100 MPG - CalCars and the beauty of high-mileage ideas

By Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks Special to the Apollo News Service

To see the future of the American automobile, take a spin down to Corte Madera, California, and introduce yourself to the CalCars boys.

This group of rebels met one sunny day in April 2004 in the garage of a typical condominium ten miles north of the Golden Gate, determined to roll out a car that could be “fueled” by plugging it into a wall at night with a standard extension cord and run on gas when needed. It was a Toyota Prius when they started and a symbol of an American revolution in automobiles when they finished.

The group was led by Felix Kramer, an entrepreneur who had an idea as big as his mustache. In 2003, after selling his Internet start-up, he cast about for his next adventure and landed on an audacious quest: to revolutionize the auto industry.

He knew that gas-powered, internal combustion cars were destroying the atmosphere and deepening our addiction to oil, and that things had to change. He stumbled on the work of Andy Frank at the University of California at Davis and Bob Graham at the Electric Power Research Institute. They are brilliant inventors who had radically re-thought how to power a car and created a blueprint for the first hybrid you could charge on the grid. Kramer decided to build a mass market for this change.

“Our whole auto configuration was decided by just a very few people, a handful of big auto company execs and the government. They had fouled up,” he said. “It was time to expand the number of Americans who had a hand in this future. So I decided to build a large group of folks who would demand the production of a clean, efficient car. To do that, I knew we had to first build such a car. So that’s exactly what we did.”

A multi-talented group of innovators answered Kramer's Internet call. They met in a garage owned by one of the new members of the team. Then they put the Internet to work to generate “open source” ideas they could incorporate into the design. Two years and a thousand feet of wire later they had converted a 2004 Prius into a car capable of driving on nothing but electricity from the garage wall jack for its first twenty-five miles each day. Kramer's plug-in may be the first car ever built “over the Internet.”

Secret SwitchIt was not an easy project. They succeeded only after discovering a secret switch that had literally been hidden in the American version of the Prius hybrid, which allowed the car to run in an all-electric mode, never relying on the gasoline engine. That discovery triggered Felix’s revelation that if he could boost the battery capacity, he could create a hybrid with monstrous mileage. So they went to work with a collection of tools, $700 worth of old nickel hydride batteries, and a growing collection of car enthusiasts who hovered around the garage at all hours.

When they finally drove their number out of the driveway and down the street in September 2004, Kramer felt justifiable pride. “All kinds of people want this kind of car: people like generals who care about security; environmentalists who care about the planet; and municipalities who care about cost.

“But it seems the last people in the world to ‘get it’ are the big car companies,” Kramer added. “Now that our CalCars cars are on the road, and these cars are being built in various places around the country, our vision is going to force changes. That is now happening.”

Plug-in, Second GenerationIt sure is. Kramer now has been tooling around California for 15,000 happy miles in his second-generation plug-in. It uses lithium ion batteries, gets a hundred miles per gallon of gas, and costs one cent a mile to run. Compare that to nine cents a mile to fuel a typical car with just gas. It is a miser of a car.

Kramer owns the first plug-in hybrid ever commercially sold in America. Plug-in hybrids are not yet rolling off assembly lines, but custom conversions like Kramer’s — built by EnergyCS, a small start-up in California that is beginning to make plug-in conversions available to the public — are being sought by an ever-growing market. Many more will follow.

Kramer takes joy in the car’s simplicity. He plugs a 19-inch cord in the rear bumper into a standard extension cord in his garage at night. Tooling around town, he is in all-electric mode for the first twenty-five quiet miles, covering the majority of his commutes gasoline free. He delights when he goes into forums of energy experts and shows them the little cord he uses.

“This is all the infrastructure we need to remake our car world,” he says. “We don’t have to build huge infrastructure for hydrogen. We can just ship clean electricity over the wires.”

What’s more, Kramer can smile as he drives, because with every mile he is saving CO2 emissions. He says, “When the car is in all-electric mode, it is putting out 60 percent less CO2 than a normal gas car, even taking into consideration all the CO2 coming out of the stacks of the plants that generate the electricity. Even if we never improve our electrical grid a bit, and even if people drive way more than the batteries can hold, some studies have shown this car can reduce CO2 by 36 percent. This is the best thing on the global warming front going.”

As an added bonus, Kramer’s wonder car has an attribute no mortal and few machines can claim—it gets better with age. “The electrical grid feeding my car is going to get cleaner over time,” he explains. “Instead of burning coal that releases carbon, we will be relying more and more on wind power, solar power, and geothermal. So the fuel—electricity—driving my car is going to get cleaner every year. How many cars do you know that get better the longer they are on the road?”

What About Detroit?Can Detroit deliver anything comparable?

We asked Tom and Ray Magliozzi, better known as Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, stars of the nationally syndicated radio talk show Car Talk. Their opinions are not exactly nuanced: “For thirty years now the companies have put everything they had into more power instead of more efficiency.”

Ray, who has a degree from MIT—as does Tom—and now runs Ray’s Garage in Cambridge, Massachusetts, elaborates: “The technology has been incredible, but it’s all about power. If the companies had put into efficiency what they have put into power, we would be driving cars getting sixty miles per gallon now. They have done fuel injection and computer-controlled engines but have not put those gains into efficiency. Any high schooler could have done better if they had wanted to.”

Indeed, Detroit cannot lead the way into the future by tinkering at the margins of its old business model. Nor can it get away with disingenuous promises of cleaner cars and ad campaigns that show gas-guzzling SUVs bringing us closer to nature. It will have to adopt the same spirit of innovation as Felix Kramer and his plug-in crew.

