The UK-built Zephyr solar-powered plane has smashed the endurance record for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The craft took off from the US Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona at 1440 BST (0640 local time) last Friday and is still in the air. Its non-stop operation, day and night, means it has now gone four times longer than the official mark recognised by the world air sports federation. The plane has been developed by the defence and research company Qinetiq.
Its project manager, Jon Saltmarsh, said Zephyr would be brought down once it had flown non-stop for a fortnight. “Zephyr is basically the first ‘eternal aircraft’,”.
The UAV has been under development for a number of years at Qinetiq. Solar-powered high-altitude long-endurance (Hale) UAVs are expected to have a wide range of applications in the future.
The military will want to use them as reconnaissance and communications platforms. Civilian and scientific programmes will equip them with small payloads for Earth observation duties. Their unique selling point is their persistence over a location. Low-Earth orbiting satellites come and go in a swift pass overhead, and the bigger drones now operated by the military still need to return to base at regular intervals for refuelling.

But as Zephyr has now proved, solar UAVs can be left in the sky. Their solar cells drive propellers during the day and top up their batteries to maintain the craft through the dark hours of night. An autopilot keeps them circling over the same spot. The latest version of Zephyr is now 50% bigger than its predecessors. The updated vehicle has a wingspan of 22.5m, and features a new wingtip and tail design that dramatically improve aero performance.

It also has a wider configuration near the main body to accommodate more equipment. In addition, the team has upgraded the avionics and power management systems on board.
“The launch was absolutely beautiful; it was just so smooth,” said Mr Saltmarsh. “We had five people lift it above their heads, start running and it just lifted away into the sky.”
The current official world endurance record for a UAV is 30 hours, 24 minutes. This was set by the US robot Global Hawk. Zephyr itself has already recorded an 83-hour continuous flight but representatives from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI) were not present to witness proceedings.

However, they are at Yuma this time and so the latest flight will go down as an official world record provided the FAI is satisfied its rules have been followed. “This is a huge milestone that puts us at the leading edge,” Mr Saltmarsh told BBC News. “It’s a practical system that can actually be used rather than simply a demonstration of small technical achievements.” The Zephyr flight is the second event of note this year in solar-powered aviation. Earlier this month, Andre Borschberg became the first person to pilot a manned solar plane through the night.

Content credits: Jonathan Amos – BBC

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Zephyr solar plane flies 7 days non-stop

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“Solar Power” no longer refers just to chunky photovoltaic panels. A variety of tools for turning sunlight into usable energy– thin-film solar, solar thermal, solar heating, and more– are undergoing a burst of technological acceleration. Whether it’s powering an entire housing development or simply heating your house, taken together, their potential is huge.

Where we are: 12.4 GW What we need by 2050: 2,000 GW.

Tech to watch: Concentrating Solar Thermal
A Shortage of low- carbon power sources seems absurd when you consider that a nearby star bathes the planet in 85,000 terawatts of energy every year. We just have to capture it.

The Google-funded start-up eSolar has devised a relatively cheap and efficient form of solar power by refining concentrating solar thermal(CST), in which large mirror arrays focus light to create heat and utilimately electricity. Proponents say CST can make solar cost-comparative with coal within a decade. It is “probably the onlky thing that can be done at a big enough scale to produce terawatts,” says Bill Gross, eSolar’s CEO.

At the first eSolar power plant, a five-megawatt facility called Sierra situated northeast of Los Angeles, 24,000 mirrors gather the sunlight falling on 20 acres of land and train it on water-filled boile4r units perched on top of towers. This creates temperatures of approximately 850 degrees F, producing steam that turns an onsite turbine to generate electricity.

CST has been around since 1980, but in the 1990’s a lack of public interest sent it into hibernation. Now public interest is back in a big way, and CST has awoken with a vengeance. One new megawatt of CST hardware was installed worldwide in 2006, in 2007 there were 100. The Earth Policy Institute projects that the installation of CST worldwide will double every 16 months, from 457 megawatts in 2007 to 6,400 megawatts by 2012. At least 13 plants are in advanced planning stages in the U.S.

ESolar’s approach is comparatively cheap because, unlike most of its competitors, which use large, custom-built parabolic mirrors to capture sunlight from all angles. eSolar uses small, flat mirrors, each about the size of a big-screen television. Computerized tracking keeps each mirror focused at the optimal angle throughout the day. The mirrors are easy to manufacture, and it takes just two workers to attach them to relatively light scaffolding on-site. ESolar’s standard 44-megawatt array, which makes enough juice to power about 30,000 homes, occupies only a quarter of a square mile, which allow the company to avoid the land-use fights that have ensnared other solar companies.

