processadores e depende do crivo da Consultoria Jurídica do Ministério da Agricultura.
“O problema é que não existem estudos sobre o pinhão-manso no Brasil. Hoje não sabemos sequer quais são as variedades disponíveis”, afirma Marcos Drummond, pesquisador da Embrapa Semi Árido. Segundo ele, estudos internacionais afirmam que a planta pode produzir 8 mil quilos por hectare, mas estudos feitos pela Embrapa apontam uma produtividade média de 1,1 mil quilos por hectare com irrigação. “Houve muita pressão pelo governo para que a Embrapa desse aval ao plantio, mas o que podemos dizer até agora é que a planta tem potencial, mas ainda falta saber qual a melhor variedade e a melhor maneira de cultivá-lo”, diz Drummond.
Álvaro Nunes Viana, diretor de Fiscalização de Insumos Agrícolas do ministério, pondera que o artigo 47 da Lei de Sementes permite a inscrição como espécie. “Há limitações ao plantio. Não tem um sistema, a maturação não é uniforme e há risco de disseminação de pragas e doenças. Não podemos ficar omissos, em nome do interesse público, e também não podemos endossar totalmente”.
O acordo político patrocinado pelo ministro da Agricultura, Reinhold Stephanes, prevê um plano de monitoramento para garantir critérios de cultivo. “A Embrapa e a Epamig vão aproveitar para obter dados para o sistema de cultivo”, diz Viana. “Temos que alertar para os riscos de um fracasso”, afirma.
De acordo com a ABPPM, enquanto o quilo de soja (que rende 200 ml de óleo) é vendida a R$ 0,67 em média, o quilo da semente de pinhão-manso custa R$ 0,30 e gera em torno de 400 ml de óleo bruto. Conforme dados da Embrapa, a área plantada com pinhão-manso no país saltou de 500 hectares em 2006 para 20 mil neste ano. E a previsão é aumentar para 50 mil hectares no próximo ano, o que exigiria uma produção adicional de 300 toneladas de sementes.
Cibelle Bouças e Mauro Zanatta
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Poison plant could help to cure the planet
The jatropha bush seems an unlikely prize in the hunt for alternative energy, being an ugly, fast-growing and poisonous weed. Hitherto, its use to humanity has principally been as a remedy for constipation. Very soon, however, it may be powering your car.
Almost overnight, the unloved Jatropha curcushas become an agricultural and economic celebrity, with the discovery that it may be the ideal biofuel crop, an alternative to fossil fuels for a world dangerously dependent on oil supplies and deeply alarmed by the effects of global warming.
The hardy jatropha, resilient to pests and resistant to drought, produces seeds with up to 40 per cent oil content. When the seeds are crushed, the resulting jatropha oil can be burnt in a standard diesel car, while the residue can also be processed into biomass to power electricity plants.
As the search for alternative energy sources gathers pace and urgency, the jatropha has provoked something like a gold rush. Last week BP announced that it was investing almost £32 million in a jatropha joint venture with the British biofuels company D1 Oils.
Even Bob Geldof has stamped his cachet on jatropha, by becoming a special adviser to Helius Energy, a British company developing the use of jatropha as an alternative to fossil fuels. Lex Worrall, its chief executive, says: "Every hectare can produce 2.7 tonnes of oil and about 4 tonnes of biomass. Every 8,000 hectares of the plant can run a 1.5 megawatt station, enough to power 2,500 homes."
Jatropha grows in tropical and subtropical climates. Whereas other feed-stocks for biofuel, such as palm oil, rape seed oil or corn for ethanol, require reasonable soils on which other crops might be grown, jatropha is a tough survivor prepared to put down roots almost anywhere.
Scientists say that it can grow in the poorest wasteland, generating topsoil and helping to stall erosion, but also absorbing carbon dioxide as it grows, thus making it carbon-neutral even when burnt. A jatropha bush can live for up to 50 years, producing oil in its second year of growth, and survive up to three years of consecutive drought.
In India about 11 million hectares have been identified as potential land on which to grow jatropha. The first jatropha-fuelled power station is expected to begin supplying electricity in Swaziland in three years. Meanwhile, companies from Europe and India have begun buying up land in Africa as potential jatropha plantations.
Jatropha plantations have been laid out on either side of the railway between Bombay and Delhi, and the train is said to run on more than 15 per cent biofuel. Backers say that the plant can produce four times more fuel per hectare than soya, and ten times more than corn. "Those who are working with jatropha," Sanju Khan, a site manager for D1 Oils, told the BBC, "are working with the new generation crop, developing a crop from a wild plant — which is hugely exciting."
Jatropha, a native of Central America, was brought to Europe by Portuguese explorers in the 16th century and has since spread worldwide, even though, until recently, it had few uses: malaria treatment, a windbreak for animals, live fencing and candle-mak-ing. An ingredient in folk remedies around the world, it earned the nickname "physic nut", but its sap is a skin irritant, and ingesting three untreated seeds can kill a person.
Jatropha has also found a strong supporter in Sir Nicholas Stern, the government economist who emphasised the dangers of global warming in a report this year. He recently advised South Africa to "look for biofuel technologies that can be grown on marginal land, perhaps jatropha".
However, some fear that in areas dependent on subsistence farming it could force out food crops, increasing the risk of famine.
Some countries are also cautious for other reasons: last year Western Australia banned the plant as invasive and highly toxic to people and animals.
Yet a combination of economic, climatic and political factors have made the search for a more effective biofuel a priority among energy companies. New regulations in Britain require that biofuels comprise 5 per cent of the transport fuel mix by 2010, and the EU has mandated that by 2020 all cars must run on 20 per cent biodiesel. Biodiesel reduces carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 80 per cent compared with petroleum diesel, according to the US Energy Department.
Under the deal between BP and D1, £80 million will be invested in jatropha over the next five years, with plantations in India, southern Africa and SouthEast Asia. There are no exact figures for the amount of land already under jatropha cultivation, but the area is expanding fast. China is planning an 80,000-acre plantation in Sichuan, and the BPD1 team hopes to have a million hectares under cultivation over the next four years.
Jatropha has long been prized for its medicinal qualities. Now it might just help to cure the planet.
- D1 Oils, the UK company leading the jatropha revolution, is growing 430,000 acres of the plant to feed its biodiesel operation on Teesside — 44,000 acres more than three months ago, after a huge planting programme in India. It has also planted two 1,235-acre trial sites this year in West Java, Indonesia. If successful, these will become a 25,000-acre plantation. Elloitt Mannis, the chief executive, says that the aim is to develop energy "from the earth to the engine".
Jatropha: costs and benefits
- Jatropha needs at least 600mm (23in) of rain a year to thrive. However, it can survive three consecutive years of drought by dropping its leaves
- It is excellent at preventing soil erosion, and the leaves that it drops act as soil-enriching mulch
- The plant prefers alkaline soils
- The cost of 1,000 jatropha saplings (enough for one acre) in Pakistan is about £50, or 5p each
- The cost of 1kg of jatropha seeds in India is the equivalent of about 7p. Each jatropha seedling should be given an area two metres square.
- 20 per cent of seedlings planted will not survive
- Jatropha seedlings yield seeds in the first year after plantation
Almost overnight, the unloved Jatropha curcushas become an agricultural and economic celebrity, with the discovery that it may be the ideal biofuel crop, an alternative to fossil fuels for a world dangerously dependent on oil supplies and deeply alarmed by the effects of global warming.
The hardy jatropha, resilient to pests and resistant to drought, produces seeds with up to 40 per cent oil content. When the seeds are crushed, the resulting jatropha oil can be burnt in a standard diesel car, while the residue can also be processed into biomass to power electricity plants.
As the search for alternative energy sources gathers pace and urgency, the jatropha has provoked something like a gold rush. Last week BP announced that it was investing almost £32 million in a jatropha joint venture with the British biofuels company D1 Oils.
Even Bob Geldof has stamped his cachet on jatropha, by becoming a special adviser to Helius Energy, a British company developing the use of jatropha as an alternative to fossil fuels. Lex Worrall, its chief executive, says: "Every hectare can produce 2.7 tonnes of oil and about 4 tonnes of biomass. Every 8,000 hectares of the plant can run a 1.5 megawatt station, enough to power 2,500 homes."
Jatropha grows in tropical and subtropical climates. Whereas other feed-stocks for biofuel, such as palm oil, rape seed oil or corn for ethanol, require reasonable soils on which other crops might be grown, jatropha is a tough survivor prepared to put down roots almost anywhere.
Scientists say that it can grow in the poorest wasteland, generating topsoil and helping to stall erosion, but also absorbing carbon dioxide as it grows, thus making it carbon-neutral even when burnt. A jatropha bush can live for up to 50 years, producing oil in its second year of growth, and survive up to three years of consecutive drought.
In India about 11 million hectares have been identified as potential land on which to grow jatropha. The first jatropha-fuelled power station is expected to begin supplying electricity in Swaziland in three years. Meanwhile, companies from Europe and India have begun buying up land in Africa as potential jatropha plantations.
Jatropha plantations have been laid out on either side of the railway between Bombay and Delhi, and the train is said to run on more than 15 per cent biofuel. Backers say that the plant can produce four times more fuel per hectare than soya, and ten times more than corn. "Those who are working with jatropha," Sanju Khan, a site manager for D1 Oils, told the BBC, "are working with the new generation crop, developing a crop from a wild plant — which is hugely exciting."
Jatropha, a native of Central America, was brought to Europe by Portuguese explorers in the 16th century and has since spread worldwide, even though, until recently, it had few uses: malaria treatment, a windbreak for animals, live fencing and candle-mak-ing. An ingredient in folk remedies around the world, it earned the nickname "physic nut", but its sap is a skin irritant, and ingesting three untreated seeds can kill a person.
Jatropha has also found a strong supporter in Sir Nicholas Stern, the government economist who emphasised the dangers of global warming in a report this year. He recently advised South Africa to "look for biofuel technologies that can be grown on marginal land, perhaps jatropha".
However, some fear that in areas dependent on subsistence farming it could force out food crops, increasing the risk of famine.
Some countries are also cautious for other reasons: last year Western Australia banned the plant as invasive and highly toxic to people and animals.
Yet a combination of economic, climatic and political factors have made the search for a more effective biofuel a priority among energy companies. New regulations in Britain require that biofuels comprise 5 per cent of the transport fuel mix by 2010, and the EU has mandated that by 2020 all cars must run on 20 per cent biodiesel. Biodiesel reduces carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 80 per cent compared with petroleum diesel, according to the US Energy Department.
Under the deal between BP and D1, £80 million will be invested in jatropha over the next five years, with plantations in India, southern Africa and SouthEast Asia. There are no exact figures for the amount of land already under jatropha cultivation, but the area is expanding fast. China is planning an 80,000-acre plantation in Sichuan, and the BPD1 team hopes to have a million hectares under cultivation over the next four years.
Jatropha has long been prized for its medicinal qualities. Now it might just help to cure the planet.
- D1 Oils, the UK company leading the jatropha revolution, is growing 430,000 acres of the plant to feed its biodiesel operation on Teesside — 44,000 acres more than three months ago, after a huge planting programme in India. It has also planted two 1,235-acre trial sites this year in West Java, Indonesia. If successful, these will become a 25,000-acre plantation. Elloitt Mannis, the chief executive, says that the aim is to develop energy "from the earth to the engine".
Jatropha: costs and benefits
- Jatropha needs at least 600mm (23in) of rain a year to thrive. However, it can survive three consecutive years of drought by dropping its leaves
- It is excellent at preventing soil erosion, and the leaves that it drops act as soil-enriching mulch
- The plant prefers alkaline soils
- The cost of 1,000 jatropha saplings (enough for one acre) in Pakistan is about £50, or 5p each
- The cost of 1kg of jatropha seeds in India is the equivalent of about 7p. Each jatropha seedling should be given an area two metres square.
- 20 per cent of seedlings planted will not survive
- Jatropha seedlings yield seeds in the first year after plantation
Friday, October 19, 2007
Pinhão-manso pode ser liberado nos próximos dias
QUINTA, 18 OUTUBRO 200
O Ministério da Agricultura, Pecuária e Abastecimento (MAPA) apresentou uma possível solução para liberar o plantio e venda de sementes de pinhão-manso (Jatropha curcas L.). Em reunião realizada ontem (17) com pesquisadores da Embrapa, representantes da indústria de biodiesel e plantadores, o ministério sinalizou a possibilidade de inscrever a espécie no Registro Nacional de Cultivares (RNC).
O registro, que seria apenas como espécie e não como cultivar, ainda precisa ser validado pela área jurídica do ministério, mas a expectativa dos presentes no encontro é que haja um desfecho favorável nos próximos dias.
Se aprovada, a solução contornaria o problema que veio à tona há um mês e meio, quando a BiodieselBR.com noticiou que sem registro no RNC o cultivo do pinhão-manso fica proibido.