With General Motors now poised to release the plug-in hybrid electric Volt, it just might be that the revolution Kramer sought to provoke is starting to take hold. Only time will tell if the big three are ready to get serious about radical new designs that break our addiction to oil. But the technology is fast approaching that can help US auto companies make the leap beyond the small efficiency gains that have dominated recent fights, and finally launch us into a future of clean and efficient energy.

A National Security BenefitWhen plug-in technology is combined with a flex-fuel engine that can burn gas or biofuels, it can actually get vastly higher mileage per gallon of gas. Even without using biofuels, it reduces our dependence on foreign fuel, because 97 percent of the electricity it consumes is produced from domestic energy sources. Kramer’s car is virtually free of Saudi Arabian influence.

Excitement for hybrids is not confined to the road. Utilities salivate over the prospect of turning the storage capacity of plug-in batteries into an adjunct to the electrical grid. Power plants may soon be able to feed their juice into our car batteries at night when demand is lowest, using base electric load more efficiently and storing energy in our cars while they are parked for use during the day. In this way, our cars may one day serve to level out electrical supply and demand on the grid as we slumber.

Roger Duncan, vice president of Austin Energy, a Texas utility, is working to make plug-ins a regular feature of the grid. He has organized a massive national grassroots initiative called Plug-In Partners, which has demonstrated the demand for these cars with pledges from literally hundreds of cities, businesses, and non-profits from Chicago to Phoenix, from California Edison to the U.S. PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups). Chicago is retrofitting 850 plug-in hybrids, and New York State is converting the 600 hybrids in its fleet to plug-ins.2 Several companies are already converting hybrids for commercial sale using the ideas of these pioneers.

A garage gave birth to Hewlett-Packard and the electronic age, not to mention rock and roll and the modern entertainment industry. A garage may also have given birth to the future of personal transportation and the age of the plug-in car.

Top 10 Ways to Be More Energy Efficient – and Green – in 2008

“Going green” and “reducing your carbon footprint’ are all the rage, but these trendy concepts are nothing new for the Alliance to Save Energy. That’s because you can’t be green without minimizing your energy use; and energy efficiency has always been and remains the quickest, most cost-effective way to use less energy – and the amount of pollution you produce.

The added benefits: While lowering your household energy bills, energy efficiency doesn’t require sacrificing comfort or convenience, and it will increase your indoor comfort.

It’s just a matter of taking simple steps with your home and vehicles and employing today’s widely available, easy-to-use energy-efficiency technologies. You’ll not only ease the strain of today’s high energy prices on your household budget, you’ll also shrink the greenhouse gases and other global warming pollutants you spew into the atmosphere.

Here are the Alliance to Save Energy’s Top 10 Ways to be More Energy Efficient and Green in 2008:

10) Remember when your mom would ask, “Do you think we own stock in the electric company??!!” Take her sage advice and turn off lights, computers, TVs, stereos, etc. when you are done using them.

9) Green means clean – air filters, that is. Clean or replace HVAC filters regularly, whether you have a central heating and/or cooling system or window air conditioners.

8) Don’t let “vampire energy use”– aka “standby power” – suck your wallet dry. Instead, look for the ENERGY STAR label on electronics – TVs, VCRs, CD players, DVD players, cordless telephones, and more that continue to use less electricity in the “off” mode to keep display clocks lit and memory chips and remote controls working.

7) Keep on rolling – efficiently – down the highway. Keep your tires properly inflated to improve gas mileage by about 3.3 percent. You could save more than 20 gallons of gasoline per year, which amounts to about $60 per car annually and about $120 per typical two-vehicle U.S. household with gasoline at $3/gallon. Added benefits: Extended tire life and avoidance of more than 390 pounds of CO2 production per vehicle yearly.

6) “Show the love” to your car by keeping it in good working order. Fixing a car that is noticeably “out of tune” or has failed an emissions test can improve gas mileage by an average of 4 percent. That amounts to nearly 25 gallons of gasoline per year, or savings of about $80 per vehicle per year or about $160 per household. Added benefit: Savings of nearly 500 pounds of C02 per vehicle, or 1,000 pounds per household.

5) Generate light, not heat, with ENERGY STAR qualified lighting such as compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). Energy-efficient lighting products use at least 2/3 less energy than standard incandescent lighting and last up to 10 times longer. So despite their higher up-front cost, they yield lifetime savings of up to $50 per bulb. Added benefit: CFLs generate 70 percent less heat than incandescents, so they don’t add to the summer heating load that your AC needs to cool down.

4) Don’t waste money and pollution by heating or cooling an empty house. When installed and properly programmed to follow your daily and weekly patterns, a programmable thermostat can cut heating and cooling costs by about 10 percent – enough, in most cases, to pay for the device within one season and then yield home energy savings of about $150 a year. Added benefit: When the thermostat “remembers for you” to adjust the temperature when no one is home, you come home to a comfortable house yet have not wasted money or polluted unnecessarily.

3) Reach for the stars – the ENERGY STARs, that is. ENERGY STAR qualified products can cut related electricity costs by up to 30 percent. More than 50 categories of products are now labeled with this government “seal of approval” for energy efficiency. In addition to electronics and lighting (see tip numbers 8 and 5), they also include appliances, HVAC systems, windows, and more (see www.energystar.gov for a complete rundown).

