There are many algae technology companies out there, but it’s nice to see these two Ontario companies actually doing something outside of the lab in a way that directly meets the needs of industry. In fact, Pond Biofuels has its sights set on China as well. The company revealed in December that its St. Marys project had been approved as part of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate program. This means it will get funding to do a feasibility study that will assess the suitability of its technology for the cement industry in China.

The problem with this conclusion? Clarens based the life-cycle analysis on data that was mostly 10 years old. For example, some current algae cultivation practices, particularly those based on wastewater or sea water, tackle the fertilizer issue head on. So the age of the data is an important bit of information that should have been made very clear in the study — even the abstract. Ten years in the world of technology, particular cleantech, is a long time. I mean, the big R&D push around algae-based fuels only began three or four years ago, and 10 years ago the “cleantech” sector didn’t exist in name. Ten years ago the world was still wrapping its head around Y2K, George W. Bush was just getting into office, Google was still a start-up years from going public, and the TV show CSI (the original one) had its world premiere. In other words, you can expect data about algae cultivation to be, well, rather useless as a reflection of current practices.

This isn’t to blame Clarens. As he told the New York Times’ Green Inc., the most current data out there is simply unavailable to academia. It’s proprietary. “I’d be happy to model it if somebody produces it,” he said. This, of course, is a general problem with a lot of studies looking into lifecycle analyses. Researchers can only go with the data they can get, and perhaps this explains a lot of the earlier controversy around ethanol from corn. It’s still something we want to move away from, but certainly not as bad as guys like David Pimental of Cornell University like to paint it. I’d argue these studies should do two things: make a greater effort of emphasizing data limitations; and make a clear distinction between technologies/processes already deployed and those in pre-commercial phase.

Look at it this way: Can you imagine a study coming out in 2010 comparing different Internet search engines, but basing it on data available in 2000? Now, the Internet isn’t cleantech, but in certain areas there’s no reason to believe that the pace of innovation is any different.

Life-cycle analysis is hugely important work, but if it can’t keep up with innovation then it can become dated before it’s even published.

Meanwhile, Toronto-based Pond Biofuels Inc. says one of its CO2-to-algae demonstration projects has been approved as part of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate program. The company, in partnership with cement manufacturer St. Marys Cement, has established a microalgae facility that uses CO2 from the neighbouring cement plant as a source of nutrients for the organisms. The algae is then expected to be harvested and used as biomass fuel in the plant’s cement kiln. Pond Biofuels will now get funding under the Asia-Pacific Partnership for a feasibility study that will assess the suitability of its technology for the cement industry in China.

Also, here’s a story I wrote in MIT Technology Review updating Sandia’s very cool “Sun-to-Petrol” project.

When the Alberta government announced last week that it would be handing over $745 million to Shell Canada so it could move ahead with its Quest commercial-scale CCS project, and when the federal government said it would chip in another $120 million, it didn’t sit well with environmental and energy think-tank The Pembina Institute.

It’s not that Pembina is against developing this technology. What it doesn’t particularly like, and I can’t help but agree, is the fact that the Alberta and federal governments’ are covering two-thirds of the cost for this $1.35 billion project, which will be designed to capture CO2 from the steam methane units at the Scotford Upgrader in Fort Saskatchewan. It’s part of the Athabasca Oil Sands Project, a joint venture among Shell (60 per cent), Chevron Canada (20 per cent) and Marathon Oil Sands (20 per cent).

Why, Pembina asks, are taxpayers covering the majority of a project’s costs when the companies benefitting from this public freebie are some of the most profitable companies in the country? Pembina is also opposed to the governments being “singularly focused” on end-of-pipe technologies, such as CCS, at the expense of investments in technologies and energy sources that reduce or altogether eliminate carbon emissions at the front of the pipe — renewables, energy efficiency, etc…

Rather than carry the load for the private sector, the government should be moving quickly to establish a cap-and-trade regime that would put a sufficient price on carbon, Pembina argues. Ultimately, polluters should cover the whole cost of CCS deployment and that will only happen when they factor in the cost of not doing so once carbon pricing hits their bottom line. Pembina also argues that the government shouldn’t be so narrowly focused on CCS that it ignores the much broader, and less risky opportunities out there. “In parallel to its support for CCS, the government needs to support a massive scale-up in renewable energy and energy efficiency, the most sustainable solutions to climate change,” it says.

Fact is the federal government appears to be pulling its support from the ecoEnergy for Renewable Power program, which covers 1 cent of the cost for every kilowatt-hour of electricity produced from green energy sources, primarily wind. The program has been successful and is expected to run out of allocated money this fall. Here’s the problem: even if the government at some point renews the incentive, and there’s no indication it will, the fact that there’s likely to be a period of inactivity creates a boom-bust situation for renewable energy developers. We saw the negative impact this had on the U.S. wind industry just a few years ago, so it’s concerning to see the Canadian government heading in this direction. I asked Lisa Raitt, Minister of Natural Resources, about this concern and she’s very aware of it. But she said the government has to be cautious about how it spends money over the next few years given the huge deficits caused by unprecedented stimulus spending and lower government revenues. Translation: end-of-pipe projects that allow us to produce more oil and coal, those are fine, but lower priority goes to renewable energy that avoids emissions in the first place. Don’t even get me started about the government’s complete lack of interest and support for geothermal power.