A notícia da proibição pegou de surpresa produtores e usineiros que já vinham investindo no plantio da oleaginosa.
“Resolvemos o problema no curto prazo. [A decisão] coloca todo mundo na legalidade”, frisa Mike Lu, presidente da Associação Brasileira de Plantadores de Pinhão-Manso (ABPPM).
A surpresa dos senadores veio quando mostrei que a lei proíbe o plantio de pinhão-manso no Brasil
Segundo Lu, o registro como espécie não dá aos produtores o direito de receber financiamentos, o que só ocorrerá quando o MAPA fizer o registro da cultivar. Um pedido de registro feito pela Empresa de Pesquisa Agropecuária de Minas Gerais (Epamig) está sob análise no ministério.
Além disso, segundo a proposta de liberação, a venda de sementes só seria autorizada se produtor e comprador assinarem um termo de compromisso a ser elaborado pelo MAPA. A medida serviria para deixar as partes cientes de que, para o ministério, faltam ainda informações importantes sobre o cultivo da planta.
O argumento da falta de informações irrita os usineiros, que acreditam no potencial do pinhão-manso para produzir biodiesel. “Esse é um problema do governo, que interrompeu várias vezes as pesquisas com a planta”, ataca Francisco Barreto, presidente da Bionasa, com sede em Porangatu (GO). “A maior parte das usinas já fomenta o plantio. O governo deveria ser mais rápido [na liberação] para dar confiabilidade a esse investimento”, afirma.
Para Barreto, o pinhão-manso “é prioridade absoluta.” Segundo ele, a Bionasa fez acordos de pesquisas sobre a oleaginosa com a Embrapa e universidades. A empresa fechará 2007 com 3.700 hectares plantados com pinhão-manso e pretende começar a usar a planta para produzir biodiesel a partir de 2011. A meta da empresa, que espera produzir 200 milhões de litros até julho de 2008, é chegar a 400 milhões até 2010.
O Ministério da Agricultura, Pecuária e Abastecimento (MAPA) apresentou uma possível solução para liberar o plantio e venda de sementes de pinhão-manso (Jatropha curcas L.). Em reunião realizada ontem (17) com pesquisadores da Embrapa, representantes da indústria de biodiesel e plantadores, o ministério sinalizou a possibilidade de inscrever a espécie no Registro Nacional de Cultivares (RNC).
O registro, que seria apenas como espécie e não como cultivar, ainda precisa ser validado pela área jurídica do ministério, mas a expectativa dos presentes no encontro é que haja um desfecho favorável nos próximos dias.
Se aprovada, a solução contornaria o problema que veio à tona há um mês e meio, quando a BiodieselBR.com noticiou que sem registro no RNC o cultivo do pinhão-manso fica proibido.
A notícia da proibição pegou de surpresa produtores e usineiros que já vinham investindo no plantio da oleaginosa.
“Resolvemos o problema no curto prazo. [A decisão] coloca todo mundo na legalidade”, frisa Mike Lu, presidente da Associação Brasileira de Plantadores de Pinhão-Manso (ABPPM).
A surpresa dos senadores veio quando mostrei que a lei proíbe o plantio de pinhão-manso no Brasil
Segundo Lu, o registro como espécie não dá aos produtores o direito de receber financiamentos, o que só ocorrerá quando o MAPA fizer o registro da cultivar. Um pedido de registro feito pela Empresa de Pesquisa Agropecuária de Minas Gerais (Epamig) está sob análise no ministério.
Além disso, segundo a proposta de liberação, a venda de sementes só seria autorizada se produtor e comprador assinarem um termo de compromisso a ser elaborado pelo MAPA. A medida serviria para deixar as partes cientes de que, para o ministério, faltam ainda informações importantes sobre o cultivo da planta.
O argumento da falta de informações irrita os usineiros, que acreditam no potencial do pinhão-manso para produzir biodiesel. “Esse é um problema do governo, que interrompeu várias vezes as pesquisas com a planta”, ataca Francisco Barreto, presidente da Bionasa, com sede em Porangatu (GO). “A maior parte das usinas já fomenta o plantio. O governo deveria ser mais rápido [na liberação] para dar confiabilidade a esse investimento”, afirma.
Para Barreto, o pinhão-manso “é prioridade absoluta.” Segundo ele, a Bionasa fez acordos de pesquisas sobre a oleaginosa com a Embrapa e universidades. A empresa fechará 2007 com 3.700 hectares plantados com pinhão-manso e pretende começar a usar a planta para produzir biodiesel a partir de 2011. A meta da empresa, que espera produzir 200 milhões de litros até julho de 2008, é chegar a 400 milhões até 2010.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Global Warming Weakens Trade Winds
The trade winds in the Pacific Ocean are weakening as a result of global warming, according to a new study that indicates changes to the region's biology are possible.
Using a combination of real-world observations and computer modeling, researchers conclude that a vast loop of circulating wind over the Pacific Ocean, known as the Walker circulation, has weakened by about 3.5 percent since the mid-1800s. The trade winds are the portion of the Walker circulation that blow across the ocean surface.
The researchers predict another 10 percent decrease by the end of the 21st century.
The effect, attributed at least in part to human-induced climate change, could disrupt food chains and reduce the biological productivity of the Pacific Ocean, scientists said.
The study was led by Gabriel Vecchi of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and is detailed in the May 4 issue of the journal Nature.
Humans to blame
The researchers used records of sea-level atmospheric pressure readings from as far back as the mid-1800s to reconstruct the wind intensity of the Walker circulation over the past 150 years. A computer climate model replicated the effect seen in the historical record.
Some of the computer simulations included the effects of human greenhouse gas emissions; others included only natural factors known to affect climate such as volcanic eruptions and solar variations.
"We were able to ask 'What if humans hadn't done anything? Or what if volcanoes erupted? Or if the sun hadn't varied?'" Vecchi said. "Our only way to account for the observed changes is through the impact of human activity, and principally from greenhouse gases from fossil fuel burning."
Earth's average temperature has risen by about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past century and many scientists believe greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide emissions from human activities are to blame.
"This is evidence supporting global warming and also evidence of our ability to make reasonable predictions of at least the large scale changes that we should expect from global warming," Vecchi told LiveScience.
By extrapolating their data and combining it with results from other models, the researchers predict the Walker circulation could slow by an additional 10 percent by 2100.
Driving force
The trade winds blow from the east at an angle towards the equator and have been used by sailors for centuries seeking to sail west. Christopher Columbus relied on the Atlantic's trade winds to carry him to North America. The winds get their name from their reliability: To say that a "wind blows trade" is to say that it blows on track.
The overall Walker circulation is powered by warm, rising air in the west Pacific Ocean and sinking cool air in the eastern Pacific.
This looping conveyer belt of winds has far-reaching effects on climate around the globe. It steers ocean currents and nourishes marine life across the equatorial Pacific and off the coast of South America by driving the upwelling of nutrient-rich cold water from ocean depths to the surface.
The Walker circulation is also primarily responsible for transporting water vapor that evaporates from the ocean surface west, towards Indonesia; there, the moisture rises up into the atmosphere, condenses, and falls back to Earth as rain.
The effects of global warming
Several theories on the effects of global warming predict a weakening of the Walker circulation. Scientists think it works like this:
To remain energetically balanced, the rate at which the atmosphere absorbs water vapor must be balanced by the rate of rainfall. But as temperatures rise and more water evaporates from the ocean, water vapor in the lower atmosphere increases rapidly. Because of various physical processes, however, the rate of rainfall does not increase as fast.
Since the atmosphere is absorbing moisture faster than it can dump it, and because wind is the major transporter of moisture into the atmosphere, air circulation must slow down if the energy balance is to be maintained.
A drop in winds could reduce the strength of both surface and subsurface ocean currents and dampen cold water upwelling at the equator.
"This could have important effects on ocean ecosystems," Vecchi said. "The ocean currents driven by the trade winds supply vital nutrients to near-surface ocean ecosystems across the equatorial Pacific, which is a major fishing region."
By Ker Than, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 03 May 2006 01:00 pm ET
Using a combination of real-world observations and computer modeling, researchers conclude that a vast loop of circulating wind over the Pacific Ocean, known as the Walker circulation, has weakened by about 3.5 percent since the mid-1800s. The trade winds are the portion of the Walker circulation that blow across the ocean surface.
The researchers predict another 10 percent decrease by the end of the 21st century.
The effect, attributed at least in part to human-induced climate change, could disrupt food chains and reduce the biological productivity of the Pacific Ocean, scientists said.
The study was led by Gabriel Vecchi of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and is detailed in the May 4 issue of the journal Nature.
Humans to blame
The researchers used records of sea-level atmospheric pressure readings from as far back as the mid-1800s to reconstruct the wind intensity of the Walker circulation over the past 150 years. A computer climate model replicated the effect seen in the historical record.
Some of the computer simulations included the effects of human greenhouse gas emissions; others included only natural factors known to affect climate such as volcanic eruptions and solar variations.
"We were able to ask 'What if humans hadn't done anything? Or what if volcanoes erupted? Or if the sun hadn't varied?'" Vecchi said. "Our only way to account for the observed changes is through the impact of human activity, and principally from greenhouse gases from fossil fuel burning."
Earth's average temperature has risen by about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past century and many scientists believe greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide emissions from human activities are to blame.
"This is evidence supporting global warming and also evidence of our ability to make reasonable predictions of at least the large scale changes that we should expect from global warming," Vecchi told LiveScience.
By extrapolating their data and combining it with results from other models, the researchers predict the Walker circulation could slow by an additional 10 percent by 2100.
Driving force
The trade winds blow from the east at an angle towards the equator and have been used by sailors for centuries seeking to sail west. Christopher Columbus relied on the Atlantic's trade winds to carry him to North America. The winds get their name from their reliability: To say that a "wind blows trade" is to say that it blows on track.
The overall Walker circulation is powered by warm, rising air in the west Pacific Ocean and sinking cool air in the eastern Pacific.
This looping conveyer belt of winds has far-reaching effects on climate around the globe. It steers ocean currents and nourishes marine life across the equatorial Pacific and off the coast of South America by driving the upwelling of nutrient-rich cold water from ocean depths to the surface.
The Walker circulation is also primarily responsible for transporting water vapor that evaporates from the ocean surface west, towards Indonesia; there, the moisture rises up into the atmosphere, condenses, and falls back to Earth as rain.
The effects of global warming
Several theories on the effects of global warming predict a weakening of the Walker circulation. Scientists think it works like this:
To remain energetically balanced, the rate at which the atmosphere absorbs water vapor must be balanced by the rate of rainfall. But as temperatures rise and more water evaporates from the ocean, water vapor in the lower atmosphere increases rapidly. Because of various physical processes, however, the rate of rainfall does not increase as fast.
Since the atmosphere is absorbing moisture faster than it can dump it, and because wind is the major transporter of moisture into the atmosphere, air circulation must slow down if the energy balance is to be maintained.
A drop in winds could reduce the strength of both surface and subsurface ocean currents and dampen cold water upwelling at the equator.
"This could have important effects on ocean ecosystems," Vecchi said. "The ocean currents driven by the trade winds supply vital nutrients to near-surface ocean ecosystems across the equatorial Pacific, which is a major fishing region."
By Ker Than, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 03 May 2006 01:00 pm ET
Monday, October 15, 2007
Turbine Free Wind Power: Alternative Alternative Energy
check this video:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1214137061?bctid=1233395616
Wind power is great, but those big turbines are inefficient (the bearings suck out a lot of energy) and, if you're a passing bird, dangerous. Shawn Frayne has come up with an alternative to this alternative energy, which he says is ten times more efficient than a turbine and, because it has no bearings, scales well to smaller sizes.
Inspired by the famous Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which you've all seen shaking itself apart, the Windbelt is a tight plastic strip stretched in a frame, joined to magnets at both ends. When the wind blows across the belt, it vibrates (like when you blow a blade of grass to make music) and the magnets move inside wire coils, generating power. This table top version will put out 40 milliwatts and can power an LED. It's cheap and simple, and can generate power from breezes as slow as 10mph, making it ideal for developing nations (California based Frayne worked in Haiti and saw a need for cheap power to replace dangerous kerosene lamps).
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1214137061?bctid=1233395616
Wind power is great, but those big turbines are inefficient (the bearings suck out a lot of energy) and, if you're a passing bird, dangerous. Shawn Frayne has come up with an alternative to this alternative energy, which he says is ten times more efficient than a turbine and, because it has no bearings, scales well to smaller sizes.
Inspired by the famous Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which you've all seen shaking itself apart, the Windbelt is a tight plastic strip stretched in a frame, joined to magnets at both ends. When the wind blows across the belt, it vibrates (like when you blow a blade of grass to make music) and the magnets move inside wire coils, generating power. This table top version will put out 40 milliwatts and can power an LED. It's cheap and simple, and can generate power from breezes as slow as 10mph, making it ideal for developing nations (California based Frayne worked in Haiti and saw a need for cheap power to replace dangerous kerosene lamps).