Sierra is a demonstration project, but in February eSolar signed a deal to build eleven 46 megawatt plants in the Southwest, and it is set to build a full gigawatt’s worth of plants in India. “Efficiency wins in every industry,” Gross says,”and it’s going to win in solar as well.”

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Solar Power – The big picture

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Second-generational biofuels created from inedible Parts of Plants Promise Near-term Alternatives to Oil. Biofuels can be made from anything that is, or ever was, a plant. First-generation biofuels derive from edible biomass, primarily corn and soybeans (in the U.S.) and sugarcane (in Brazil). They are the low-hanging fruits in a forest of possible biofuels, given that the technology to convert these feedstocks into fuels already exists(180 refineries currently process corn into ethanol in the U.S.). Yet first-generation biofuels are not a long term solution. There is simply not enough available farmland to provide more than about 10 percent of developed countries’ liquid-fuel needs with first-generation biofuels. The additional crop demand raises the price of animal feed and thus makes some food items more expensive – though not as much as the media hysteria last year would indicate. And once the total emissions of growing, harvesting, and processing corn and factored into the ledger, it becomes clear that first-generation biofuels are not as environmentally friendly as we would like them to be.
Second-generation biofuels made from cellulosic material- colloquially, “grassoline”- can avoid these pitfalls. Grassoline can be made from dozens, if not hundreds, of sources: from wood residues such as sawdust and construction debris, to agricultural residues such as cornstalks and wheat straw, to “energy crops” – fast growing grasses and woody materials that are grown expressly to serve as feedstocks for grassoline. The feedstocks are cheap, abudant and do not interfere with food production. Most energy crops can grow on marginal lands that would not otherwise be used as farmland. Some, such as the short-rotation willow coppice, will decontaminate soil that has been polluted with wastewater or heavy metals as it grows.
Huge amounts of cellulosic biomass can be sustainably harvested to produce fuel. According to a study by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture and Dept of Energy , the U.S. can produce at least 1.3 billion dry tons of cellulosic biomass every year without decreasing the amount of biomass available for our food, animal feed or exports. This much biomass could produce more than 100 billion gallons of grassoline a year- about half the current annual consumption of gasoline and diesel in the U.S. Similar projections estimate that the global supply of cellulosic biomass as an energy content equivalent to between 34 billion to 160 billion barrels of oil a year, numbers that exceed the world’s current annual consumption of 30 billion barrels of oil. Cellulosic biomass can also be converted to any type of fuel- ethanol, ordinary gasoline, diesel, even jet fuel. Scientists are still much better at fermenting corn kernels than they are at breaking down tough stalks of cellulose, but they have recently enjoyed an explosion of progress. Powerful tools such as quantum-chemical computational models allow chemical engineers to build structures that can control reactions at the atomic level. Research is done with an eye toward quickly scaling conversion technologies up to refinery scales. And although the field is still young, a number of demonstration plants are already online, and the first commercial refineries are scheduled for completion in 2011. The age of grassoline may soon be at hand.

The most promising approaches involve subjection of the biomass to extremes of pH and temperature. We are developing a strategy that uses ammonia- a strong base- in one of our laboratories. In this ammonia fiber expansion (AFEX) process, cellulosic biomass is cooked at 100 degrees C with concentrated ammonia under pressure. When the pressure is released, the ammonia evaporates and is recycled. Subsequently, enzymes convert 90 percent or more of the treated cellulose and hemicellulose to sugars. The yield is so high in part because the approach minimizes the sugar degradation that often occurs in acidic or high temperature environments. The AFEX process is “dry to dry”: biomass starts as a mostly dry solid and is left dry after treatment, undiluted with water. It thus can provide large amounts of highly concentrated, high-proof ethanol.
AFEX also has the potential to be very inexpensive: a recent economic analysis showed that, assuming biomass can be delivered to the plant for around $50 a ton, AFEX pretreatment, combined with an advanced fermentation process called consolidated bioprocessing, can produce cellulosic ethanol for approximately $1 per gallon of equivalent gasoline energy content, probably selling for less than $2 at the pump.