The other concern has to do with the enormous risks associated with CCS. According to a recent report out of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, “The technology holds the promise of massive reductions in emissions but any success may ultimately be limited to a relatively few projects due to cost, liability, technology, scale and public skepticism.” It goes on to say that CCS “may turn out to be another costly Faustian bargain” because it merely justifies and prolongs our addiction to fossil fuels while offering no long-term certainty:

Nobody knows how billions of tonnes of highly compressed carbon dioxide will behave underground. Could CO2 eventually leak and find its way into underground sources of drinking water (USDW)? Could plumes of pressurized carbon dioxide displace salt water from the saline aquifers into USDW? What would happen if sequestered carbon dioxide were to leak into the atmosphere or creep into an underground source of drinking water 50 years from now? Who would be responsible? Who would monitor the carbon dioxide underground for centuries? What would happen if carbon dioxide injected in one jurisdiction migrated into a neighbouring jurisdiction?

In other words, are we really willing to put so many eggs — and future generations — in one basket? The reality, according to the Munk report, is that “Instead of buying us time to find alternate sources of clean energy, CCS is buying politicians’ time to avoid making tough, unpopular decisions.”

Those tough, unpopular decisions can be found in the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2009, or at least an early excerpt from that outlook. To limit CO2 levels in the atmosphere to 450 parts per million, the agency estimates that $10.5 trillion (U.S.) will need to be spent globally between 2010 and 2030 on top of what’s been spent or committed up to mid-2009. In total, $6.6 trillion will need to be invested in “low-carbon power generation,” with 72 per cent of that committed to renewables, 19 per cent to nuclear, and 9 per cent to CCS. The good news is that total fuel savings are estimated to be $8.6 trillion over that period, so there are clearly economic and environmental benefits to aggressively pursuing this path.

But let me just emphasize: The IEA figures 72 per cent of those trillions should be spent on renewables, with just 9 per cent spent on CCS. It also says fossil fuel energy consumption must peak by 2020 and then begin falling to achieve the 450 parts per million target. Given this, why is the Canadian government giving so much attention to CCS, a technology that encourages greater fossil fuel consumption and is burdened with massive risk, when the world’s energy agency clearly shows that limiting fossil fuel use and spending heavily on renewables should be the chief goal?

I think it’s a fair question for all Canadians to be asking. The country’s national energy and climate policy shouldn’t be primarily based on the economic interests of Alberta.

Researchers co-injected carbion dioxide and chemical tracers into an underground storage site. The tracer makes it possible to differentiate CO2 from the experiment from naturally occurring CO2. They then placed bee hives about 150 metres upwind and downwind of the site, where CO2 from underground was intentionally released as part of the experiment. The idea is that pollen from surrounding flowers would collect the CO2 and be marked by the tracer. As bees gather the pollen, they bring it back to their hives, where researchers collect samples for analysis. If there’s no tracer, there’s presumably no leak.

While a novel idea, I’m not sure I’m comforted by the idea of having bees used to track CO2 leaks over hundreds of years. Also, I wonder if there ever was a major leak whether it would just kill the bees — that to me, is a pretty good sign that something is wrong. Problem is, it would also kill the humans in the area. As a way to pre-test the ability of a site to hold CO2, however, this could be one approach worth employing.

My feature, by the way, starts out focusing on Florida-based Algenol. Many don’t realize the company’s technology emerged out of research at the University of Toronto, and that founder Paul Woods is a Canadian who was born, grew up and ran a natural gas marketing business in Toronto before heading south at age 36. Algenol’s chief science officer, John Coleman, is the U of T professor who worked with Woods over the past 25 years to perfect the Algenol process.

I’ve said this in many posts before, but I’ll say it again: These are exciting times people. The engine of innovation is in high gear.

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. For one, you can leverage an existing municipal MSW collection network, so no extra costs there. Second, pyrolysis systems can be economically set up at central MSW collection points. Third, a municipality can better manage its waste by reducing how much of it goes to landfill. The charcoal produced is essentially crushed and stored in existing landfills, where it will sit inert for centuries. (A good way for municipalities to earn carbon credits, too).

Gupta argues that if it works well with MSW, and at scale, then it can expand to other areas over time. He even did a comparison to using MSW for other purposes — such as electricity-from-waste and ethanol-from-waste — and concluded that sequestration of MSW-based charcoal is cheaper to implement and, with the benefit of carbon credits, more economical overall. That said, we’re already seeing huge competition for biomass resources driven by the quest for carbon-neutral fuels and power.