Saturday, October 13, 2007
CLIMATE CHANGE: Forests Join the Carbon Market
Zilia Castrillón* - IPS/IFEJ
BOSTON, Oct 6 (IPS) - With deforestation as the second leading source of climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions, experts are focusing the discussion on the viability of compensating countries for protecting their forests.
The proposal "Reduced Emissions from Deforestation" (RED) was not included in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. But now is being evaluated by scientists, companies and agencies in poor countries that have extensive forested areas.
The CDM allows governments and corporations of industrialised countries (required under the Protocol to cut greenhouse gas emissions) to meet part of their obligations by investing in "clean" projects in developing countries, by which they obtain certificates of emissions reductions -- at much lower cost than curbing emissions at home.
"Slowing emissions from deforestation would not stop climate change, but it could be an important part of a many-part strategy," Christopher Field, head of the global ecology department at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, said in an interview for this report.
RED emerged in 2005 at the 11th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, led by Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica, with support from the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. Its aim is to include "avoided deforestation" in the global market of carbon credits -- carbon dioxide being the principal greenhouse gas.
Implementation is expected to be finalized at the 13 Conference of Parties, to take place in December on the Indonesian island of Bali.
Brazil, for its part, proposes a fund with voluntary contributions of public money to compensate the effort made by developing countries to reduce deforestation, and that they would be remunerated based on prevented emissions.
In the article "Tropical Forests and Climate Policy", published May 10 in "Science Express" online magazine, Field and other researchers propose to slow the current pace of deforestation 50 percent by the year 2050.
That would be the equivalent of 50 billion tonnes of carbon prevented from being released into the atmosphere, or equal to six years of emissions of gases from fossil fuel combustion, the experts say.
But that figure is meaningless, says to Almuth Ernsting, of the Britain-based Biofuelwatch campaign. Because RED does not intend to stop industrial-scale logging, "there is growing evidence that many rainforests, including the Amazon forest, will collapse well before the destruction of a further 50 percent."
The Amazon is the forest ecosystem with the most carbon: 305 tonnes per hectare, of which 28 percent is in the soil, according to a 1998 study.
Its destruction would release 120 billion tonnes of carbon by 2050, which would be catastrophic to the global climate, says Ernsting.
The transformation of natural ecosystems into farmland entails a loss of 75 percent of the carbon in tropical soils. That implies between 18 and 20 percent of the total emissions from deforestation, according to experts.
There is about twice as much carbon stored in forests and soils as exists in the atmosphere, said William Moomaw, director of the Centre for International Environment and Resource Policy, at Tufts University in the United States.
If one area is preserved, and another is deforested, how is this to be counted, asks Moomaw by way of example. Planting trees in other areas to compensate for logging does not work because it often is done in areas not apt for forests, he explained.
This problem has come up with tree plantations intended to absorb carbon, and could be repeated in a scheme for reducing emissions from deforestation, say critics.
The carbon market helped finance monoculture plantations, and had negative results for the soil, local communities, water resources and, ironically, carbon emissions, says Biofuelwatch's Ernsting.
There is also concern about the difficulties in controlling changes in the carbon stores of forests once the system is applied.
"Monitoring entails some costs, but existing satellite technologies make the challenge relatively straightforward," says Field, of the Carnegie Institution.
National measurement systems can function, according to Moomaw. In the international arena, the European Union, United States and Brazil would need to form a coordinated satellite monitoring team, available for countries with few resources but rich in forests.
Compensation for avoided deforestation should reduce net emissions, encouraging a change in international frameworks and adopting an emissions tariff for countries with little or no historic deforestation, according to the study "No Forest Left Behind", published by Conservation International in the Aug. 14 issue of the online journal Public Library of Science - Biology. Countries with much forest and relatively little deforestation are: Belize, Bhutan, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, French Guiana, Gabon, Guyana, Panama, Peru, Suriname and Zambia. Inhabited mostly by indigenous peoples, they would enter the carbon market through "preventive credits" or compensation that they would forfeit if there is an increase in loss of forest.
In order for the system to function equitably, it is important that local communities participate, according to experts.
"The principle of avoided deforestation is not a bad principle, however the means through which it could be realised are complex and fraught with unequal power relations," says Helen Leake, of the non-governmental Forest Peoples Programme. "The devil is in the details."
(*This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS-Inter Press Service and IFEJ-International Federation of Environmental Journalists.) (END/2007)
BOSTON, Oct 6 (IPS) - With deforestation as the second leading source of climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions, experts are focusing the discussion on the viability of compensating countries for protecting their forests.
The proposal "Reduced Emissions from Deforestation" (RED) was not included in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. But now is being evaluated by scientists, companies and agencies in poor countries that have extensive forested areas.
The CDM allows governments and corporations of industrialised countries (required under the Protocol to cut greenhouse gas emissions) to meet part of their obligations by investing in "clean" projects in developing countries, by which they obtain certificates of emissions reductions -- at much lower cost than curbing emissions at home.
"Slowing emissions from deforestation would not stop climate change, but it could be an important part of a many-part strategy," Christopher Field, head of the global ecology department at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, said in an interview for this report.
RED emerged in 2005 at the 11th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, led by Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica, with support from the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. Its aim is to include "avoided deforestation" in the global market of carbon credits -- carbon dioxide being the principal greenhouse gas.
Implementation is expected to be finalized at the 13 Conference of Parties, to take place in December on the Indonesian island of Bali.
Brazil, for its part, proposes a fund with voluntary contributions of public money to compensate the effort made by developing countries to reduce deforestation, and that they would be remunerated based on prevented emissions.
In the article "Tropical Forests and Climate Policy", published May 10 in "Science Express" online magazine, Field and other researchers propose to slow the current pace of deforestation 50 percent by the year 2050.
That would be the equivalent of 50 billion tonnes of carbon prevented from being released into the atmosphere, or equal to six years of emissions of gases from fossil fuel combustion, the experts say.
But that figure is meaningless, says to Almuth Ernsting, of the Britain-based Biofuelwatch campaign. Because RED does not intend to stop industrial-scale logging, "there is growing evidence that many rainforests, including the Amazon forest, will collapse well before the destruction of a further 50 percent."
The Amazon is the forest ecosystem with the most carbon: 305 tonnes per hectare, of which 28 percent is in the soil, according to a 1998 study.
Its destruction would release 120 billion tonnes of carbon by 2050, which would be catastrophic to the global climate, says Ernsting.
The transformation of natural ecosystems into farmland entails a loss of 75 percent of the carbon in tropical soils. That implies between 18 and 20 percent of the total emissions from deforestation, according to experts.
There is about twice as much carbon stored in forests and soils as exists in the atmosphere, said William Moomaw, director of the Centre for International Environment and Resource Policy, at Tufts University in the United States.
If one area is preserved, and another is deforested, how is this to be counted, asks Moomaw by way of example. Planting trees in other areas to compensate for logging does not work because it often is done in areas not apt for forests, he explained.
This problem has come up with tree plantations intended to absorb carbon, and could be repeated in a scheme for reducing emissions from deforestation, say critics.
The carbon market helped finance monoculture plantations, and had negative results for the soil, local communities, water resources and, ironically, carbon emissions, says Biofuelwatch's Ernsting.
There is also concern about the difficulties in controlling changes in the carbon stores of forests once the system is applied.
"Monitoring entails some costs, but existing satellite technologies make the challenge relatively straightforward," says Field, of the Carnegie Institution.
National measurement systems can function, according to Moomaw. In the international arena, the European Union, United States and Brazil would need to form a coordinated satellite monitoring team, available for countries with few resources but rich in forests.
Compensation for avoided deforestation should reduce net emissions, encouraging a change in international frameworks and adopting an emissions tariff for countries with little or no historic deforestation, according to the study "No Forest Left Behind", published by Conservation International in the Aug. 14 issue of the online journal Public Library of Science - Biology. Countries with much forest and relatively little deforestation are: Belize, Bhutan, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, French Guiana, Gabon, Guyana, Panama, Peru, Suriname and Zambia. Inhabited mostly by indigenous peoples, they would enter the carbon market through "preventive credits" or compensation that they would forfeit if there is an increase in loss of forest.
In order for the system to function equitably, it is important that local communities participate, according to experts.
"The principle of avoided deforestation is not a bad principle, however the means through which it could be realised are complex and fraught with unequal power relations," says Helen Leake, of the non-governmental Forest Peoples Programme. "The devil is in the details."
(*This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS-Inter Press Service and IFEJ-International Federation of Environmental Journalists.) (END/2007)
Amazon Rainforest At Risk From Initiative To Connect South American Economies
Science Daily — An unprecedented development plan to link South America's economies through new transportation, energy and telecommunications projects could destroy much of the Amazon rainforest in coming decades, according to a new study by Conservation International scientist Tim Killeen.
However, Killeen reports that such a disastrous outcome can be avoided if steps are taken now to reconcile the legitimate desires for development with the globally important need to conserve the Amazon ecosystem.
His 98-page report, titled "A Perfect Storm in the Amazon Wilderness: Development and Conservation in the Context of the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA)," offers pragmatic approaches for resolving the enduring paradox between economic development and environmental protection.
Killeen, who has worked in the Amazon region for 25 years, fully supports the 12-nation IIRSA plan that seeks the historic goal of overcoming the geographic obstacles of the Amazon wilderness to connect the area's isolated economies. IIRSA investments will integrate improved highway networks, river ways, hydroelectric dams and telecommunications links throughout the continent -- particularly in remote, isolated regions -- to allow greater trade and create a South American community of nations.
Killeen's analysis shows that IIRSA's development projects will coincide with mounting pressures on the Amazon's ecosystem and its traditional communities. These pressures include climate change; logging; deforestation for agriculture; and mineral exploitation, as well as the impending boom in biofuel crops such as sugar cane.
"Failure to foresee the full impact of IIRSA investments, particularly in the context of climate change and global markets, could lead to a perfect storm of environmental destruction," Killeen says. "At stake are the greatest tropical wilderness area on the planet and the multiple benefits it provides."
October 5, 2007
The study offers three possible scenarios for the future of the Amazon region, and warns that infrastructure projects that are developed without timely or thorough environmental impact analysis will lead to the worst-case scenario -- widespread deforestation and the eventual loss of the Amazon jungle within three or four decades.
"Our hope is that this document will stimulate IIRSA to become an even more important and relevant initiative, one that incorporates the vision of an ecologically and culturally intact Amazon," writes Gustavo Fonseca, the Global Environment Facility's team leader for natural resources, in the publication's preface. "South America has an enormous economic incentive to conserve the ecosystem services provided by the Amazon, along with achieving real and effective regional integration. These are not mutually exclusive goals."
According to Killeen, the destruction of the Amazon as a result of currently-planned IIRSA projects would have profound and far-reaching consequences. The Amazon River basin is the world's largest reserve of fresh water, while the extensive Amazon wilderness regulates the continental climate, spawning annual precipitation that waters the multibillion-dollar agriculture industry of the Rio Plata basin to the south.
Cutting and burning of the Amazon forests could seriously jeopardize this industry as well as destroy the vast ecosystems that are home to indigenous people. It would also wipe out some of Earth's richest storehouses of terrestrial and freshwater life and would exacerbate global warming by releasing into the atmosphere the huge quantities of carbon stored in the biomass of the tropical forest -- estimated at about twenty times the world's total annual greenhouse gas emissions.
Killeen argues it doesn't have to be this way. He notes that intact Amazon forest could generate billions of dollars in carbon credits under a market system being negotiated to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. Biofuel crops, such as sugarcane could be planted on the 65 million hectares (162 million acres) of already deforested land, rather than clearing more jungle to establish new plantations. He also advocates other environmentally friendly solutions, such as fish farming, which could use the Amazon's abundant water resources to create economic opportunity for peasant farmers and produce millions of dollars in revenue.
"A visionary initiative such as IIRSA should be visionary in all of its dimensions, and should incorporate measures to ensure that the region's renewable natural resources are conserved and its traditional communities strengthened," Killeen writes.
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by Conservation International.
However, Killeen reports that such a disastrous outcome can be avoided if steps are taken now to reconcile the legitimate desires for development with the globally important need to conserve the Amazon ecosystem.
His 98-page report, titled "A Perfect Storm in the Amazon Wilderness: Development and Conservation in the Context of the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA)," offers pragmatic approaches for resolving the enduring paradox between economic development and environmental protection.
Killeen, who has worked in the Amazon region for 25 years, fully supports the 12-nation IIRSA plan that seeks the historic goal of overcoming the geographic obstacles of the Amazon wilderness to connect the area's isolated economies. IIRSA investments will integrate improved highway networks, river ways, hydroelectric dams and telecommunications links throughout the continent -- particularly in remote, isolated regions -- to allow greater trade and create a South American community of nations.