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Second generation biofuels

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This is not a typical town square in Uruguay. The square, in the town of Suarez some 40km from the capital Montevideo, has gone over to solar energy and LED technology. The aim is to reduce electricity costs and at the same time light more streets. If it works, the plan could serve as a model for other towns across the country. In the current economic crisis and upward pressure on electricity prices, it should be a way of reducing energy costs. The energy crisis will continue to get worse and city councils and the state will have to deal with that,” Leonardo D’Andrea of the local town council explained . “We decided to try out solar energy lamps in the town square and if it works, then we will apply it to all public lights in the town,” he said. “The lighting had been very unstable and a few years ago we installed sodium lights, which are more modern but use a lot of energy and are more polluting.” “Each lamp costs $30 a month (£18) and we know that with LED lamps we would save between 70% and 90% on energy costs.” Light emitting diodes (LED) are semi-conductors which give bright light but use very little energy.

They can be charged with solar energy as well as electricity and can give light for up to four days. “These lamps are very expensive if you buy them from China, Taiwan or Japan,” says Juan José Marchelli, director of Uruled, the local firm which proposed the experiment. This is why he decided to import the diodes but manufacture the bulbs locally. “We recycled lamp posts which had fallen into disrepair.” “Instead of glass, we put in anti-vandal polycarbonate and we adapted lamps that were made in Uruguay.” “Then we introduced solar panels into the supports,” he said.
The authorities are examining how cost-effective they are. If they prove worthwhile they will buy equipment to make the lamps in Uruguay. “The idea is to manufacture the lights in Uruguay and replace high energy lighting with these low energy ones. At the same time we’ll create jobs in the community,” says Mr Marchelli.

Nicolas Vilaro, director-general of public works in Canelones said: “With electricity prices continuing to rise, we are trying to find alternatives, however small the scale.” The city council’s energy bill comes $400,000 and about 70% of that is for street lighting. “For that reason we are keen to make even the smallest of energy savings so we can free up money for other projects,” says Mr Vilaro. “We are going to install some 20 columns with solar panels and energy accumulators to test out their efficiency,” he says. “Maybe in a few years’ time you won’t see single posts with a bulb – they’ll all have solar panels behind them.”

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Uruguay city goes solar

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You can get yourself an electric motorcycle with a top speed of 60 mph, 32 horsepower and 62 ft lbs of torque for less than $10,000. The bike can be shipped anywhere in the U.S. for a mere $500, so don’t worry if you don’t have a dealer nearby. Deliveries announced to begin in early May. The Zero S is a high performance supermoto motorcycle that is revolutionary because it is fully electric. Imagine instant torque and power from a standstill. Imagine smooth acceleration as you race out of turns. Then, imagine never needing to stop at the gas station. Developed to aggressively take on urban environments and encourage the occasional detour, the Zero S integrates revolutionary technology with innovative motorcycle design. Using Zero Motorcycles’ proprietary Z-Force power pack and aircraft grade alloy frame, the Zero S features an industry leading power-to-weight ratio that increases its range and maneuverability.

Santa Cruz, California-based Zero Motorcycles launched its new supermoto-style electric streetbike last month and gave Cycle News an exclusive look at it. Here are the results of this evaluation. The clutchless one-speed Zero S is powered by a brushed permanent magnet electric motor with a proprietary lithium-ion battery pack called Z-Force, which was developed by Zero’s founder Neal Saiki. One of the early pioneers of modern mountain-bike suspension, Saiki says the Z-Force is the smallest, lightest lithium-ion battery pack to be used in a vehicle in the world.

“Our goal from the beginning was to engineer a high-performance electric urban street motorcycle that would change the face of the industry,” founder Neal Saikai said. “The Zero S is a high-performance motorcycle that also happens to be fully electric and green.”

The Zero S builds upon the the technology underpinning the Zero X dirt bike by doubling the size of the battery to deliver 60 miles of electric commuting and corner-carving. The Santa Cruz startup promises a top speed of 60 mph and a zero-to-60 time of about 5 seconds from a highway-legal bike that weighs just 225 pounds.