Gupta’s enthusiasm for charcoal sequestration is shared by more than just James Lovelock, who says that if he was a betting man he’d put all his money on biochar. The Weather Makers author Tim Flannery supports it, as does NASA scientist James Hansen. Sure, you’ve got skeptics like Heat author George Monbiot, who recently slammed the approach in a column for the U.K. Guardian. But nobody is calling charcoal sequestration a silver bullet, as Monbiot suggests. It’s one promising option in the climate mitigation toolbox. Nobody is suggesting that we use prime agricultural lands to grow crops that we would then turn into charcoal. By making that connection Monbiot is doing his readers a disservice.

Would Monbiot be against turning all the dead and decaying pine trees in B.C. — victims of pine beatle infestation — into charcoal? Municipal solid waste? Would he be against farmers choosing to turn their own crop residue into charcoal, which can be used as a soil enhancer for their own land?

My Clean Break column today takes a shot at the Canadian government for repeatedly touting carbon capture and sequestration as a panacea for the oil sands, while at the same time refusing to recognize — and support — the role that renewable energy can play. It comes on the heels of an appropriately critical National Geographic feature on the oil sands called “Scrapping Bottom,” and the recently yet repeatedly expressed belief of Environment Minister Jim Prentice that technology will save the day.

Perhaps technology will helps prolong our days on this planet, but it won’t be carbon capture and sequestration, which is too expensive, unproven, inefficient and, in some applications, ineffective to tackle the ghost in Canada’s climate-change closet. By refusing to acknowledge the major role that other renewables can play to avoid these carbon emissions in the first place, and to do it more quickly and economically, Stephen Harper is sending Canada’s economy down a path that’s unsustainable.

Aside from some environmental groups, nobody is asking the government to shut down the oil sands. What they’re asking is for development to be frozen while we address the environmental concerns we face today. CCS is part of the solution, and the long-term part, so we need to put more investment and attention to technologies that make oil sand operations more efficient, or which use clean alternatives to natural gas — such as geothermal and solar thermal. Canada is not doing itself any favours by broadening the path it’s currently on. Better to build a couple of new paths that will enable a less painful transition over the long term.

Oil sands supporters like to remind the rest of Canada, particularly Ontarians, that the Alberta oil industry is the country’s economic engine and creates the jobs and government revenues that keep the rest of us happy. Yeah, and it creates a lot of jobs for foreign workers as well who take that wealth out of the country, and for foreign companies that also take that wealth out of the country.  Maybe if we slowed down development, we could come to a pace that’s sustainable using our own national workforce? And why can’t we pursue other paths as well? Why is it just assumed that the path laid down is the only path for employment and GDP growth in Alberta?

To quote the end of my column:

Under an Obama administration, America is no longer in denial. Having acknowledged its addiction to oil, the United States is checking itself into rehab. Canada’s steadfast position? Renovate the crack house, use cleaner needles and continue feeding a nasty global habit. Surely we could broaden that narrow, dangerous vision.

I’ll end with this: Just what is Rex Murphy smoking? His position — that Alberta’s oil sands is bringing home the Canadian bacon so we should just shut up – borderline insulting, and ignores the fact that the oil sands — despite its job and wealth creation so far – is a generational symbol of the crossroads we are at. We either choose to go down an unsustainable path or we begin creating some other paths to make the transition less painful in the long term. Attacking National Geographic for consuming fuel in the course of making its story is like blaming the dog for eating the slop that’s put in front of him. We, as average Canadians, haven’t had much say about it.

But let’s assume, a decade out, that all the promise of CCS pans out. Let’s assume it takes hold, that a vast network of pipelines is built, that we’re certain sequestration sites won’t leak, and that the percentage of CO2 we can capture from coal plants and industrial sites continues to improve. Let’s assume that two decades out we start to see a number of acquifers and old oil fields filled to capacity with CO2 and, finally, capped shut.

Think those storage sites will be forever permanent? Think again.

I was talking recently with someone heading up a government algae-based carbon recycling program. The goal of this program is to come up with an economic way to divert CO2-rich flue gases from industrial sites and coal plants to nearby enclosed algae farms. The algae would “eat” the CO2, grow quickly, and then be harvested to make a combination of products, from biodiesel and ethanol to protein feed for livestock. I’m probably not telling you anything new — there are dozens of companies out there trying to do the same thing.

But then this person, who shall remain nameless, says something that caught my attention. He called all those storage sites “gold mines of the future.” At first I didn’t get what he was saying, then I realized the significance of that comment. He was basically saying that, down the road, algae farms could be created right on top of CO2 storage sites. The farms could be designed to pump this CO2 back to the surface, giving them a predictable stream of relatively pure algae food. An earlier scenario would be to build these algae farms at CO2 pipeline hubs. Either way, it would be much more economical than building an algae farm/processing plant next to each and every coal plant or aluminum smelter.

There’s a part of me that loves this idea, and there’s a part that asks: Shouldn’t we leave this stuff alone? Sure, the biodiesel and ethanol and other chemical products made from this algae will presumably displace the use of oil down the road. But given that, long term, we’re going to need an 80 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions globally, developing infrastructure for this would seem to undermine this target.

It made me realize that short- and medium-term ideas, despite there merit, need to be considered as part of a larger long-term picture. CO2 stored, assuming we can ever make it work to the scale that’s necessary, is probably best if capped shut and left alone.