Killeen's analysis shows that IIRSA's development projects will coincide with mounting pressures on the Amazon's ecosystem and its traditional communities. These pressures include climate change; logging; deforestation for agriculture; and mineral exploitation, as well as the impending boom in biofuel crops such as sugar cane.
"Failure to foresee the full impact of IIRSA investments, particularly in the context of climate change and global markets, could lead to a perfect storm of environmental destruction," Killeen says. "At stake are the greatest tropical wilderness area on the planet and the multiple benefits it provides."
October 5, 2007
The study offers three possible scenarios for the future of the Amazon region, and warns that infrastructure projects that are developed without timely or thorough environmental impact analysis will lead to the worst-case scenario -- widespread deforestation and the eventual loss of the Amazon jungle within three or four decades.
"Our hope is that this document will stimulate IIRSA to become an even more important and relevant initiative, one that incorporates the vision of an ecologically and culturally intact Amazon," writes Gustavo Fonseca, the Global Environment Facility's team leader for natural resources, in the publication's preface. "South America has an enormous economic incentive to conserve the ecosystem services provided by the Amazon, along with achieving real and effective regional integration. These are not mutually exclusive goals."
According to Killeen, the destruction of the Amazon as a result of currently-planned IIRSA projects would have profound and far-reaching consequences. The Amazon River basin is the world's largest reserve of fresh water, while the extensive Amazon wilderness regulates the continental climate, spawning annual precipitation that waters the multibillion-dollar agriculture industry of the Rio Plata basin to the south.
Cutting and burning of the Amazon forests could seriously jeopardize this industry as well as destroy the vast ecosystems that are home to indigenous people. It would also wipe out some of Earth's richest storehouses of terrestrial and freshwater life and would exacerbate global warming by releasing into the atmosphere the huge quantities of carbon stored in the biomass of the tropical forest -- estimated at about twenty times the world's total annual greenhouse gas emissions.
Killeen argues it doesn't have to be this way. He notes that intact Amazon forest could generate billions of dollars in carbon credits under a market system being negotiated to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. Biofuel crops, such as sugarcane could be planted on the 65 million hectares (162 million acres) of already deforested land, rather than clearing more jungle to establish new plantations. He also advocates other environmentally friendly solutions, such as fish farming, which could use the Amazon's abundant water resources to create economic opportunity for peasant farmers and produce millions of dollars in revenue.
"A visionary initiative such as IIRSA should be visionary in all of its dimensions, and should incorporate measures to ensure that the region's renewable natural resources are conserved and its traditional communities strengthened," Killeen writes.
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by Conservation International.
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Biodiesel: seminário discute uso do pinhão manso como alternativa à produção
SAFRAS (26) - A Assembléia Legislativa de São Paulo recebe especialistas de vários setores na próxima quinta-feira (28/6) para o seminário A utilização do pinhão manso no Programa de Biodiesel. Essa planta é interessante, embora seja pouco conhecida da maioria das pessoas.
Ela oferece um óleo de ótima qualidade e ainda pode se transformar em um instrumento de inserção social devido à facilidade para cultivá-la, destaca o deputado estadual Sebastião Almeida, idealizador do seminário.
O evento será realizado no auditório Franco Montoro, com capacidade para mais de 300 pessoas, das 10h às 13h. A entrada é gratuita. Foram convidados o secretário Estadual de Agricultura e Abastecimento, João de Almeida Sampaio Filho, o presidente do Incra-SP, Raimundo Pires Silva, o diretor Executivo da Fundação Instituto de Terra do Estado de São Paulo, Gustavo Ungaro, o gerente Executivo da Diretoria de Desenvolvimento Energético da Petrobras, Mozart Schmitt de Queiroz, entre outros.
José Rainha Júnior, uma das lideranças do Movimento dos Sem-Terra, foi convidado para participar e contar a experiência de pequenos agricultores do Pontal do Paranapanema com o cultivo do pinhão manso. Queremos ampliar o debate em torno de novas matrizes energéticas. O álcool é um sucesso no Brasil e no Exterior, mas não podemos nos limitar a essa fonte de energia, destaca Almeida. Com o pinhão manso e outras oleaginosas, tenho certeza de que poderemos contribuir ainda mais para amenizar os impactos da poluição no planeta. O que é o pinhão manso? O pinhão manso (Jatropha curcas) é uma das mais promissoras oleaginosas do Brasil devido à sua facilidade de adaptação, cultivável em 90% do território nacional. Apresenta boa produtividade em terras pouco férteis, diferentes condições de solo (arenoso, calcário, salino, pedregoso) e em climas áridos. O cultivo pode ser feito sem a utilização de máquinas, o que estimula a agricultura familiar. Segundo estimativas, a produção de 2.000 a 3.500 litros de óleo por hectare pode garantir uma renda média anual entre R$ 3.000,00 a R$ 4.500,00. É uma planta perene, que produz por mais de 50 anos e sua colheita se estende por cerca de seis meses. Só para se ter uma idéia, um ônibus urbano consume 40 mil litros de biocombustível por ano, quantia de óleo suficiente para empregar até 190 famílias.
O pinhão manso também pode ser cultivado junto com outros vegetais. A partir de seu processamento é obtido um biofertilizante rico em nitrogênio, potássio, fósforo e matéria orgânica, capaz de combater as doenças do solo.
Desintoxicada, essa torta de pode ser transformada em ração, como já ocorre com a mamona. Sua casca também pode ser usada como carvão vegetal e matéria-prima na fabricação de papel. E o óleo extraído, como repelente de insetos em pomares e para a fabricação de tintas e vernizes.
Uma planta com essas características pode dar outra dimensão aos que lutam por maior inclusão social, diz o deputado Almeida. Não podemos desprezar a força que a planta pode exercer sobre os produtores familiares, ao gerar um impacto positivo na geração de emprego e renda no campo. As informações partem da assessoria de imprensa do evento.
SERVIÇO: A utilização do pinhão manso no Programa de Biodiesel Data: 28/06 (quinta-feira) Horário: 10h às 13h Local: Auditório Franco Montoro, na Assembléia Legislativa de São Paulo Endereço: Avenida Pedro Álvares Cabral, 201 - Ibirapuera - São Paulo Realização: deputado Sebastião Almeida (PT-SP) ESPECIALISTAS CONVIDADOS: Arnoldo Anacleto de Campos (Coordenação Geral de Agregação de Valor e Renda/ MDA) João de Almeida Sampaio Filho (Secretário de Agricultura e Abastecimento do Estado de São Paulo) Gustavo Ungaro (Diretor Executivo da Fundação Instituto de Terras do Estado de São Paulo) Raimundo Pires Silva (Superintendente do Incra no Estado de São Paulo) Mozart Schmitt de Queiroz (Gerente Executivo da Diretoria de Desenvolvimento Energético da Petrobrás) Alfredo José Barreto Luiz (Chefe Adjunto de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento da Embrapa Meio Ambiente) José Rainha (Federação dos Assentados e Pequenos Agricultores do Oeste Paulista e Pontal do Paranapanema) Sérgio Black (Gerente de Mercado - Agro-Negócio do Banco do Brasil) Karin Brüning (Diretora Superintendente da Ciatec Companhia de Desenvolvimento do Pólo de Alta Tecnologia de Campinas) Luiz Carlos Rocha Gaspar - Presidente da Ciatec (Companhia de Desenvolvimento do Pólo de Alta Tecnologia de Campinas e Trade Point) (CBL)
Ela oferece um óleo de ótima qualidade e ainda pode se transformar em um instrumento de inserção social devido à facilidade para cultivá-la, destaca o deputado estadual Sebastião Almeida, idealizador do seminário.
O evento será realizado no auditório Franco Montoro, com capacidade para mais de 300 pessoas, das 10h às 13h. A entrada é gratuita. Foram convidados o secretário Estadual de Agricultura e Abastecimento, João de Almeida Sampaio Filho, o presidente do Incra-SP, Raimundo Pires Silva, o diretor Executivo da Fundação Instituto de Terra do Estado de São Paulo, Gustavo Ungaro, o gerente Executivo da Diretoria de Desenvolvimento Energético da Petrobras, Mozart Schmitt de Queiroz, entre outros.
José Rainha Júnior, uma das lideranças do Movimento dos Sem-Terra, foi convidado para participar e contar a experiência de pequenos agricultores do Pontal do Paranapanema com o cultivo do pinhão manso. Queremos ampliar o debate em torno de novas matrizes energéticas. O álcool é um sucesso no Brasil e no Exterior, mas não podemos nos limitar a essa fonte de energia, destaca Almeida. Com o pinhão manso e outras oleaginosas, tenho certeza de que poderemos contribuir ainda mais para amenizar os impactos da poluição no planeta. O que é o pinhão manso? O pinhão manso (Jatropha curcas) é uma das mais promissoras oleaginosas do Brasil devido à sua facilidade de adaptação, cultivável em 90% do território nacional. Apresenta boa produtividade em terras pouco férteis, diferentes condições de solo (arenoso, calcário, salino, pedregoso) e em climas áridos. O cultivo pode ser feito sem a utilização de máquinas, o que estimula a agricultura familiar. Segundo estimativas, a produção de 2.000 a 3.500 litros de óleo por hectare pode garantir uma renda média anual entre R$ 3.000,00 a R$ 4.500,00. É uma planta perene, que produz por mais de 50 anos e sua colheita se estende por cerca de seis meses. Só para se ter uma idéia, um ônibus urbano consume 40 mil litros de biocombustível por ano, quantia de óleo suficiente para empregar até 190 famílias.
O pinhão manso também pode ser cultivado junto com outros vegetais. A partir de seu processamento é obtido um biofertilizante rico em nitrogênio, potássio, fósforo e matéria orgânica, capaz de combater as doenças do solo.
Desintoxicada, essa torta de pode ser transformada em ração, como já ocorre com a mamona. Sua casca também pode ser usada como carvão vegetal e matéria-prima na fabricação de papel. E o óleo extraído, como repelente de insetos em pomares e para a fabricação de tintas e vernizes.
Uma planta com essas características pode dar outra dimensão aos que lutam por maior inclusão social, diz o deputado Almeida. Não podemos desprezar a força que a planta pode exercer sobre os produtores familiares, ao gerar um impacto positivo na geração de emprego e renda no campo. As informações partem da assessoria de imprensa do evento.
SERVIÇO: A utilização do pinhão manso no Programa de Biodiesel Data: 28/06 (quinta-feira) Horário: 10h às 13h Local: Auditório Franco Montoro, na Assembléia Legislativa de São Paulo Endereço: Avenida Pedro Álvares Cabral, 201 - Ibirapuera - São Paulo Realização: deputado Sebastião Almeida (PT-SP) ESPECIALISTAS CONVIDADOS: Arnoldo Anacleto de Campos (Coordenação Geral de Agregação de Valor e Renda/ MDA) João de Almeida Sampaio Filho (Secretário de Agricultura e Abastecimento do Estado de São Paulo) Gustavo Ungaro (Diretor Executivo da Fundação Instituto de Terras do Estado de São Paulo) Raimundo Pires Silva (Superintendente do Incra no Estado de São Paulo) Mozart Schmitt de Queiroz (Gerente Executivo da Diretoria de Desenvolvimento Energético da Petrobrás) Alfredo José Barreto Luiz (Chefe Adjunto de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento da Embrapa Meio Ambiente) José Rainha (Federação dos Assentados e Pequenos Agricultores do Oeste Paulista e Pontal do Paranapanema) Sérgio Black (Gerente de Mercado - Agro-Negócio do Banco do Brasil) Karin Brüning (Diretora Superintendente da Ciatec Companhia de Desenvolvimento do Pólo de Alta Tecnologia de Campinas) Luiz Carlos Rocha Gaspar - Presidente da Ciatec (Companhia de Desenvolvimento do Pólo de Alta Tecnologia de Campinas e Trade Point) (CBL)
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Billionaires bet big on India's bio-fuel
Rajesh Abraham in Mumbai | BS | June 23, 2007 | 04:10 IST
India's well-known investors who are known for their Midas touch have spotted an opportunity in bio-fuel, betting big on ethanol, bio-mass and even bio-fuel equipment makers in India and other parts of the globe.
Billionaires Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, C Sivasankaran, Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun Microsystems, and Nemish Shah, the media-shy joint partner of Enam Financial Services, are investing in bio-fuel makers quietly, expecting that bio-fuel will have a big play in the coming years as the world looks for a viable alternative to the fast depleting oil reserves.
Jhunjhunwala, who is known for his ability to spot a multi-bagger at a very early stage, recently invested in Hyderabad-based bio-fuel firm Nandan Biometrics.
He is also a 10 per cent stakeholder in Praj Industries, which is a bio-fuel technology provider and equipment maker.