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Zero S Electric motorcycle available for purchase

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What started in Sydney in 2007 is now a world wide phenomenon. Earth Hour is a symbolic event. Turning off our lights for an hour won’t stop climate change but it does demonstrate that our individual action is important and adds up to make a big difference. More importantly, it sends a very powerful message to government and world leaders that people want policies and regulations put in place that can achieve meaningful emission reduction to help fight climate change.
Earth Hour is about more than just turning off the lights, it’s also an opportunity to turn on young minds!
In the US Chicago returned this year as an Earth Hour flagship city, and organizers are hopeful that the campaign leads to sustained, year-round action – in fact, it already has. As an extension of their Earth Hour participation, many downtown buildings have voluntarily pledged to turn off non-essential, decorative lighting and lit signage in the late night hours every night of the year. The Sears Tower, Hancock Building, Tribune Tower, Merchandise Mart, and many more will power down these lights every night at 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, and at 11 p.m. or midnight (depending on the season) every Friday and Saturday, following guidelines developed by the Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago. The big turn-off was for Earth Hour 2009, presented by ComEd, and approximately 230 downtown Chicago buildings and more than 1,400 local businesses, schools, restaurants and organizations throughout Illinois joined hundreds of millions of people around the world in voluntarily turning off the lights in a symbolic gesture to show concern about climate change.

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Earthour 2009 – The big turn-off

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Hope-Bearer for Cleaner Air? The world’s cheapest car, the Indian-built Tata Nano, will launch on Monday, but another Indian company manufactures an electric car that has proven wildly popular — in London as well as Bangalore. The capillaries of India’s cities are clogged with every imaginable form of conveyance: hulking buses, braying bullock carts and motorbikes stacked with families of five. The result is that most of India’s commuters idle in traffic for hours a day. The government is trying to play catch-up with a long string of mass transit projects, but most residents pine for the status, peace and luxury of a car of their own.
The Tata Nano, set to launch on Monday after almost a year of delays, is an Indian-manufactured, gasoline-powered car priced at about $2,000. Billed as “the world’s cheapest car,” it’s also a nightmare for environmentalists, who predict sky-high sales will pollute India’s already smog-filled air. So why isn’t India’s other indigenous automotive invention — the Reva — taking the world by storm? The Reva is the world’s most successful electric vehicle. It’s manufactured on the outskirts of Bangalore, in southern India, and has fans all over the world. In spite of patented technologies, government subsidies, a groundswell of interest in electric vehicles, though, the Reva is unlikely to dent in the global car market with as much force as the Nano.
That’s because the environmentally friendly, near-silent Reva costs three times as much as the Nano, and holds only a limited appeal to poorer first-time car buyers.
“It is very much a second car in the household,” says Chetan Maini, the company’s chief technology officer and deputy chairman, adding that “the highest growth is in [the] second car buyer [market].” Despite the current economic slowdown, Reva is nearing completion of a state-of-the-art, environmentally friendly plant in Bangalore. It hopes to produce 30,000 cars a year, with the aim of exporting about half to the foreign market and keeping half in India. Tata, by comparison, plans to churn out nearly 250,000 Nanos after it completes a new factory of its own this year. Reva has already built more than 3,000 cars, but they’re marketed in Europe to a mostly affluent, environmentally conscious, urban demographic. The car needs 7 hours for a full charge and 2.5 hours for an 80% charge — which makes it difficult for buyers who live in apartment buildings, without access to a dedicated outlet.
“You need to have off-street parking,” says Kevin Johnston, the Reva’s president of European operations. “It’s been a real limitation until now.” The company will launch a third-generation model this May, with an extended range of about 75 miles and faster charging times. So far 1,000 commuters, including a clutch of celebrities, have bought Revas in London, where the car is marketed as the G-Wiz. It’s as popular in the British capital as in the company’s headquarters in Bangalore. London provides numerous incentives for electric car owners, from a reduced parking charge and no road tax, to waving the congestion charge, which is about US $11 per visit to central London.
“In a G-Wiz,” says Johnston, “you can drive for a month for the cost of a tank of petrol.” The rest of Europe has followed suit. France provides a €3,000 subsidy for Reva buyers. Norway cuts the car’s import duty and value-added tax, and allows its drivers to use bus lanes. Many European cities plan to increase the number of public outlets where electric vehicle owners can plug in and charge up.
Despite being the cheapest automatic car on the Indian market, the newest version of the Reva, due out in May or June, will have lithium-ion batteries and a solar panel on the roof — and will cost around US $14,500, or seven to eight times the price of the Nano. The main reason for the price jump from one generation to the next is the battery pack. But Chetan Maini says the Reva is “battery agnostic,” meaning that when more advanced, low-cost lithium-ion batteries become available, Reva can improve the car without a redesign.
Still, the price of the Reva varies considerably, depending on where it is sold. One of the cheapest places to buy the current Reva is New Delhi, where tax breaks and subsidies bring the car’s price to around 300,000 Indian rupees, or $6,000. That’s about a third of what Sean McGuire paid for his Reva in western Ireland.
A football fan, McGuire regularly drives to a nearby stadium where he plugs his car in to an available outlet. He put 11,000 kilometers (6,855 miles) on the vehicle in its first year, and plans to order a windmill to power it with zero emissions. “They go from village to village in India on terrible roads, so I presumed it would be just what I would need in rural Ireland,” says McGuire. “It’s brilliant.” That sentiment may be echoed by thousands of potential electric-vehicle enthusiasts in American cities. The reason the Reva isn’t yet available in the US is the same reason many European cars don’t appear on America’s roads: strict safety and testing regulations make the cost of entering the US market prohibitively expensive.
Like golf carts and other small electric vehicles commonly found on corporate campuses and retirement communities, the Reva, with a top speed of 65 miles per hour, would be barred in America from driving on roads where speed limits exceed 35 miles per hour. These smaller vehicles “don’t have to meet the same safety standards, but the problem is there’s not a category between those and the conventional vehicles,” says Daniel Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies and a professor of transportation engineering and environmental policy at the University of California, Davis.
“That category doesn’t exist in the United States but does exist in Europe,” says Marc Geller, spokesman for Plug in America, an electric vehicle education and advocacy group. “The market is so small,” says Geller. But he insists that despite the market’s small size, “if someone comes out with a fairly expensive electric car there is going to be greater demand than supply.”
If the Reva were legal in the US, it would be significantly cheaper than the price analysts are expecting for the Volt, the most anticipated electric vehicle in America, when it hits showrooms in November 2010. Analysts estimate the Volt will be priced at around $40,000, but after federal and state subsidies and tax write-offs the price could be closer to $30,000. That might bring it within range for many middle-class Americans. But it’s still the price of fifteen Tata Nanos.
So, India can do – our question is: what’s up with Mexico?? The brain- and man-power is given: how about putting it to work??
How about an alternative?? Check below!!