2) Don’t waste money and energy heating and cooling the great outdoors, either! Make sure you have the proper amount of insulation for your climate, and seal leaks around doors and windows to cut your heating and cooling bills by up to 20 percent. With home energy costs estimated at $2,200 for the average U.S. household in 2008, and just over half of that going for heating and cooling, those savings can amount to about $225. Added benefit: Eliminate drafts and hot and cold spots for greater indoor comfort.

1) Slow down and save! Each 5 miles per hour you drive over 60 mph costs you about 20 cents more per gallon of gasoline. And aggressive driving habits – speeding, rapid acceleration and braking – can lower gas mileage by a whopping 33 percent at highway speeds and 5 percent around town. But driving sensibly can save up to 200 gallons of gasoline per year at highway speeds, or about $600 per car and about $1,200 per household with gasoline prices at $3/gallon. Added benefit: Avoiding up to 4,000 pounds of CO2 per car/8,000 per household.


For further information:Ronnie Kweller: 202-530-2203 (office); 202-276-9327 (mobile)Rozanne Weissman: 202-530-2217 (office); 202-904-4490 (mobile)
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The Alliance to Save Energy is a coalition of prominent business, government, environmental, and consumer leaders who promote the efficient and clean use of energy worldwide to benefit consumers, the environment, economy, and national security.

Carbon Capture Strategy Could Lead To Emission-free Cars

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a strategy to capture, store and eventually recycle carbon from vehicles to prevent the pollutant from finding its way from a car tailpipe into the atmosphere. Georgia Tech researchers envision a zero emission car, and a transportation system completely free of fossil fuels.

Technologies to capture carbon dioxide emissions from large-scale sources such as power plants have recently gained some impressive scientific ground, but nearly two-thirds of global carbon emissions are created by much smaller polluters — automobiles, transportation vehicles and distributed industrial power generation applications (e.g., diesel power generators).

The Georgia Tech team’s goal is to create a sustainable transportation system that uses a liquid fuel and traps the carbon emission in the vehicle for later processing at a fueling station. The carbon would then be shuttled back to a processing plant where it could be transformed into liquid fuel. Currently, Georgia Tech researchers are developing a fuel processing device to separate the carbon and store it in the vehicle in liquid form.

“Presently, we have an unsustainable carbon-based economy with several severe limitations, including a limited supply of fossil fuels, high cost and carbon dioxide pollution,” said Andrei Fedorov, associate professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and a lead researcher on the project. “We wanted to create a practical and sustainable energy strategy for automobiles that could solve each of those limitations, eventually using renewable energy sources and in an environmentally conscious way.”

Little research has been done to explore carbon capture from vehicles, but the Georgia Tech team outlines an economically feasible strategy for processing fossil or synthetic, carbon-containing liquid fuels that allows for the capture and recycling of carbon at the point of emission. In the long term, this strategy would enable the development of a sustainable transportation system with no carbon emission.

Georgia Tech’s near-future strategy involves capturing carbon emissions from conventional (fossil) liquid hydrocarbon-fueled vehicles with an onboard fuel processor designed to separate the hydrogen in the fuel from the carbon. Hydrogen is then used to power the vehicle, while the carbon is stored on board the vehicle in a liquid form until it is disposed at a refueling station. It is then transported to a centralized site to be sequestered in a permanent location currently under investigation by scientists, such as geological formations, under the oceans or in solid carbonate form.

In the long-term strategy, the carbon dioxide will be recycled forming a closed-loop system, involving synthesis of high energy density liquid fuel suitable for the transportation sector.

Georgia Tech settled on a hydrogen-fueled vehicle for its carbon capture plan because pure hydrogen produces no carbon emissions when it is used as a fuel to power the vehicle. The fuel processor produces the hydrogen on-board the vehicle from the hydrocarbon fuel without introducing air into the process, resulting in an enriched carbon byproduct that can be captured with minimal energetic penalty. Traditional combustion systems, including current gasoline-powered automobiles, have a combustion process that combines fuel and air — leaving the carbon dioxide emissions highly diluted and very difficult to capture.

“We had to look for a system that never dilutes fuel with air because once the CO2 is diluted, it is not practical to capture it on vehicles or other small systems,” said David Damm, PhD candidate in the School of Mechanical Engineering, the lead author on the paper and Fedorov’s collaborator on the project.

The Georgia Tech team compared the proposed system with other systems that are currently being considered, focusing on the logistic and economic challenges of adopting them on a global scale. In particular, electric vehicles could be part of a long-term solution to carbon emissions, but the team raised concerns about the limits of battery technology, including capacity and charging time.

The hydrogen economy presents yet another possible solution to carbon emissions but also yet another roadblock — infrastructure. While liquid-based hydrogen carriers could be conveniently transported and stored using existing fuel infrastructure, the distribution of gaseous hydrogen would require the creation of a new and costly infrastructure of pipelines, tanks and filling stations.

The Georgia Tech team has already created a fuel processor, called CO2/H2 Active Membrane Piston (CHAMP) reactor, capable of efficiently producing hydrogen and separating and liquefying CO2 from a liquid hydrocarbon or synthetic fuel used by an internal combustion engine or fuel cell. After the carbon dioxide is separated from the hydrogen, it can then be stored in liquefied state on-board the vehicle. The liquid state provides a much more stable and dense form of carbon, which is easy to store and transport.