"Bhai (as Jhunjhunwala is known in market circles) is bullish on biofuel and the broad alternative energy space. He is looking at several unlisted companies for more investments," said a source.
Vinod Khosla, the founder of Sun Microsystems and a leading green fuel investor through his Khosla Ventures, holds a minor stake in Praj Industries.
But, Khosla, who is scouting for more investments in India, is playing a high stakes game in Brazil.
He has backed Brazilian Renewable Energy Company (Brenco) and also made investments in Segetis, founded by former Soviet scientists Sergey and Olga Selifonova, to develop renewable chemical products.
C Sivasankaran, who sold his stake in mobile phone company Aircel to Malaysian conglomerate Maxis Communications for over $1 billion, has set up "E85 Inc", an ethanol producing company in Raleigh, North Carolina, investing $200 million late last year.
"Alternative energy, broadly, is an area which we are excited about as an investment opportunity," said Rahul Bhasin, managing director, Barings Private Equity, which has invested in Auro Mira Energy, a wind energy company.
Market sources say Nemish Shah, who spotted multi-baggers Sesa Goa and Infosys when everyone was looking the other way in the early 1990s, is also making quiet moves in biofuel companies in India, both listed and unlisted.
Sources say little known IKF Technologies, which is entering bio-fuel production in a big way, has come on his investment radar.
A listed company, IKF Tech recently sought government leases for a total of 150,000 hectares of land in Swaziland, Mozambique and South Africa to cultivate jatropha to produce biofuel.
"There are several factors that can make India successful in the alternative energy space: availability of natural resources, cost-effective engineering and manufacturing talent and high cost of importing traditional fuels," said Arun Natarajan of Venture Intelligence, a PE tracking firm.
"While I do not see alternative energy posing a threat to sectors that are traditional favourites with investors -- like IT & IT-enabled services and manufacturing -- any time soon, there is definitely a strong interest in this sector," he added.
India's well-known investors who are known for their Midas touch have spotted an opportunity in bio-fuel, betting big on ethanol, bio-mass and even bio-fuel equipment makers in India and other parts of the globe.
Billionaires Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, C Sivasankaran, Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun Microsystems, and Nemish Shah, the media-shy joint partner of Enam Financial Services, are investing in bio-fuel makers quietly, expecting that bio-fuel will have a big play in the coming years as the world looks for a viable alternative to the fast depleting oil reserves.
Jhunjhunwala, who is known for his ability to spot a multi-bagger at a very early stage, recently invested in Hyderabad-based bio-fuel firm Nandan Biometrics.
He is also a 10 per cent stakeholder in Praj Industries, which is a bio-fuel technology provider and equipment maker.
"Bhai (as Jhunjhunwala is known in market circles) is bullish on biofuel and the broad alternative energy space. He is looking at several unlisted companies for more investments," said a source.
Vinod Khosla, the founder of Sun Microsystems and a leading green fuel investor through his Khosla Ventures, holds a minor stake in Praj Industries.
But, Khosla, who is scouting for more investments in India, is playing a high stakes game in Brazil.
He has backed Brazilian Renewable Energy Company (Brenco) and also made investments in Segetis, founded by former Soviet scientists Sergey and Olga Selifonova, to develop renewable chemical products.
C Sivasankaran, who sold his stake in mobile phone company Aircel to Malaysian conglomerate Maxis Communications for over $1 billion, has set up "E85 Inc", an ethanol producing company in Raleigh, North Carolina, investing $200 million late last year.
"Alternative energy, broadly, is an area which we are excited about as an investment opportunity," said Rahul Bhasin, managing director, Barings Private Equity, which has invested in Auro Mira Energy, a wind energy company.
Market sources say Nemish Shah, who spotted multi-baggers Sesa Goa and Infosys when everyone was looking the other way in the early 1990s, is also making quiet moves in biofuel companies in India, both listed and unlisted.
Sources say little known IKF Technologies, which is entering bio-fuel production in a big way, has come on his investment radar.
A listed company, IKF Tech recently sought government leases for a total of 150,000 hectares of land in Swaziland, Mozambique and South Africa to cultivate jatropha to produce biofuel.
"There are several factors that can make India successful in the alternative energy space: availability of natural resources, cost-effective engineering and manufacturing talent and high cost of importing traditional fuels," said Arun Natarajan of Venture Intelligence, a PE tracking firm.
"While I do not see alternative energy posing a threat to sectors that are traditional favourites with investors -- like IT & IT-enabled services and manufacturing -- any time soon, there is definitely a strong interest in this sector," he added.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Programa de Reaproveitamento de Óleo Vegetal
SÁBADO, 23 JUNHO 2007 . BIODIESELBR.COM
O Programa de Reaproveitamento de Óleos Vegetais (Prove), iniciativa da Refinaria de Manguinhos, em parceria com a Secretaria de Meio Ambiente do Rio, está ampliando suas parcerias para aumentar o volume adquirido de óleo de cozinha usado.
O PROVE utiliza como mão-de-obra principal catadores de óleo reunidos em cooperativas. Atualmente, 25 cooperativas de catadores já participam do projeto, coletando óleo de cozinha usado em vários pontos da cidade para enviá-lo a Refinaria de Manguinhos, em Bonsucesso, onde é transformado em biodiesel.
A meta de produção da refinaria de Manguinhos é de 4,5 milhões de litros por ano de biodiesel, o que proporcionará às cooperativas renda de cerca de R$ 2,7 milhões.
Com a parceria, Manguinhos contribuirá para a redução da poluição dos rios e da Baía de Guanabara e do custo de tratamento de esgoto. A produção de biodiesel a partir do reaproveitamento do óleo vegetal é a primeira experiência nessa área feita no estado do Rio.
O programa iniciou o processo de certificação de restaurantes, escolas e condomínios.
- Quem quiser participar basta separar o óleo de cozinha usado em recipiente e telefonar para o Disque-Prove, no telefone 021 2598-9240 - informou Carlos Minc, secretário estadual do ambiente.
Somente no Circo Voador, que participa do projeto, deverão ser coletados 30 litros de óleo usado por semana. Além do óleo usado de pequenas lanchonetes e da creche do Circo Voador, seus funcionários estão trazendo o produto de casa.
O programa possui um caminhão coletor, doado pelo Orla Rio, que já está rodando por diversos pontos de coleta de óleo de cozinha usado instalados na cidade.
O Programa de Reaproveitamento de Óleos Vegetais (Prove), iniciativa da Refinaria de Manguinhos, em parceria com a Secretaria de Meio Ambiente do Rio, está ampliando suas parcerias para aumentar o volume adquirido de óleo de cozinha usado.
O PROVE utiliza como mão-de-obra principal catadores de óleo reunidos em cooperativas. Atualmente, 25 cooperativas de catadores já participam do projeto, coletando óleo de cozinha usado em vários pontos da cidade para enviá-lo a Refinaria de Manguinhos, em Bonsucesso, onde é transformado em biodiesel.
A meta de produção da refinaria de Manguinhos é de 4,5 milhões de litros por ano de biodiesel, o que proporcionará às cooperativas renda de cerca de R$ 2,7 milhões.
Com a parceria, Manguinhos contribuirá para a redução da poluição dos rios e da Baía de Guanabara e do custo de tratamento de esgoto. A produção de biodiesel a partir do reaproveitamento do óleo vegetal é a primeira experiência nessa área feita no estado do Rio.
O programa iniciou o processo de certificação de restaurantes, escolas e condomínios.
- Quem quiser participar basta separar o óleo de cozinha usado em recipiente e telefonar para o Disque-Prove, no telefone 021 2598-9240 - informou Carlos Minc, secretário estadual do ambiente.
Somente no Circo Voador, que participa do projeto, deverão ser coletados 30 litros de óleo usado por semana. Além do óleo usado de pequenas lanchonetes e da creche do Circo Voador, seus funcionários estão trazendo o produto de casa.
O programa possui um caminhão coletor, doado pelo Orla Rio, que já está rodando por diversos pontos de coleta de óleo de cozinha usado instalados na cidade.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Farms Fund Robots to Replace Migrant Fruit Pickers
As if the debate over immigration and guest worker programs wasn't complicated enough, now a couple of robots are rolling into the middle of it.
Vision Robotics, a San Diego company, is working on a pair of robots that would trundle through orchards plucking oranges, apples or other fruit from the trees. In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season.
The robotic work has been funded entirely by agricultural associations, and pushed forward by the uncertainty surrounding the migrant labor force. Farmers are "very, very nervous about the availability and cost of labor in the near future," says Vision Robotics CEO Derek Morikawa.
Agricultural groups hope Vision Robotics can build this harvester to replace labor crews.
Image: Vision Robotics
It's a surprising new market for Vision Robotics, which had been focused on developing consumer devices, including a robotic vacuum cleaner to compete with iRobot's Roomba.
When a member of the California Citrus Research Board approached the company in 2004, Morikawa was doubtful that an effective robotic picker was even feasible. A citrus grower brought the skeptical engineers to an orange farm in California's fertile Central Valley, where they walked down the neat rows of trees and stared at the oranges hanging in the branches.
Previous attempts at making a mechanical harvester were thwarted by inefficiency, explains Morikawa. In the past, experimental machines approached a tree as a human would, picking one piece of fruit and then looking for the next. In this slow process, the machine circled the tree repeatedly until it was sure it had picked all the fruit.
Morikawa says his engineers had their breakthrough idea right there in the orange grove. They realized that the task could be divided between two robots: One would locate all the oranges, and the second would pick them. "Once you know where all the fruit is, then it becomes an easy job to calculate the most efficient way to pick it all," says Morikawa.
The eight-armed orange harvester will strip ripe fruit from trees.
Image: Vision Robotics
But it wasn't just technological challenges that held back previous attempts at building a mechanical harvester –- politics got involved, too. Cesar Chavez, the legendary leader of the United Farm Workers, began a campaign against mechanization back in 1978.
Chavez was outraged that the federal government was funding research and development on agricultural machines, but not spending any money to aid the farm workers who would be displaced. In the '80s, that simmering anger merged with a growing realization that the technology was nowhere near ready, and government funding dried up.
This time around, growers' associations are funding the research. By the end of this year, the orange growers will have invested almost $1 million in the project, says Ted Baskin, president of the California Citrus Research Board. He estimates that it will take about $5 million more to get to the finished product.
The farmers are willing to pay up because they've been rattled by a labor shortage over the past few years -- California growers tell horror stories of watching their fruit rot on the trees as they waited for the picking crews to arrive. Last fall, growers rallied in front of the U.S. Capitol, frustrated that Congress still hadn't created a program to ease the passage of foreign guest workers across the Mexico border.
With the supply-and-demand equation uncertain, growers see the robots as a better option. "You can predict what it's going to cost to buy a machine and maintain it," says Baskin. "You can't predict the bargaining that we go through with contract labor," he says.
The two robots would work as a team: one an eagle-eyed scout, the other a metallic octopus with a gentle touch. The first robot will scan the tree and build a 3-D map of the location and size of each orange, calculating the best order in which to pick them. It sends that information to the second robot, a harvester that will pick the tree clean, following a planned sequence that keeps its eight long arms from bumping into each other.
The Vision Robotics engineers are currently building the scout. They expect to have a prototype ready next year, with the harvester to follow two or three years later. Baskin says he doesn't expect the mechanical systems to pose any serious problems. The hard work is writing the software. After the scout robot makes a 3-D map of the tree, it has to evaluate each piece of fruit. What size is the orange? What color is it? Does it have black spots on it? "It's a question of gathering the information, and then judging whether it meets the parameters that are equal to a good orange," Baskin says.
Vision Robotics has been working on that problem for almost four years now, which might give some reassurance to human pickers. The United Farm Workers' leaders say they aren't worried about the robots, because they don't believe the machines will ever be able to do the job as well as people. Spokesman Marc Grossman predicts that mechanical hands will damage the fruit and make it unappealing for supermarket shoppers. "There are already machines that will pick wine grapes, but the high end wine growers don’t use them, because they want the quality," Grossman says.
Farmers don't seem to share that concern. The Washington Tree Fruit Commission started investing in the project last year, and Vision Robotics is talking to other agricultural groups with crops ranging from cherries to asparagus.
Friday, June 1, 2007
Rio antecipa adição do biodiesel para ônibus
Em um ano, a economia é de 32 milhões de litros de óleo diesel
Rio de Janeiro - Nos próximos quatro meses, cerca de 3 mil dos 14,5 mil ônibus que circulam na região metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro, utilizarão como combustível o óleo diesel derivado do petróleo com a adição de 5% de biodiesel - o diesel vegetal.
Nesse período, uma empresa especializada fará o monitoramento da qualidade do ar e do desempenho dos motores, e os dados serão analisados pela Agência Nacional do Petróleo, Gás Natural e Biocombustíveis (ANP).
