During a recent round-table session I attended with British scientist and Gaia author James Lovelock, it was easy to walk away feeling helpless about the climate problems humanity faces. But when pressed, Lovelock said he does believe there’s potential in “biochar” — that is, converting some of the world’s biomass (e.g. forest slash, agricultural residues, fast-growing grasses grown on depleted soils, farmed algae) into charcoal and sequestering the black mass in soil or under the ocean. This is done through a process called pyrolysis, which when creating the charcoal locks in about 60 per cent of the biomass’s carbon. Charcoal stays inert and chemically stable for hundreds of years. Best to turn some of the world’s biomass into charcoal instead of letting the biomass rot and release methane into the atmosphere. At least that’s the thinking.

In the end, it’s the rough equivalent of making coal, but doing it in a few hours instead of a million or so years. It’s considered better — and likely cheaper — than the capture and sequestering of fossil-fuel CO2 emissions because it doesn’t just avoid the release of emissions; so-called charcoal sequestration can lead to the extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere. This makes it carbon negative. Turning some of the biomass into charcoal prevents new emissions, but the new generation of biomass that grows also absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere. Over time, the cycle of charring biomass and growing new biomass can act like a big global carbon vacuum.

The trick is doing it on a large enough scale to matter. EnCana researcher Subodh Gupta, a big believer in charcoal sequestration, recently argued at the Canadian International Petroleum Conference in Calgary that the best way to demonstrate that the approach works is to start with the organics and even some plastics collected from municipal solid waste. It solves many problems. (more…)

It’s with great delight that I read about the handful of U.S. utilities that are seriously testing out various conservation, smart grid, storage and renewable technologies in an effort to extend greener offerings to customers. The latest is Duke Energy’s McAlpine Creek project, part of which involves the deployment of a 50 kilowatt solar PV array, consisting of 213 solar panels, at a substation that feeds the grid or, alternatively, can charge up a 500-kilowatt zinc-bromide battery system.

Duke hasn’t revealed any detail of the specific vendor technologies it is using, but I’m betting that the battery system for this particular pilot comes from Mass.-based Premium Power, which is largely operating in stealth mode at the moment. For one, the company’s TransFlow 2000 product fits the bill. It has 500 kilowatts of power and stores up to 500 kilowatts  2.8 megawatt-hours, is UL and CSA certified, and one of its main applications is for the time-shift of renewable generation energy. Boston Power, backed by VantagePoint Venture Partners, claims its storage product costs the same as pumped storage over the long term, or about 2 cents per kilowatt-hour. I also remind that last October, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke at an event in Toronto, he mentioned that Duke Energy had ordered $100 million worth of Premium Power’s batteries. An advisor and partner with VantagePoint, Kennedy also said a Canadian utility had ordered $100 million of the batteries as well. (more…)

I had a feature this weekend in the Toronto Star about the cap-and-trade system coming to Ontario and the likelihood an offsets market will be created a year or more before the 2012 launch of the program. The government here is working hard to align our own provincial system with the Western Climate Initiative, in which it is a member, as well as the Waxman-Markey bill under consideration in the United States (which will likely set the North American standard). The idea of allowing a carbon offsets market to emerge in advance of the cap-and-trade launch is a smart one, as it gives industry a way to prepare and it stimulates offset project development before the final cap-and-trade rules go into effect.

But here’s the problem: A good portion of offset projects are also electricity generation projects, such as wind, solar, biogas and hydroelectric. But in Ontario, if you want to sell your electricity to the power authority you sign a 20-year deal under a new feed-in tariff program. The tariffs are generous, but most developers are also hoping to keep the carbon credits they would qualify for so they can be sold as offsets.

Unfortunately for them, the Ontario Power Authority’s contract for power purchases stipulates that it — and by “it” I mean the Ontario government, which is ultimately the Ontario ratepayer — gets to keep all environmental attributes. This raises a number of issues: (more…)

You’re at home cooking yourself some dinner. You fill your plate but before you sit down to eat you walk over to the garbage can and dump a quarter of your meal.

Insane? Well, that’s exactly what we’re doing with our drinking water.

In Ontario, some new numbers were released today and they’re staggering. A study by professors in the University of Toronto’s civil engineering department found that municipal water systems across Ontario have leakage rates of treated water ranging from 10 to 50 per cent, with the average conservatively estimated at 25 per cent. This, they estimate, translates into $700 million annually that taxpayers are paying for water that never reaches their taps.

“That’s some 327 million cubic meters of water lost each year — enough to fill about 131,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools,” according to the study, which was done in partnership with the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario. Then there’s all the energy that’s used to treat and pump that lost water and the environmental consequences of having it leak into the ground, where sinkholes can form and basement can flood.

This isn’t the kind of thing consumers like to hear when they’re being asked to conserve water, install low-flush toilets, use rain barrels, and let their lawns and flowers go brown. (more…)

Canada, with its vast territory and expertise in deep drilling, is still relativelysilent on the potential for geothermal power. Meanwhile, the U.K. is even leaping ahead of us. A tourist attracton in Cornwall, England, called The Eden Project has partnered up with a company called EGS Energy that will see a 3 megawatt enhanced geothermal plant built, with plans for further expansion throughout the area. Two four kilometre deep boreholes will be drilled into hot granite rock. Water will be brought in and pumped into one borehole and will travel through the hot rock to a second borehole, picking up heat along the way. The water will then be pumped back at around 150 degrees C. A secondary fluid, with a lower boiling point than water, extracts the heat from the hot water and is turned into vapour to power a binary turbine. The water, now cooled, is then reinjected back into the first well to reheat and continue the cycle, which is a closed loop.

The U.K. plant is expected to be operational by 2012. Needless to say, this approach could easily be done throughout Alberta, particularly in the oil sands, even in some locations in Ontario and other provinces. If the U.K. can do it, hell, certainly there are parts of Canada that can. In late May the Obama administration committed $140 million to geothermal demonstration projects, $80 million for enhanced geothermal R&D, and $100 million for new drilling techniques and innovation.

And Canada? The big goose egg.