The Georgia Tech paper also details the subsequent long-term strategy to create a truly sustainable system, including moving past carbon sequestration and into a method to recycle the captured carbon back into fuel. Once captured on-board the vehicle, the liquid carbon dioxide is deposited back at the fueling station and piped back to a facility where it is converted into a synthetic liquid fuel to complete the cycle.

Now that the Georgia Tech team has come up with a proposed system and device to produce hydrogen and, at the same time, capture carbon emissions, the greatest remaining challenge to a truly carbon-free transportation system will be developing a method for making a synthetic liquid fuel from just CO2 and water using renewable energy sources, Fedorov said. The team is exploring a few ideas in this area, he added.

The research was published in Energy Conversion and Management . The research was funded by NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense NDSEG Fellowship Program and Georgia Tech’s CEO (Creating Energy Options) Program.

source - ScienceDaily

Shell Oil Exec Ponders Impending Energy Crossroads

By Jeroen van der Veer

By 2100, the world’s energy system will be radically different from today’s. Renewable energy like solar, wind, hydroelectricity, and biofuels will make up a large share of the energy mix, and nuclear energy, too, will have a place.

Humans will have found ways of dealing with air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. New technologies will have reduced the amount of energy needed to power buildings and vehicles.

Indeed, the distant future looks bright, but much depends on how we get there. There are two possible routes. Let’s call the first scenario Scramble. Like an off-road rally through a mountainous desert, it promises excitement and fierce competition. However, the unintended consequence of “more haste” will often be “less speed,” and many will crash along the way.

The alternative scenario can be called Blueprints, which resembles a cautious ride, with some false starts, on a road that is still under construction. Whether we arrive safely at our destination depends on the discipline of the drivers and the ingenuity of all those involved in the construction effort. Technological innovation provides the excitement.

Regardless of which route we choose, the world’s current predicament limits our room to maneuver. We are experiencing a step-change in the growth rate of energy demand due to rising population and economic development. After 2015, easily accessible supplies of oil and gas probably will no longer keep up with demand.

As a result, we will have no choice but to add other sources of energy – renewables, yes, but also more nuclear power and unconventional fossil fuels such as oil sands. Using more energy inevitably means emitting more CO2 at a time when climate change has become a critical global issue.

In the Scramble scenario, nations rush to secure energy resources for themselves, fearing that energy security is a zero-sum game, with clear winners and losers. The use of local coal and homegrown biofuels increases fast. Taking the path of least resistance, policymakers pay little attention to curbing energy consumption – until supplies run short. Likewise, despite much rhetoric, greenhouse gas emissions are not seriously addressed until major shocks trigger political reactions. Since these responses are overdue, they are severe and lead to energy price spikes and volatility.

The Blueprints scenario is less painful, even if the start is more disorderly. Numerous coalitions emerge to take on the challenges of economic development, energy security, and environmental pollution through cross-border cooperation. Much innovation occurs at the local level, as major cities develop links with industry to reduce local emissions. National governments introduce efficiency standards, taxes, and other policy instruments to improve the environmental performance of buildings, vehicles, and transport fuels.

Moreover, as calls for harmonization increase, policies converge across the globe. Cap-and-trade mechanisms that put a price on industrial CO2 emissions gain international acceptance. Rising CO2 prices in turn accelerate innovation, spawning breakthroughs. A growing number of cars are powered by electricity and hydrogen, while industrial facilities are fitted with technology to capture CO2 and store it underground.

Against the backdrop of these two equally plausible scenarios, we will know only in a few years whether December’s Bali declaration on climate change was just rhetoric or the start of a global effort to counter it. Much will depend on how attitudes evolve in China, the European Union, India, and the United States.

Shell traditionally uses its scenarios to prepare for the future without expressing a preference for one over another. But, faced with the need to manage climate risk for our investors and our descendants, we believe the Blueprints outcomes provide the best balance between economy, energy, and environment. For a second opinion, we appealed to climate change calculations made at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These calculations indicate that a Blueprints world with CO2 capture and storage results in the least amount of climate change, provided emissions of other major manmade greenhouse gases are similarly reduced.

But the Blueprints scenario will be realized only if policymakers agree on a global approach to emissions trading and actively promote energy efficiency and new technology in four sectors: heat and power generation, industry, transport, and buildings.

This will require hard work, and time is short. For example, Blueprints assumes CO2 is captured at 90% of all coal- and gas-fired power plants in developed countries by 2050, plus at least 50% of those in non-OECD countries. Today, none capture CO2. Because CO2 capture and storage adds costs and yields no revenues, government support is needed to make it happen quickly on a scale large enough to affect global emissions. At the least, companies should earn carbon credits for the CO2 they capture and store.

Blueprints will not be easy. But it offers the world the best chance of reaching a sustainable energy future unscathed, so we should explore this route with the same ingenuity and persistence that put humans on the moon and created the digital age.

The world faces a long voyage before it reaches a low-carbon energy system. Companies can suggest possible routes to get there, but governments are in the driver’s seat. And governments will determine whether we should prepare for bitter competition or a true team effort.

* Jeroen van der Veer, Chief Executive of Royal Dutch Shell plc, is Energy Community leader of the World Economic Forum energy industry partnership in 2007-2008 and chaired this year’s Energy Summit in Davos. He also chairs the Energy and Climate Change working group of the European Round Table of Industrialists.

Turning Carbon Dioxide into Fuel

Researchers are harnessing solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, which can be used to make fuels.

Could concentrated solar energy be used to reverse combustion and convert carbon dioxide back into gasoline? That's what scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, NM, aim to find out by building a novel reactor that can chemically "reenergize" carbon dioxide.