O projeto experimental foi apresentado na quinta-feira, 31, em solenidade na Federação do Comércio e resulta de parceria entre a Secretaria Estadual de Transportes, a Petrobras Distribuidora, a Federação das Empresas de Transporte de Passageiros do Rio (Fetranspor) e as montadoras Volkswagen e Mercedes-Benz.
Na prática, o projeto antecipa em quase sete anos a lei federal que torna obrigatória, em janeiro de 2013, a utilização do B5, diesel mineral com adição de 5% de biodiesel. A mesma lei prevê, já para janeiro do próximo ano, o uso do B2, diesel comum com 2% de adição do novo combustível.
O secretário de Transportes, Júlio Lopes, destacou o pioneirismo do Rio de Janeiro em relação a combustíveis mais limpos: "Em um ano, 3 mil ônibus rodando com biodiesel a 5% significam uma economia de 32 milhões de litros de óleo diesel".
Para o coordenador de Meio Ambiente da Fetranspor, Guilherme Wilson da Conceição, o projeto não vai pesar no bolso dos usuários do transporte público, porque as tarifas não serão alteradas: "O biodiesel ainda é um pouco mais caro que o diesel, mas a BR Distribuidora nos garantiu que não vai repassar esta diferença. Vamos manter a mesma qualidade do transporte poluindo menos".
Dados da Agência Internacional de Energia indicam que o setor de transportes em todo o mundo é responsável por cerca de 24% do dióxido de carbono (CO2) lançado na atmosfera. E que a participação das frotas das grandes cidades na emissão de gases do efeito estufa aumenta 2,5% a cada ano. Nos países em desenvolvimento, essa taxa atinge até 4,4% ao ano.
Rio de Janeiro - Nos próximos quatro meses, cerca de 3 mil dos 14,5 mil ônibus que circulam na região metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro, utilizarão como combustível o óleo diesel derivado do petróleo com a adição de 5% de biodiesel - o diesel vegetal.
Nesse período, uma empresa especializada fará o monitoramento da qualidade do ar e do desempenho dos motores, e os dados serão analisados pela Agência Nacional do Petróleo, Gás Natural e Biocombustíveis (ANP).
O projeto experimental foi apresentado na quinta-feira, 31, em solenidade na Federação do Comércio e resulta de parceria entre a Secretaria Estadual de Transportes, a Petrobras Distribuidora, a Federação das Empresas de Transporte de Passageiros do Rio (Fetranspor) e as montadoras Volkswagen e Mercedes-Benz.
Na prática, o projeto antecipa em quase sete anos a lei federal que torna obrigatória, em janeiro de 2013, a utilização do B5, diesel mineral com adição de 5% de biodiesel. A mesma lei prevê, já para janeiro do próximo ano, o uso do B2, diesel comum com 2% de adição do novo combustível.
O secretário de Transportes, Júlio Lopes, destacou o pioneirismo do Rio de Janeiro em relação a combustíveis mais limpos: "Em um ano, 3 mil ônibus rodando com biodiesel a 5% significam uma economia de 32 milhões de litros de óleo diesel".
Para o coordenador de Meio Ambiente da Fetranspor, Guilherme Wilson da Conceição, o projeto não vai pesar no bolso dos usuários do transporte público, porque as tarifas não serão alteradas: "O biodiesel ainda é um pouco mais caro que o diesel, mas a BR Distribuidora nos garantiu que não vai repassar esta diferença. Vamos manter a mesma qualidade do transporte poluindo menos".
Dados da Agência Internacional de Energia indicam que o setor de transportes em todo o mundo é responsável por cerca de 24% do dióxido de carbono (CO2) lançado na atmosfera. E que a participação das frotas das grandes cidades na emissão de gases do efeito estufa aumenta 2,5% a cada ano. Nos países em desenvolvimento, essa taxa atinge até 4,4% ao ano.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Food prices rise as more crops go into producing biofuels
By KANAKO TAKAHARA
The increasing demand for biofuel, which is derived from biomass — usually plants — has taken a bite out of supplies of crops and other farm products worldwide. The redirection of crops from mouths to fuel tanks is reflected in the rise of prices of ordinary food items in Japan.
For the first time in 17 years, Q.P. Corp., Japan's biggest mayonnaise maker, will raise the price of its main product by about 10 percent, starting with Friday's shipment.
"It's because the price of the ingredients, mainly rapeseed and soybeans, rose," said Shunsuke Horiike, spokesman for Q.P., citing stronger demand in China. But he also blamed the price hike on biomass fuel.
"Rapeseed oil is used for biodiesel in Europe," Horiike said. "In the United States, corn is used to produce ethanol, and because of that, soybean acreage has been decreased."
Many countries, including Japan, see biofuel, mainly ethanol, as an eco-friendly replacement for petroleum, but experts doubt it can be a sustainable alternative energy resource.
Masatoshi Matsumura, a professor of life and environment sciences at the University of Tsukuba in Ibaraki Prefecture, said using food resources to produce biofuel is meaningless because it would cause unnecessary agricultural competition and lead to higher crop prices.
When U.S. President George W. Bush pledged in January to increase the supply of alternative fuels to 35 billion gallons (132.5 billion liters) a year in 2017, six times the amount in 2006, corn futures topped $ 4 a bushel at the Chicago Board of Trade, or about twice as high as the same period last year.
"We need to produce fuel from new resources that are not food," Matsumura said.
Matsumura is currently working on a project to produce biodiesel from sunflower oil and is seeking ways to increase its production. Making biofuel from resources not widely used for food is one of the most sustainable ways to produce alternative fuels, he said.
Sunflowers can be imported from many parts of the world, including Russia, South America and Southeast Asia, that would diversify sources of fuel, Matsumura said.
However, most biofuel currently produced in Japan is a mix of gasoline and ethanol derived from crops.
In April, Japanese oil companies started selling bio-gasoline — a mixture of imported ethanol produced from sugar cane and corn, and gasoline — at 50 gas stations in the Kanto region.
The fuel appears to be off to a good start, partly because retail prices are the same as regular gasoline thanks to government subsidies.
"Apparently because the name bio-gasoline appeals to people, we are seeing pretty good sales," said Fumiaki Watari, president of the Petroleum Association of Japan.
Watari, who is also chairman of Nippon Oil Corp., said the industry intends to increase the number of gas stations selling bio-gasoline to 100 by the end of March 2009.
Japan has been keen on fighting global warming under the Kyoto Protocol by committing to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 6 percent from 1990 levels by 2012.
But observers say Japan lags behind Brazil, the U.S. and Europe in promoting biofuel.
In February, a government panel on biofuel announced Japan should aim to boost production to an annual 6 million kiloliters in fiscal 2030 — a big leap from the approximately 30 kiloliters per year in fiscal 2005.
It was the first time the government has come up with a numerical target.
But Miyuki Tomari, chairman of the nonprofit organization Biomass Industrial Society Network, said Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is merely promoting biofuel, currently focused on ethanol, to win support for the ruling bloc in the runup to the July Upper House election.
"He's using it to gain support from rural areas" where farmers, who are strong supporters of Abe's Liberal Democratic Party, believe his policy will increase production of crops and additional subsidies from the project, she said.
In a campaign speech in April in Okinawa, Abe praised ethanol as a state-of-the-art fuel that is environmentally friendly.
"What the government actually needs to do is create a framework in which individuals and businesses will be motivated" to reduce gas emissions, she said.
Introducing a carbon tax, raising prices of electricity sold to utilities and promoting emissions trading — which allows high-emission companies to purchase credits from others — are among the key policies the government should promote, Tomari said.
"Producing biofuel may be a good option for Europe and the U.S., where their food self-sufficiency rate is high," Tomari said. "But for countries like Japan with a 40 percent food self-sufficiency rate, the priority should be placed on providing food for humans and livestock."
The Japan Times: Tuesday, May 29, 2007
(C) All rights reserved
The increasing demand for biofuel, which is derived from biomass — usually plants — has taken a bite out of supplies of crops and other farm products worldwide. The redirection of crops from mouths to fuel tanks is reflected in the rise of prices of ordinary food items in Japan.
For the first time in 17 years, Q.P. Corp., Japan's biggest mayonnaise maker, will raise the price of its main product by about 10 percent, starting with Friday's shipment.
"It's because the price of the ingredients, mainly rapeseed and soybeans, rose," said Shunsuke Horiike, spokesman for Q.P., citing stronger demand in China. But he also blamed the price hike on biomass fuel.
"Rapeseed oil is used for biodiesel in Europe," Horiike said. "In the United States, corn is used to produce ethanol, and because of that, soybean acreage has been decreased."
Many countries, including Japan, see biofuel, mainly ethanol, as an eco-friendly replacement for petroleum, but experts doubt it can be a sustainable alternative energy resource.
Masatoshi Matsumura, a professor of life and environment sciences at the University of Tsukuba in Ibaraki Prefecture, said using food resources to produce biofuel is meaningless because it would cause unnecessary agricultural competition and lead to higher crop prices.
When U.S. President George W. Bush pledged in January to increase the supply of alternative fuels to 35 billion gallons (132.5 billion liters) a year in 2017, six times the amount in 2006, corn futures topped $ 4 a bushel at the Chicago Board of Trade, or about twice as high as the same period last year.
"We need to produce fuel from new resources that are not food," Matsumura said.
Matsumura is currently working on a project to produce biodiesel from sunflower oil and is seeking ways to increase its production. Making biofuel from resources not widely used for food is one of the most sustainable ways to produce alternative fuels, he said.
Sunflowers can be imported from many parts of the world, including Russia, South America and Southeast Asia, that would diversify sources of fuel, Matsumura said.
However, most biofuel currently produced in Japan is a mix of gasoline and ethanol derived from crops.
In April, Japanese oil companies started selling bio-gasoline — a mixture of imported ethanol produced from sugar cane and corn, and gasoline — at 50 gas stations in the Kanto region.
The fuel appears to be off to a good start, partly because retail prices are the same as regular gasoline thanks to government subsidies.
"Apparently because the name bio-gasoline appeals to people, we are seeing pretty good sales," said Fumiaki Watari, president of the Petroleum Association of Japan.
Watari, who is also chairman of Nippon Oil Corp., said the industry intends to increase the number of gas stations selling bio-gasoline to 100 by the end of March 2009.
Japan has been keen on fighting global warming under the Kyoto Protocol by committing to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 6 percent from 1990 levels by 2012.
But observers say Japan lags behind Brazil, the U.S. and Europe in promoting biofuel.
In February, a government panel on biofuel announced Japan should aim to boost production to an annual 6 million kiloliters in fiscal 2030 — a big leap from the approximately 30 kiloliters per year in fiscal 2005.
It was the first time the government has come up with a numerical target.
But Miyuki Tomari, chairman of the nonprofit organization Biomass Industrial Society Network, said Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is merely promoting biofuel, currently focused on ethanol, to win support for the ruling bloc in the runup to the July Upper House election.
"He's using it to gain support from rural areas" where farmers, who are strong supporters of Abe's Liberal Democratic Party, believe his policy will increase production of crops and additional subsidies from the project, she said.
In a campaign speech in April in Okinawa, Abe praised ethanol as a state-of-the-art fuel that is environmentally friendly.
"What the government actually needs to do is create a framework in which individuals and businesses will be motivated" to reduce gas emissions, she said.
Introducing a carbon tax, raising prices of electricity sold to utilities and promoting emissions trading — which allows high-emission companies to purchase credits from others — are among the key policies the government should promote, Tomari said.
"Producing biofuel may be a good option for Europe and the U.S., where their food self-sufficiency rate is high," Tomari said. "But for countries like Japan with a 40 percent food self-sufficiency rate, the priority should be placed on providing food for humans and livestock."
The Japan Times: Tuesday, May 29, 2007
(C) All rights reserved
Friday, May 25, 2007
Biofuel seen biting into food supply
Biofuel seen biting into food supply
Kyodo News
The country should raise its food self-sufficiency rate as the global balance of food supply and demand is expected to get tighter as biofuel production increases, according to a government white paper approved Friday by the Cabinet.
The balance is also likely to tighten due to increases in the world population that will boost grain consumption, according to the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry's fiscal 2006 report.
Japan may "face rising food prices and difficulties in securing sufficient amounts of foods," the report warns.
Demand for corn has been increasing rapidly. More plants have been built in the United States to produce ethanol, a renewable fuel distilled from crops such as sugar cane, corn and wheat. This has led to higher prices for food and animal feed there, the white paper says.
Demand for corn for biofuel production is expected to rise to 31 percent of overall U.S. demand for corn in 10 years, from 18 percent in 2006, making the amount for export inevitably lower, which will affect food-importing nations like Japan.
The world's population will continue to grow, with particularly notable increases in developing economies, the report says. The global population is expected to top 9 billion in 2050, compared with 6.5 billion in 2006, and grain consumption will rise as a result.