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The Reva

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Small Car Sales boom in Germany amid automaker crisis! Even as car makers around the world suffer amid the global economic downturn, some manufacturers are seeing record sales in Germany. Berlin’s “scrapping bonus” is paying off. Bailout, of course, has already become the word of the year. And these days, with the global automobile industry sinking into crisis, it has been used more than ever. The European Union is looking at ways to help out carmakers in the bloc, Washington has spent weeks trying to shore up the Big Three, and even China has recently announced plans to streamline its automobile industry as part of a large stimulus package for vehicle manufacturers.
In Germany, though, the car-related headlines have been of an entirely different nature. A number of brands have experienced record sales so far in 2009. According to media reports Thursday, Volkswagen expects February sales to reach 120,000 cars, more than ever before. Opel, which is struggling to survive as its parent company GM sinks further into economic woes, experienced its best month in five years this February, selling 40,000 cars. And the Romanian auto manufacturer Dacia has even had to boost production lately to keep up with high demand in Germany.
The reason isn’t difficult to find. Included in Germany’s €50 billion ($64 billion) stimulus package, which finally cleared the last legislative hurdle last week, is the so-called “scrapping bonus.” The measure hands Germans €2,500 to junk their old cars — provided they immediately buy a new one. And even before the provision became law, tens of thousands of Germans began storming their local automobile dealerships.
“There has never been a state promotion that has had such a positive effect as the scrapping bonus,” Robert Rademacher, president of the German Association for Motor Trade and Repairs, told the industry journal Auto, Motor und Sport this week.
His euphoria is echoed by Patrick Pélata, chief operating officer of Dacia parent Renault. “The scrapping bonus in Germany has led to an extreme boost,” he told the Financial Times Deutschland. “Orders have jumped six-fold.”
Still, it is unclear whether the measure can provide long term help to the German and European automobile industries. Most of the cars being sold as a result of the bonus are smaller, cheaper models like the VW Polo, Dacia Sandero or Opel Corsa. Indeed, because of the demand for compact cars, some buyers have been put on a waiting list and may have to wait months before they get their new car. Furthermore, the program is currently capped at €1.5 billion, enough for 600,000 people to take advantage. By the time the measure passed in the upper house of Germany’s parliament last week, almost a quarter million Germans had already lined up in anticipation.
Meanwhile, sales of larger cars in Germany have dropped through the floor. Signature brands such as Mercedes, Porsche, BMW and Audi are all suffering. Sales of high-end sedans plummeted by 48 percent in January relative to the same month a year before. Because of higher profit margins on such models, the downturn is doubly dangerous.
The European Commission on Wednesday said it would not be presenting a Europe-wide plan to save the continent’s car industry. “I do not believe for one moment that any government can be a better car manufacturer than those that we have already,” said Enterprise and Industry Commissioner Günter Verheugen.
At the same time though, the Commission is taking a look at car industry support plans presented by France, Spain, Britain, Italy, Sweden and Germany. According to media reports, France has dropped a clause in its plan that would have requested that Renault and Peugeot close down factories outside of France before shuttering plants inside the country. The protectionist clause had come under intense criticism from the European Union.
In total, new automobile registrations in January of this year in the European Union were down 27 percent against the same period last year.