The device uses a two-stage thermochemical reaction to break down carbon dioxide to produce carbon monoxide, says Nathan Siegel, a senior member of technical staffat Sandia's Solar Technologies Department and one of the researchers developing the technology. "Carbon dioxide is a combustion product, so what we're doing is reversing combustion," he says. The carbon monoxide can then readily be employed to produce a range of different fuels, including hydrogen, methanol, and gasoline, using conventional technologies.

Within the Sandia reactor, invented by Sandia researcher Rich Diver, is a ring of a cobalt-ferrite ceramic material, which is essentially made up of iron oxide and cobalt. A parabolic solar concentrator directs sunlight onto the ceramic material, heating it to around 1,500 °C and causing it to give up oxygen.


As the ring continually rotates, the reduced material passes into a second, separate chamber containing carbon dioxide. Having given up its oxygen, the ceramic reacts with the carbon dioxide, stealing oxygen atoms off it. The result is the production of carbon monoxide. The process is continuous, so that the oxidized ceramic once again passes back into the solar chamber where it is again reduced. "It will work with either carbon dioxide to make carbon monoxide or with water to make hydrogen," says Siegel.


At least that's the theory. The Sandia group has carried out proof of principle demonstrations of various stages of the device but has yet to show that they all work together. The team is building a prototype that will be ready for testing by late spring. "It's 95 percent built," says Siegel.


The cobalt-ferrite ceramic was originally developed in Japan and is easy to produce. To maximize its effect, the material is constructed into a matrix of crisscrossing one-millimeter-diameter rods. This has the effect of producing a high surface area with which to react with the carbon dioxide.


By next June, the researchers expect to have the reactor's performance mapped out, and if it does as well as they expect, a practical version could be available within five years.


"At the moment, we are looking at getting carbon dioxide from industrial sources," says Siegel. The real potential, however, is to capture carbon-dioxide emissions and reuse them as fuel. "We're also looking at ways to pull carbon dioxide out of the air," he says. This would allow the reactor to be mounted anywhere, sucking up the atmospheric greenhouse gas and turning it into fuel. However, Siegel stresses, this is at a much earlier stage of development.


Despite the huge potential, there is currently very little research into finding ways to harness solar energy to produce carbon monoxide from carbon dioxide, says Siegel. But such technology deals with two problems directly: putting carbon dioxide to good use, and finding a way to make the best of the sporadic nature of solar energy. "It offers a way to store this solar energy and use it when you want it," he says.


It's excellent work and, in principle, scientifically quite possible, says Christian Sattler, of the Institute of Technical Thermodynamics at the German Aerospace Center, in Cologne. "The question is, at what efficiency?" he says. "How much energy does it take to carry out this reduction? It may be more efficient to use the solar energy for direct power production."

By Duncan Graham-Rowe

To the source

Big Coal's Dirty Plans for Our Energy Future

Just as the American people and the world are beginning to recognize the necessity of shifting to renewable energies, Big Coal, in collusion with an out-of-step administration, is pushing their dirty fossil fuel as the solution to our nation's energy crisis.

Big Coal and its cohorts envision a "clean coal technology" future fueled by liquifying and gasifying coal, capturing the carbon emissions and injecting them underground. By 2030 the West Virginia Division of Energy -- a nascent state agency formed in July, 2007 -- wants to oust oil and exalt coal by displacing the 1.3 billion gallons of foreign oil the state currently imports every year.

The WVDoE believes "that higher energy prices are providing and will continue to provide market opportunities" for a variety of alternative coal technologies including "coal waste, coal fines and coal bed methane," according to a document released in December 2007 called, "A Blueprint for the Future."

But scientists and environmentalists say "clean coal" does not exist; it is a misnomer and an oxymoron. The National Resources Defense Council has said, using the term "clean coal" makes about as much sense as saying "safe cigarettes." The extraction and cleaning of coal inevitably decimate ecosystems and communities.

Citing abundant supplies of quality domestic coal, escalating oil prices that are hoving around $100 per barrel, and security concerns raised by dependence on foreign oil, the coal industry is chomping at the bit to secure their stake in the false pursuit of domestic energy independence through a federally assisted coal-based economy. But as the world wakes up to the climate crisis and people learn more about modern coal mining and the continuing exploitation of Appalachia, which has sickened entire communities, polluted the water and air, and condemned vast sections of an ecologically extraordinary land to death, the coal industry faces an increasingly uphill battle against growing public awareness and concern.

Just this year, plans for a dozen new coal plants in Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Kansas and others have been repudiated by the growing public awareness and concern about the role of coal and other fossil fuels in our climate crisis. Playing on stereotypes and employing scare tactics about the unpredictability of the Middle East, the coal industry is developing a Frankenstein-like future for U.S. energy needs.

In Kansas, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius recently blocked plans for two coal-fired electricity plants; afterwards, on Nov. 5, a full page ad in Kansas newspapers explained that now, because of Sebelius' decision, "Kansas will import more natural gas from countries like Russia, Venezuela and Iran." The ad displayed the grinning faces of the leaders of these countries and continued, "Without new coal-fueled plants in our state, experts predict that electric bills will skyrocket and Kansans will be more dependent than ever on hostile, foreign energy sources." In fact, Kansas exports natural gas to other states and the United States does not even import natural gas from Russia, Venezuela or Iran, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Why carbon capture is no safety net

Nationwide there are grandiose plans for more than 100 new coal-fired power plants but that will all hinge on being able to sell the public and legislators on outfitting and funding these new plants with Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) technology. This process siphons off or "captures" carbon dioxide before it can escape into the atmosphere, contributing to acid rain, smog and warming the planet. The sequestered carbon would then be pumped and stored underground.