Grain consumption in developing countries is seen doubling in 2050 from the annual average of 1.1 billion tons between 1999 and 2001.
To address the tightening supply and demand situation, some members of the government's Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy have proposed Japan strengthen relations with food-exporting nations to secure a stable food supply and conclude more economic partnership agreements with them that would include trade liberalization of farm products.
But the white paper also points to risks of depending on imports, saying that in a crisis exporting countries would supply food to their own populations first.
On measures to improve the food self-sufficiency rate in Japan, the paper calls for creating large-scale farming with an eye to reducing production costs.
It calls for revitalizing agriculture by encouraging residents in urban areas to start farming as populations in farming communities are aging and declining. It also suggests growing rice on abandoned farmland to stockpile for emergencies.
The Japan Times: Saturday, May 26, 2007
(C) All rights reserved
Kyodo News
The country should raise its food self-sufficiency rate as the global balance of food supply and demand is expected to get tighter as biofuel production increases, according to a government white paper approved Friday by the Cabinet.
The balance is also likely to tighten due to increases in the world population that will boost grain consumption, according to the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry's fiscal 2006 report.
Japan may "face rising food prices and difficulties in securing sufficient amounts of foods," the report warns.
Demand for corn has been increasing rapidly. More plants have been built in the United States to produce ethanol, a renewable fuel distilled from crops such as sugar cane, corn and wheat. This has led to higher prices for food and animal feed there, the white paper says.
Demand for corn for biofuel production is expected to rise to 31 percent of overall U.S. demand for corn in 10 years, from 18 percent in 2006, making the amount for export inevitably lower, which will affect food-importing nations like Japan.
The world's population will continue to grow, with particularly notable increases in developing economies, the report says. The global population is expected to top 9 billion in 2050, compared with 6.5 billion in 2006, and grain consumption will rise as a result.
Grain consumption in developing countries is seen doubling in 2050 from the annual average of 1.1 billion tons between 1999 and 2001.
To address the tightening supply and demand situation, some members of the government's Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy have proposed Japan strengthen relations with food-exporting nations to secure a stable food supply and conclude more economic partnership agreements with them that would include trade liberalization of farm products.
But the white paper also points to risks of depending on imports, saying that in a crisis exporting countries would supply food to their own populations first.
On measures to improve the food self-sufficiency rate in Japan, the paper calls for creating large-scale farming with an eye to reducing production costs.
It calls for revitalizing agriculture by encouraging residents in urban areas to start farming as populations in farming communities are aging and declining. It also suggests growing rice on abandoned farmland to stockpile for emergencies.
The Japan Times: Saturday, May 26, 2007
(C) All rights reserved
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Schwarzenegger attacks ethanol tariffs, subsidies
Schwarzenegger attacks ethanol tariffs, subsidies
Fri May 18, 2007 7:08PM EDT
By Bernie Woodall
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said on Friday he wants markets to set policies on low carbon fuels, and called for eliminating subsidies and tariffs related to ethanol.
"We need to take down the barriers we have created," Schwarzenegger said at a symposium on low carbon fuels at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, California.
The United States, he said, subsidizes domestic corn-based ethanol and imposes a 54-cents-per-gallon tariff to limit cheap ethanol imports from Brazil.
"It makes absolutely no sense. It's crazy, and it's definitely not in the best interest of the customers," said Schwarzenegger.
Brazil, which uses sugar-based ethanol, is the No. 2 producer of the biofuel after the United States and its corn-based fuel.
He did not offer specific alternatives to the tariffs and subsidies, but said the market should be allowed to come up with the best solutions after targets are set by governments like California's.
"We set the targets. The market decides how best to get there," Schwarzenegger said.
The booming U.S. ethanol production has increased corn costs and in turn feed costs for chickens, hogs and cattle. The result is a $47-per-person increase since last July in the average U.S. grocery bill, a study issued last week by Iowa State University found.
U.S. fuel ethanol gets a 51-cents-per-gallon tax subsidy.
The low carbon fuel symposium held Friday is a method to allow the markets to decide the best way forward on alternative fuels, the governor said. The governor in January called for California to set a "low carbon fuel standard" meant to cut carbon emissions in transportation fuels by 10 percent by 2020.
Schwarzenegger on Friday said the federal government's help is essential in establishing standards that stakeholders -- from industry to scientists to environmentalists -- can then strive to meet.
He called on the U.S. Congress "to adopt a fuel policy that works."
Transportation accounts for about 40 percent of the climate changing carbon emissions in California, and the state now relies on petroleum-based fuels for 96 percent of its transportation fuels.
Record gasoline prices can also be helped by less reliance on oil-based fuels and more on alternatives that cut carbon emissions, Schwarzenegger said.
Travel and motor club AAA on Friday said the U.S. average for regular gasoline was $3.13 per gallon, and $3.46 per gallon in California.
"The low carbon fuel standard is our best weapon against rising oil prices and gas prices," Schwarzenegger said.
"A vibrant market in alternative fuels and alternative vehicles and alternative engines give customers a great choice, and that empowers the customers to say, 'No,' to these high fuel prices. To say, 'Hasta la vista, baby,' "
Fri May 18, 2007 7:08PM EDT
By Bernie Woodall
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said on Friday he wants markets to set policies on low carbon fuels, and called for eliminating subsidies and tariffs related to ethanol.
"We need to take down the barriers we have created," Schwarzenegger said at a symposium on low carbon fuels at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, California.
The United States, he said, subsidizes domestic corn-based ethanol and imposes a 54-cents-per-gallon tariff to limit cheap ethanol imports from Brazil.
"It makes absolutely no sense. It's crazy, and it's definitely not in the best interest of the customers," said Schwarzenegger.
Brazil, which uses sugar-based ethanol, is the No. 2 producer of the biofuel after the United States and its corn-based fuel.
He did not offer specific alternatives to the tariffs and subsidies, but said the market should be allowed to come up with the best solutions after targets are set by governments like California's.
"We set the targets. The market decides how best to get there," Schwarzenegger said.
The booming U.S. ethanol production has increased corn costs and in turn feed costs for chickens, hogs and cattle. The result is a $47-per-person increase since last July in the average U.S. grocery bill, a study issued last week by Iowa State University found.
U.S. fuel ethanol gets a 51-cents-per-gallon tax subsidy.
The low carbon fuel symposium held Friday is a method to allow the markets to decide the best way forward on alternative fuels, the governor said. The governor in January called for California to set a "low carbon fuel standard" meant to cut carbon emissions in transportation fuels by 10 percent by 2020.
Schwarzenegger on Friday said the federal government's help is essential in establishing standards that stakeholders -- from industry to scientists to environmentalists -- can then strive to meet.
He called on the U.S. Congress "to adopt a fuel policy that works."
Transportation accounts for about 40 percent of the climate changing carbon emissions in California, and the state now relies on petroleum-based fuels for 96 percent of its transportation fuels.
Record gasoline prices can also be helped by less reliance on oil-based fuels and more on alternatives that cut carbon emissions, Schwarzenegger said.
Travel and motor club AAA on Friday said the U.S. average for regular gasoline was $3.13 per gallon, and $3.46 per gallon in California.
"The low carbon fuel standard is our best weapon against rising oil prices and gas prices," Schwarzenegger said.
"A vibrant market in alternative fuels and alternative vehicles and alternative engines give customers a great choice, and that empowers the customers to say, 'No,' to these high fuel prices. To say, 'Hasta la vista, baby,' "
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Green-tech pros eye cash in carbon
By Martin LaMonica
Story last modified Wed May 09 06:05:41 PDT 2007
The first electric vehicles to roll off Phoenix Motorcars' manufacturing lines will have a hidden, but potentially lucrative, asset embedded in them.
The company's battery-powered trucks, set for delivery this summer, will generate "zero-emission credits" from the state of California that could add up to serious money for the start-up if it can sell those credits to bigger automakers.
If that happens, Phoenix will need only a fraction of what it would otherwise cost to get its business going, said Bryon Bliss, the Ontario, Calif., company's vice president of sales. "It's the difference in how much venture capital money we need--something like $100 million versus $10 million."
Put another way, the credits could help the company be profitable in one year rather than five or six, Bliss said.
Phoenix Motorcars has hit upon a particularly scarce--and thus valuable--environmental credit. The state of California requires all automakers to produce a set number of zero-emission vehicles--or buy credits to offset the gas guzzlers they do make. Because it specializes in clean vehicles, Phoenix Motorcars expects to have an excess of these credits, which it could sell to auto manufacturers who don't meet the state's requirements.
But zero-emission credits aren't the only ones making their way into companies' business models. A number of forward-looking green-tech entrepreneurs and investors are betting on the growing value of other credits, notably those based on carbon.
As government policies that address global warming build steam, companies could start to generate revenue from offsetting greenhouse gases.
It's a novel business model, but one that is actively being explored, said Rob Day, a principal at the clean-tech investment arm of @Ventures.
"Some (entrepreneurs) have been writing into contracts that they own the carbon credits created by the products they manufacture," said Day, who said that carbon-restraining policies are likely to come to the U.S. in the next few years. "You can see the writing on the wall now."
Carbon finance
As an investor, Day favors companies that don't need to rely solely on revenue from carbon credits, or other forms of market-based environmental controls.
But others view them as a sound business model. A company called Planktos is building its entire revenue plan around sequestering carbon.
Later in May, Planktos employees will set sail for the Galapagos Islands, where they plan to seed a large area of the ocean with iron to stimulate the growth of plankton, which it says is in decline.
A portion of that plankton will die and sink, keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, said David Kubiak, the company's director of communications.
"We're mostly concerned with plankton that get below 500 meters. It puts them in deep enough ocean currents that they are out of the atmosphere for centuries," he said.
To make money, it intends to sell the carbon reduction that the plankton bloom causes. Kubiak said the company originally conceived of the idea as a research project to mitigate climate change but found that business people were willing to back the venture based on anticipated revenue from selling carbon credits, which were made possible by the Kyoto Protocol.
Planktos also has a subsidiary called KlimaFa, which plans to do essentially the same thing but with forest management. Its first project in Hungary has gained government approval, said Kubiak.
"What we're basically doing is ecorestoration...and the funding mechanism is the carbon credits generated by it," he said.
Credits designed to restrict emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are being discussed in the context of climate change regulation.
But trading in emissions for different types of pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide, has been going on for years. Renewable Energy Credits are another type of green trading program, driven by government mandates for utilities to generate a certain amount of renewable energy.
Regulations will definitely accelerate (carbon management)...We're a little bit in the Wild West right now.
--Dan Pullman, vice president, McNamee Lawrence
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative will use a cap-and-trade system set to go online in 2009. It will give electricity generators a cap on the amount of greenhouse gases they can emit. If they stay below that allowance, they get credits for those offset emissions, which can be exchanged with other polluters.
Carbon trading has already taken hold in Europe, where about 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide were transacted last year on the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme, at a value of more than 18 billion euros (or $24.41 billion), according to carbon finance research firm Point Carbon.
Many of these exchanged credits are generated through project finance deals and voluntary carbon offset arrangements. In one example, carbon credits were generated in a solar power project in Malaysia, said Dan Pullman, vice president of investment bank McNamee Lawrence, which advises alternative energy companies, including voluntary carbon offset company Carbon Neutral.
Because the solar power replaced a dirtier form of power generation, the financiers of the project gained carbon credits, which could be sold on a carbon exchange.
How policies are shaped has a significant impact on the price of credits. Emissions limits that are not stringent will results in a surplus of allowances, according to experts.
Phoenix Motorcars, for example, can get carbon credits in addition to its zero-emissions vehicle credits, which are part of a $25 million California clean energy incentive program (click here for PDF).
But the company isn't doing anything with the carbon credits because they "have almost no value," said Bliss. By contrast, the California state zero-emission credits will likely be in high demand from other automakers, he said.
Planktos' Kubiak has also found that the price for carbon emissions is very low, particularly in the regulated European market because of a surplus of allowances. But he anticipates prices will go up over time and said that the company, which intends to sell credits directly, "can do quite well" at $5 per ton of carbon.
Pullman said that the arrival of federal U.S. regulations will help drive more trading. Also required are more certification authorities to evaluate carbon offset schemes, he said. There have been complaints that carbon offsets are not adequately vetted or certified.
"Regulations will definitely accelerate (carbon management). It creates a much more active environment for trading and exchanging carbon credits," Pullman said. "We're a little bit in the Wild West right now."
Copyright ©1995-2007 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
Story last modified Wed May 09 06:05:41 PDT 2007
The first electric vehicles to roll off Phoenix Motorcars' manufacturing lines will have a hidden, but potentially lucrative, asset embedded in them.
The company's battery-powered trucks, set for delivery this summer, will generate "zero-emission credits" from the state of California that could add up to serious money for the start-up if it can sell those credits to bigger automakers.