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Small Car Sales Boom in Germany

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The New Energy Economy: Global warming issues have been pushed to the back burner by many doubting political and corporate leaders in view of the government bailouts, unemployment surge, and rise in home foreclosures. Venture capitalists are getting cautious about investments. Amid this despair some voices are saying it is the right time to launch a global uprising.
The time for a New Green Era has come paralleling the New Deal Era of post depression president Franklin Roosevelt. Not only will it put off disasters and shortages in two or three decades from now, but it will reshape the economy of the globe. In the U.S., President Elect Barack Obama is quoted as saying, “We can move toward energy independence and create 5 million new jobs across America.” The financial and housing sectors, once creating U.S. job growth are now driving unemployment. The U.S and the world need a new economic driver and growth industry.
Roosevelt’s New Deal recharged the economy during the great Depression of the 30’s and into the 40’s with the WPA (works project administration). Investments have driven the economy since but with its failure a new push or spark is needed from the government. Supporters of the New Deal propose that massive public investment and fiscal incentives can lay the ground work for the private sector to develop whole new industries and create new jobs and save the planet in the long haul. Oliver Schäfer, policy director of the European Renewable Energy Council states, “You are investing in clean technology, which is real business.” The strongest incentive of this is new jobs and the beauty of it is the resulting attentiveness to good stewardship of the planet. Barack Obama wants to create a program that trains American veterans for work in green industries and modernize factories to make green products. Given the economic conditions currently afflicting us, these are investments that governments must make.

A few European countries have taken a strong lead with substantial initiatives. The U.N. reports that Germany supports a $240 billion dollar renewable energy industry which employs 250,000 people and by the year 2020 will provide more jobs in this sector than in their current main employment industry of automotives.
Britain’s goal is to increase its wind turbine industry tremendously by the year 2020. It is imperative for the government to push ahead and provide incentives, regulations, and ‘a whole lot of money’ up front in order for this long term job producer and global conservation movement to take hold. When capital and credit are tight, and oil prices drop private investors are less likely to put billions in to R&D for a distant clean-energy future. Governments need to jumpstart their economy with regulations and public investments to create millions of new jobs.

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Green Power

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Engineers are constantly coming up with new ways to dispose of greenhouse gases. The latest idea is to hide carbon dioxide exhaust in cement. The method could revolutionize one of the most carbon-intensive industries in the world. Vinod Khosla has a lot of money, and he wants to put it to good use, which explains his Silicon Valley nickname, “Angel Investor”. The 53-year-old Indian has already invested $450 million (€290 million) of his personal fortune in new technologies to save mankind and the planet. A little more than a year ago, Khosla received an e-mail. What it contained, in its 12 lines of text, was exactly the sort of thing this immensely wealthy philanthropist likes to read. “I have an idea for a sustainable cement” Brent Constantz, a chemistry professor, wrote. His idea was to convert the carbon dioxide emissions from a power plant into cement, thereby rendering the gas harmless.

It seemed like a bold idea, which was precisely why it caught Khosla’s attention. Although he was vacationing at the time, he promptly called the inventor and told him: “Hire five people and build a laboratory!” Constantz replied that his plan was not something for the faint of heart. In response, Khosla barked: “I’ve given you the money. So get going already!” Meanwhile, the new company, which is called Calera, has built a prototype plant on a site next to a gas-fired power plant in Moss Landing, California. In his new laboratory, chemist Constantz is studying ways to siphon off a portion of the carbon dioxide released by the plant and conduct it through sea water from the nearby Pacific Ocean. Constantz theorizes that when the carbon dioxide is combined with the magnesium and calcium dissolved in the water, the resulting substance will be something mankind uses in vast quantities: cement. “Chemically speaking, the same thing happens in coral when it grows” says Constantz, who originally developed a type of cement used to repair bone fractures and in dental applications.