But is it really possible to bury our daily CO2 emission? Australia's renown physicist, Karl Kruszelnicki, who is running for public office on the Climate Change Coalition ticket, told the Sydney Morning Herald on Nov. 1, "One cubic kilometer of CO2 to get rid of every day? It's not possible! But they don't tell you that that's what they've got to get rid of. They make reassuring noises that they're spending millions looking for underground caverns. But I'm here to tell you that they're not going to find it ... The point is that they can only store 1,000th of 1 percent, not all their daily output."

Not only do we not have the capacity to store all the CO2 we produce, but the technology isn't there yet. The coal industry acknowledges that CCS is 15 years away, but continues to promulgate the myth of "clean coal technology" and to guide generous government subsidies to themselves and to West Virginia universities, assigning valuable research money to dirty technology. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's 2007 report "The Future of Coal" stated that "there is no standard for measurement, monitoring, and verification of CO2 distribution. Duration of post-injection monitoring is an unresolved issue."

In other words, Big Coal is betting on a pipe dream with an entire ecosystem at stake. Adding CCS to plans for the more than 100 proposed coal-fired power plants on the drawing board would increase operating budgets by 50 percent to 80 percent. And the gasifying and liquifying of coal into syn-gas and diesel would create potential emissions twice as carbon-rich as petroleum based gasoline or natural gas. If Big Coal gets its way, the U.S. Air Force will cruise the skies on liquid coal fuel -- spewing dangerously concentrated CO2 into our fragile atmosphere, and we'll be building more polluting plants based on false promises from an outlaw industry.

Exacerbating the water crisis

To many observers, the next natural resource wars will be waged over water, not oil or coal. People in the United States are waking up to the reality of a looming water crisis, but the coal industry is still advocating for a technology that is part of the problem, not the solution.
The U.S. Department of Energy stated in December 2006, that the demand for water to produce coal conversion fuels "threaten our limited water supply." Coal conversion -- gasification or liquefaction -- requires an absurd amount of fresh water. Each new Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) or Coal to Liquid (CTL) plant will require millions of gallons of fresh water every day. And these new plants will require even more coal.

Big Coal's proposed plans will require a large increase in coal extraction -- at least 15 percent more, though some reports quote as high as a 45 percent increase in coal production would be necessary to fuel "clean coal technology." The surge in demand for coal would be met with a surge in mountaintop removal coal mining, which means more water pollution. Mountaintop removal mining and the chemical cleaning of coal also threatens Appalachian headwater streams, which are the drinking water source for the southeastern United States -- an area that has endured frightening water shortages this year in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

The coal-to-liquid plants that coal state politicians like Gov. Joe Manchin, III of West Virginia and Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky are scrambling to site in their states would have one consequence that many observers underestimate or ignore: the increase in production of coal sludge -- one of the least known and least regulated toxic wastes in the United States -- a direct threat to water supplies.

Ben Stout, a biologist from Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, W.Va., who testified in the landmark Bragg v. Robertson case, where 88 community members sued a coal operator for destroying their land, has witnessed the environmental and human health devastation wreaked on the unique mountain ecosystems and communities of Appalachia firsthand.

"Clean Coal Technologies is a misnomer," he said. "There's nothing clean about coal. The extraction end is not addressed; if you live in southern West Virginia, the landscape you grew up in has been destroyed and rearranged. The question is, why are so many people in West Virginia so desperate to get hooked up to county water supply?"

The answer is: toxic coal sludge. Coal sludge, laden with heavy metals found in coal and released during extraction, like arsenic, chromium, cadmium and mercury, has been pumped underground in West Virginia for decades, with scant regulatory oversight. The sludge has intercepted underground water tables, from which mountain communities draw their drinking water. Coal sludge also contains carcinogenic chemicals like floculants, which are used to process coal.

In West Virginia, the second-largest coal-producing state in the nation, more than 470 mountaintops have been blown apart, 800 square miles of the most diverse temperate hardwood forest razed and replaced with more than 4,000 valley fills and 675 toxic coal sludge ponds. By 2012, the U.S. government estimates that we will have destroyed 2,500 square miles of pristine Appalachia. Currently there are over 107 trillion gallons of coal slurry stored or permitted to be stored in active West Virginia "impoundments."

The total mechanization of coal extraction epitomized by mountaintop removal/valley fill coal mining has buried thousands of miles of vital headwater streams and pumped previously mined lands full of sludge. The coal industry says that it has "elevated" some streams -- after they've buried them upstream -- relocating them and "repurposing" them into chemical spillways called National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) streams.

Coal sludge, the waste by-product of the chemical cleaning of coal in preparation for shipping to market, is initially put into surface ponds, but eventually this chemically concentrated, pudding-like waste leaches into the groundwater. In southern West Virginia, where the largest seams of coal lie, whole communities have been poisoned over years by mining waste that has contaminated their drinking water.

Coal sludge is a disaster waiting to happen, like the 2.8 billion gallons of toxic sludge that stand behind a 325-foot, leaking, unsound dam of slate, 400 yards from the Marsh Fork Elementary School in Sundial, W.Va. Or, Brushy Fork, in Boone County, W.Va., one of the largest coal sludge dumps in the world, holding back 9 billion gallons of coal waste.