If that happens, Phoenix will need only a fraction of what it would otherwise cost to get its business going, said Bryon Bliss, the Ontario, Calif., company's vice president of sales. "It's the difference in how much venture capital money we need--something like $100 million versus $10 million."
Put another way, the credits could help the company be profitable in one year rather than five or six, Bliss said.
Phoenix Motorcars has hit upon a particularly scarce--and thus valuable--environmental credit. The state of California requires all automakers to produce a set number of zero-emission vehicles--or buy credits to offset the gas guzzlers they do make. Because it specializes in clean vehicles, Phoenix Motorcars expects to have an excess of these credits, which it could sell to auto manufacturers who don't meet the state's requirements.
But zero-emission credits aren't the only ones making their way into companies' business models. A number of forward-looking green-tech entrepreneurs and investors are betting on the growing value of other credits, notably those based on carbon.
As government policies that address global warming build steam, companies could start to generate revenue from offsetting greenhouse gases.
It's a novel business model, but one that is actively being explored, said Rob Day, a principal at the clean-tech investment arm of @Ventures.
"Some (entrepreneurs) have been writing into contracts that they own the carbon credits created by the products they manufacture," said Day, who said that carbon-restraining policies are likely to come to the U.S. in the next few years. "You can see the writing on the wall now."
Carbon finance
As an investor, Day favors companies that don't need to rely solely on revenue from carbon credits, or other forms of market-based environmental controls.
But others view them as a sound business model. A company called Planktos is building its entire revenue plan around sequestering carbon.
Later in May, Planktos employees will set sail for the Galapagos Islands, where they plan to seed a large area of the ocean with iron to stimulate the growth of plankton, which it says is in decline.
A portion of that plankton will die and sink, keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, said David Kubiak, the company's director of communications.
"We're mostly concerned with plankton that get below 500 meters. It puts them in deep enough ocean currents that they are out of the atmosphere for centuries," he said.
To make money, it intends to sell the carbon reduction that the plankton bloom causes. Kubiak said the company originally conceived of the idea as a research project to mitigate climate change but found that business people were willing to back the venture based on anticipated revenue from selling carbon credits, which were made possible by the Kyoto Protocol.
Planktos also has a subsidiary called KlimaFa, which plans to do essentially the same thing but with forest management. Its first project in Hungary has gained government approval, said Kubiak.
"What we're basically doing is ecorestoration...and the funding mechanism is the carbon credits generated by it," he said.
Credits designed to restrict emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are being discussed in the context of climate change regulation.
But trading in emissions for different types of pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide, has been going on for years. Renewable Energy Credits are another type of green trading program, driven by government mandates for utilities to generate a certain amount of renewable energy.
Regulations will definitely accelerate (carbon management)...We're a little bit in the Wild West right now.
--Dan Pullman, vice president, McNamee Lawrence
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative will use a cap-and-trade system set to go online in 2009. It will give electricity generators a cap on the amount of greenhouse gases they can emit. If they stay below that allowance, they get credits for those offset emissions, which can be exchanged with other polluters.
Carbon trading has already taken hold in Europe, where about 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide were transacted last year on the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme, at a value of more than 18 billion euros (or $24.41 billion), according to carbon finance research firm Point Carbon.
Many of these exchanged credits are generated through project finance deals and voluntary carbon offset arrangements. In one example, carbon credits were generated in a solar power project in Malaysia, said Dan Pullman, vice president of investment bank McNamee Lawrence, which advises alternative energy companies, including voluntary carbon offset company Carbon Neutral.
Because the solar power replaced a dirtier form of power generation, the financiers of the project gained carbon credits, which could be sold on a carbon exchange.
How policies are shaped has a significant impact on the price of credits. Emissions limits that are not stringent will results in a surplus of allowances, according to experts.
Phoenix Motorcars, for example, can get carbon credits in addition to its zero-emissions vehicle credits, which are part of a $25 million California clean energy incentive program (click here for PDF).
But the company isn't doing anything with the carbon credits because they "have almost no value," said Bliss. By contrast, the California state zero-emission credits will likely be in high demand from other automakers, he said.
Planktos' Kubiak has also found that the price for carbon emissions is very low, particularly in the regulated European market because of a surplus of allowances. But he anticipates prices will go up over time and said that the company, which intends to sell credits directly, "can do quite well" at $5 per ton of carbon.
Pullman said that the arrival of federal U.S. regulations will help drive more trading. Also required are more certification authorities to evaluate carbon offset schemes, he said. There have been complaints that carbon offsets are not adequately vetted or certified.
"Regulations will definitely accelerate (carbon management). It creates a much more active environment for trading and exchanging carbon credits," Pullman said. "We're a little bit in the Wild West right now."
Copyright ©1995-2007 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
Plastic goods for your compost heap
By Martin LaMonica
Story last modified Tue Apr 24 10:48:43 PDT 2007
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Biotech firm Metabolix and agriculture giant Archer Daniels Midland plan to sell a plastic that could benefit everyone from backyard composters to marine animals.
At a press conference here Monday, Metabolix announced the brand name--Mirel--for its biodegradable plastic made from corn and said it will be used in several consumer products including razor holders and gift cards.
The plastic pellets will be produced through a joint venture called Telles between Cambridge, Mass.-based Metabolix and ADM, which expects to have a corn-processing plant in Clinton, Iowa, operating in the second half of 2008.
The idea behind Mirel is to brand products or their packaging as a greener alternative to conventional plastics, which are made from petroleum, said Metabolix CEO James Barber. Like a growing number of "green," or so-called clean tech, companies, Metabolix is appealing to consumers' growing concerns over the environment and sustainability.
Companies can use the Mirel logo to indicate that it's an Earth-friendly plastic that can decompose within a few months, depending on the circumstance.
By contrast, things like plastic bags--part of the 350 million pounds of plastic created every year--remain in the environment "virtually forever," Barber said. The petroleum to make these plastics accounts for 10 percent of the oil the U.S. consumes, he said.
Metabolix expects that consumer-goods packagers will charge slightly more because they are "premium" goods. A coffee sold in Mirel packaging, for example, would cost consumers a few cents more, Barber said.
Metabolix is in talks with 40 prospective customers for 60 different applications including coffee cups and lids and plastic bags, he said.
Plastic microbes
American Excelsior has already developed a line of plastic stakes to hold down its erosion prevention blankets. The plastic stakes are better than metal stakes because they will not rust in seawater and don't require crews to retrieve them at the end of their use, said Jerry Bohannon, director of earth science at American Excelsior.
The company will also upgrade its software so that engineers can design systems around biodegradable products, a move that will allow "engineers to create products with the environment in mind," Bohannon said.
Mirel will initially be made from corn starch, but other sources of sugar can be used as well.
Meanwhile, Metabolix is already at work on a second generation of plastics grown within plants.
The company is developing a method by which the microbes that make up its biodegradeable plastic can be produced within switchgrass, Barber said.
The microbes, which are innocuous to the switchgrass they're growing in, can be extracted and made into plastic pellets. Residual biomass also could be converted into biofuels. "It'll be huge," he said, adding that the process will be available in about five years.
Mirel plastic stems from genetic research started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nearly 20 years ago.
The plastic is made by combining genes of several naturally occurring substances and making them function together, said Oliver Peoples, chief scientific officer and co-founder of Metabolix.
Genetic engineering is well understood but hasn't been widely applied to plastics, he said. Mirel uses many of the same techniques that pharmaceutical companies do.
"We are interested in using a number of genes to assemble teams of genes and make them work in living cells," Peoples said.
There are already biodegradable packaging products created with polyactic acid (PLA), also typically made from corn starch.
Metabolix executives said PLA does not stand up as well to heat as Mirel and can be composted only in industrial composting facilities.
Mirel plastic can biodegrade in soil or any type of compost pile. It will also break down in septic systems and waste treatment facilities or in wetlands and marine environments.
"The key thing with Mirel is that it opens up a range of options for the end-of-life fate," Barber said. "Now plastics last hundreds or thousands of years."
On the other hand, PLA is clearer than Mirel, so most likely it will be used to package products that will be chilled, like produce or sandwiches, Barber said.
Another company called Cereplast is also making biodegradeable goods, such as food packaging and utensils, from corn starch.
In contrast to Metablox, Cereplast said that with rising petroleum prices, its corn-based products will be the same price or cheaper than traditional plastics.
ADM chose to partner with Metabolix because its patented technology makes it a leader in the field, said Terry Stoa, vice president of technology assessment at ADM.
He said that the production plant, now under construction, will be capable of making 110 million pounds of Mirel per year.
Although the company is betting that consumers will be willing to pay more for Mirel as a green product, company executives concede there isn't a great awareness of how plastics are produced today.
A study commissioned by Telles found that 72 percent of the American public does not know that conventional plastic is made from petroleum.
Copyright ©1995-2007 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
Story last modified Tue Apr 24 10:48:43 PDT 2007
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Biotech firm Metabolix and agriculture giant Archer Daniels Midland plan to sell a plastic that could benefit everyone from backyard composters to marine animals.
At a press conference here Monday, Metabolix announced the brand name--Mirel--for its biodegradable plastic made from corn and said it will be used in several consumer products including razor holders and gift cards.
The plastic pellets will be produced through a joint venture called Telles between Cambridge, Mass.-based Metabolix and ADM, which expects to have a corn-processing plant in Clinton, Iowa, operating in the second half of 2008.
The idea behind Mirel is to brand products or their packaging as a greener alternative to conventional plastics, which are made from petroleum, said Metabolix CEO James Barber. Like a growing number of "green," or so-called clean tech, companies, Metabolix is appealing to consumers' growing concerns over the environment and sustainability.
Companies can use the Mirel logo to indicate that it's an Earth-friendly plastic that can decompose within a few months, depending on the circumstance.
By contrast, things like plastic bags--part of the 350 million pounds of plastic created every year--remain in the environment "virtually forever," Barber said. The petroleum to make these plastics accounts for 10 percent of the oil the U.S. consumes, he said.
Metabolix expects that consumer-goods packagers will charge slightly more because they are "premium" goods. A coffee sold in Mirel packaging, for example, would cost consumers a few cents more, Barber said.
Metabolix is in talks with 40 prospective customers for 60 different applications including coffee cups and lids and plastic bags, he said.
Plastic microbes
American Excelsior has already developed a line of plastic stakes to hold down its erosion prevention blankets. The plastic stakes are better than metal stakes because they will not rust in seawater and don't require crews to retrieve them at the end of their use, said Jerry Bohannon, director of earth science at American Excelsior.
The company will also upgrade its software so that engineers can design systems around biodegradable products, a move that will allow "engineers to create products with the environment in mind," Bohannon said.
Mirel will initially be made from corn starch, but other sources of sugar can be used as well.
Meanwhile, Metabolix is already at work on a second generation of plastics grown within plants.
The company is developing a method by which the microbes that make up its biodegradeable plastic can be produced within switchgrass, Barber said.
The microbes, which are innocuous to the switchgrass they're growing in, can be extracted and made into plastic pellets. Residual biomass also could be converted into biofuels. "It'll be huge," he said, adding that the process will be available in about five years.
Mirel plastic stems from genetic research started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nearly 20 years ago.
The plastic is made by combining genes of several naturally occurring substances and making them function together, said Oliver Peoples, chief scientific officer and co-founder of Metabolix.
Genetic engineering is well understood but hasn't been widely applied to plastics, he said. Mirel uses many of the same techniques that pharmaceutical companies do.
"We are interested in using a number of genes to assemble teams of genes and make them work in living cells," Peoples said.
There are already biodegradable packaging products created with polyactic acid (PLA), also typically made from corn starch.
Metabolix executives said PLA does not stand up as well to heat as Mirel and can be composted only in industrial composting facilities.
Mirel plastic can biodegrade in soil or any type of compost pile. It will also break down in septic systems and waste treatment facilities or in wetlands and marine environments.
"The key thing with Mirel is that it opens up a range of options for the end-of-life fate," Barber said. "Now plastics last hundreds or thousands of years."
On the other hand, PLA is clearer than Mirel, so most likely it will be used to package products that will be chilled, like produce or sandwiches, Barber said.
Another company called Cereplast is also making biodegradeable goods, such as food packaging and utensils, from corn starch.
In contrast to Metablox, Cereplast said that with rising petroleum prices, its corn-based products will be the same price or cheaper than traditional plastics.
ADM chose to partner with Metabolix because its patented technology makes it a leader in the field, said Terry Stoa, vice president of technology assessment at ADM.
He said that the production plant, now under construction, will be capable of making 110 million pounds of Mirel per year.
Although the company is betting that consumers will be willing to pay more for Mirel as a green product, company executives concede there isn't a great awareness of how plastics are produced today.
A study commissioned by Telles found that 72 percent of the American public does not know that conventional plastic is made from petroleum.
Copyright ©1995-2007 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
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