This reaction with seawater would benefit the climate, because the carbon dioxide from emissions would be incorporated into the carbonate. Then heat from the power plant would be used to dry the mud-like material. “We get the smallest bricks that can be used to make cement” says Constantz. In this way, power plants, which normally eject carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, could be turned into carbon sinks. On the one hand, the CO2 they produce would be rendered harmless. On the other hand, they would eliminate the energy-intensive production of brick in the cement industry. “One ton of my cement removes half a ton of CO2 from the environment” claims Constantz, who is also a visiting professor at Stanford University.

Cement as a Greenhouse Gas Culprit

The concrete industry produces more than two billion tons of cement worldwide each year. In doing so, it releases 5 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted worldwide, making it the third-largest single producer of the greenhouse gas. The industry’s large carbon footprint is a result of energy-intensive production processes, which include temperatures of 1450 degrees Celsius (2642 degrees Fahrenheit) to bake the raw materials and the use of electric motors to pulverize the resulting cement bricks. “Because of this process, it is difficult for us to significantly lower carbon dioxide emissions” explains Martin Schneider, director of the Research Institute of the Cement Industry in Duesseldorf. The most promising method is to do away with the bricks altogether, says Schneider. This is achieved partly through the use of granulated cinder, a byproduct of the steel industry. But steel mills are already sending their entire annual production volume of seven million tons to cement plants today. “I don’t see any way of increasing that number” says Schneider. For this reason, the method Constantz has devised for turning CO2 into cement is especially appealing to Schneider. The California inventor promises to be able to produce precisely the alternative material that the cement industry needs so desperately. Constantz expects to have five prototype plants up and running by next year, and the first commercial model by 2010.

This is music to the ears of his financial backer, Khosla. But cement expert Schneider cautions against too much economic optimism. The process may work on a small scale, according to Schneider, but transferring to a large-scale production environment is a different story altogether, and Calera has yet to prove that this is possible. “Lots of things can be tested in an aquarium” says Schneider. Other ideas designed to eliminate greenhouse gases also have yet to pass the practical test. Many engineers, physicists and chemists around the world are currently developing ways to sequester carbon dioxide. Research institutes in the United States, in particular “a country where the belief in technical feasibility is especially pronounced” are constantly coming up with new proposals.

Planktos, based in California, has come up with the idea of using giant tankers to add iron dust to the world’s oceans, restoring the behavior of wind-borne dust (which diminishes with global warming) and stimulating algae growth. The CO2 captured in the algae would sink into the depths when the plants die. A large-scale test near the Galapagos Islands failed recently, due to insufficient funding. Ning Zeng, an American atmospheric researcher at the University of Maryland, has proposed submerging tree trunks deep into the oceans — and, along with them, the CO2 captured in the wood fiber. According to Zeng’s calculations, such a program could provide employment for one million forestry workers. Many of his colleagues criticize Zeng’s proposal. In fact, it does seem more sensible not to chase the greenhouse gas when it is already wafting through the earth’s atmosphere. It would be easier to collect CO2 before it is emitted through chimneys or exhaust pipes, and then store it underground, in a process called sequestration.

Norwegian national Olav Karstad, a reserved engineer with the StatoilHydro Group, devised this process. He applied it for the first time at the Sleipner North Sea gas-drilling platform, where carbon dioxide is pumped into the well, driving out valuable natural gas at the same time. Since then, many research groups, including Germany’s Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources, have been looking for suitable and safe storage sites. Scientists are also studying the possibility of pumping carbon dioxide into coal seams. This would lead to the release of methane, which could be captured and used as a fuel. Even if safe final storage succeeds, all of these methods have an economic drawback. Carbon dioxide from power plants would have to be captured and sequestered in highly compressed form. However, this costs energy. A coal power plant, for instance, would lose about 10 percent of its efficiency. Nevertheless, fervent climate researchers like Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, an advisor to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are also open to bold proposals. “We are in a desperate situation,” says Schellnhuber, “which is why we should also pursue unconventional ideas.”

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Carbon Dioxide to Concrete?

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