Sludge is also injected underground into the sprawling abandoned mine works of decades past. Coal sludge is turning up in the water in Mingo County, W.Va., where documentation of this practice stretches back for more than 30 years. Residents of Mingo County have suffered catastrophic illness after the toxic sludge breached the local aquifers that feed home wells. More than 650 of these residents have signed on to a massive class-action lawsuit against the offending coal company, Massey Energy.

Pursuing "clean coal technology" will cause an increase in the production of coal and toxic coal waste which contains dangerous levels of arsenic, barium, cadmium, coper, iron, lead, manganese and zinc. In some cases, there are no standards by which to measure contaminants because some have never been found in drinking water before.

While scrubbers on smoke stacks have cleaned coal fired power plant emissions considerably, the cleaning on the combustion end causes the processing of coal for market to be exponentially dirtier. The coal going to market is cleaner burning today, with lower sulfur and mercury content, but these dangerous elements are left behind in the coal sludge and in drinking water.

The dirty truth about "clean coal"

The environmental destruction caused by mountaintop removal coal extraction is just one of many reasons to immediately transition out of coal. A plethora of substantial hurdles for the alternative coal industry include technological uncertainties, billion dollar budgets, lack of project partners willing to invest in coal, growing concern about carbon emissions from coal fired power plants, uncertainty about future environmental regulations, rising constructions costs and an array of water contamination issues.

But, we've been here before. In response to the energy crisis of the 1970s, the U.S. government invested $15 billion in a failed attempt to jump-start the coal-based synthetic fuel industry including the infamous 1.5 billion syn-fuel plant in Beulah, N.D. In the end, the '80s era attempt at gasification and liquefaction of coal failed miserably because of volatile oil prices bankrupting the nascent industry leaving taxpayers with a $330 million loss.

The newborn West Virginia Division of Energy -- formed to put a better face on coal -- would like to institutionalize all possible manifestations of coal production. The state agency says it would like to surround coal extraction sites and the coal-fired power plants with "additional advance coal opportunities" like the "production of ammonia nitrate from coal, as well as nitrates for fertilizer."

These processes require the same copious amounts of water as CTL and IGCC plants. WVDoE's outline for an energy future goes hand-in-hand with what mountain people call the declaration of a "National Sacrifice Zone" fueled by a plan to depopulate the coal-rich region of the southern mountains. A similar strategy was publicly declared when the federal government found uranium under Native American lands in the Four Corners area in the 1970s. In the end, the uranium was deemed more important than the land and the people; vast regions of Native American lands were declared "National Sacrifice Zones," and people were forced from their homelands.

Massey Energy's CEO, Don Blankenship, recently suggested the idea of a far-reaching coal industrial complex upon releasing a statement regarding the purchase of vast parcel of coal lands, increasing Massey's reserve holding to 100 million tons in Northern Appalachia. "This region is becoming increasingly important to the coal and energy industry, and this transaction will enable us to take advantage of the growth in demand for Northern Appalachian coal," he said. Massey's newly acquired coal lands are in West Virginia, across the Ohio River from Meigs County, Ohio, where a notorious cluster of coal-fired power plants are concentrated.

And momentum is building in the region. At a coal-to-liquids conference in Beckley, W.Va., in August this year, U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller sent word to the crowd that, "We need the equivalent of the Apollo and Manhattan Projects that would provide billions in federal funding for research and development so that the best and brightest engineers and scientific minds can tackle carbon capture sequestration and CTL development."

It is time to stop the momentum and break our coal habit. Instead we need an Apollo and Manhattan project to replace coal with solar, wind and geo-thermal or our kids will be stuck cleaning up after the dirtiest energy industry. Coal companies are notorious for leaving their mess behind.

"The worst offenders declare bankruptcy, opting to clear their plate of financial obligations and skip town," says Earthjustice attorney Lisa Evans. "Residents are left with poisoned soil and water; taxpayers are stuck with a hefty clean up bill." Only 3 percent to 5 percent of West Virginia mined lands have been reclaimed and developed -- the Twisted Gun Golf Course in Mingo County, Mt. View High School in McDowell County and a FBI complex in Clarksburg, W.Va., are all built on unstable, previously mined lands -- but the lands can never be truly reclaimed because of the extent of the destruction. Large-scale surface mining has converted forests to grasslands, resulting in a loss of carbon sequestration capacity of approximately 1.4 million acres, according to Stout.

When Big Coal talks about economic benefits of CTL, they talk about how cheap raw coal is and how we need to stick with cheap energy. But they avoid talking about the budgets in the multi-billions, the fact that CCS is unproven and untested commercially, and the externalities of extracting coal: the decimation of Appalachia's ecosystems and communities.

It is impossible to estimate the true cost of coal in a dollar figure -- how do you calculate the destruction of animal habitats, forests, fresh water, heritage, family history, hometowns, livelihoods, and personal health? When you add it all up, coal costs too much!

The plunder and destruction of West Virginia began with a plan in 1760 called the Great Land Grab, when a small group of wealthy Americans plotted to buy the coal-rich lands out from under the mountain people who didn't know the value of what was beneath their homes. Today, coal advocates ignore the global climate crisis, while pushing untested coal-based technology and scaring Americans about our dependence on foreign oil, hoping to fuel the planet with their coal, regardless of the consequences.

No matter what, the immediate transition away from coal is necessary and inevitable, as is a moratorium on all new coal-fired power plants. The world is coming to understand the impacts of dirty energies like coal and the need for sustainable, renewable, clean energy. James Hansen, the leading climate scientist at NASA, who shared the Nobel Prize this year with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), testified as a private citizen at the Iowa Utilities board and said, "Coal will determine whether we continue to increase climate change or slow human impact."

The coal industry's proposed path to a coal-based energy independent future for the United States is like laying down a 16-lane superhighway through the bedrooms of coal-rich regions like Appalachia. "Clean coal technology" would require a sizable increase in coal extraction and for the mountain communities of Central Appalachia, already suffering under the mountaintop removal/valley fill coal-mining campaign, "clean coal technology" is a highway to hell. We have a choice -- let's build a new road to renewable energy and sustainable communities.

By Antrim Caskey, AlterNetPosted on December 14, 2007, Printed on December 14, 2007http://www.alternet.org/story/70475/

Worldwide Shift from Incandescents to Compact Fluorescents

On February 20, 2007, Australia announced it would phase out the sale of inefficient incandescent light bulbs by 2010, replacing them with highly efficient compact fluorescent bulbs that use one fourth as much electricity. If the rest of the world joins Australia in this simple step to sharply cut carbon emissions, the worldwide drop in electricity use would permit the closing of more than 270 coal-fired (500 megawatt) power plants. For the United States, this bulb switch would facilitate shutting down 80 coal-fired plants.

The good news is that the world may be approaching a social tipping point in this shift to efficient light bulbs. On April 25, 2007, just two months after Australia’s announcement, the Canadian government announced it would phase out sales of incandescents by 2012. Mounting concerns about climate change are driving the bulb replacement movement.

In mid-March, a U.S. coalition of environmental groups—including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Alliance to Save Energy, the American Coalition for an Energy-Efficient Economy, and the Earth Day Network—along with Philips Lighting launched an initiative to shift to the more-efficient bulbs in all of the country’s estimated 4 billion sockets by 2016.

In California, the most populous state, Assemblyman Lloyd Levine is proposing that his state phase out the sale of incandescent light bulbs by 2012, four years ahead of the coalition’s deadline. Levine calls his proposed law the “How Many Legislators Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb Act.” On the East Coast, the New Jersey legislature is on the verge of requiring state government buildings to replace all incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents by 2010 as part of a broader statewide effort to promote the shift to more-efficient lighting. (See additional initiatives.)

The European Union, now numbering 27 countries, announced in March 2007 that it plans to cut carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020. Part of this cut will be achieved by replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents. In the United Kingdom, a nongovernmental group called Ban the Bulb has been vigorously pushing for a ban on incandescents since early 2006. Further east, Moscow is urging residents to switch to compact fluorescents. In New Zealand, Climate Change Minister, David Parker, has announced that his country may take similar measures to those adopted by Australia.

In April, Greenpeace urged the government of India to ban incandescents in order to cut carbon emissions. Since roughly 640 million of the 650 million bulbs sold each year in this fast-growing economy are incandescents, the potential for cutting carbon emissions, reducing air pollution, and saving consumers money is huge.

At the industry level, Philips, the world’s largest lighting manufacturer, has announced plans to discontinue marketing incandescents in Europe and the United States by 2016. More broadly, the European Lamp Companies Federation (the bulb manufacturers’ trade association) is supporting a rise in EU lighting efficiency standards that would lead to a phase-out of incandescent bulbs.

At the commercial level, Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, announced a marketing campaign in November 2006 to boost its sales of compact fluorescents to 100 million by the end of 2007, more than doubling its annual sales. In the U.K., Currys, Britain’s largest electrical retail chain, has announced that it will discontinue selling incandescent light bulbs.

Switching light bulbs is an easy way of realizing large immediate gains in energy efficiency. A study for the U.S. government calculated that the gasoline equivalent of the energy saved over the lifetime of one 24 watt compact fluorescent bulb is sufficient to drive a Prius from New York to San Francisco. While a worldwide phase out of the inefficient incandescents would reduce world electricity use by more than 3 percent, shifting to more-efficient street lighting and replacing older fluorescent tubes with newer, more-efficient ones might double this reduction in power use.

Although highly efficient compact fluorescent bulbs have been around for a generation, they have until recently been on the fringe, used only by environmentally-minded consumers and typically sold in hardware stores, but not in supermarkets. One reason consumers lacked interest was that the new bulbs can cost five times as much as incandescents. Only the more knowledgeable consumers knew that a compact fluorescent bulb uses only one fourth as much electricity as an incandescent bulb, lasts 10 times as long, and easily saves $50 during its lifetime.

One disadvantage of compact fluorescents is that each bulb contains a small amount of mercury, roughly one fifth the amount in a watch battery. This mercury is only a small fraction of that released into the atmosphere by the additional coal burned to power an incandescent.

Mercury released by coal-fired power plants is the principal reason why 44 of the 50 states in the United States have issued mercury intake advisories limiting the consumption of fish from freshwater streams and lakes. Nonetheless, worn-out compact fluorescents, watch batteries, and other items that contain mercury still need to be recycled properly. Fortunately, this is possible, whereas the mercury spewing from coal smokestacks blankets the countryside, ending up in the water and food supply.

Shifting to the highly efficient bulbs sharply reduces monthly electricity bills and cuts carbon emissions, since each standard (13 watt) compact fluorescent over its lifetime reduces coal use by more than 210 pounds. Such a shift also substantially reduces air pollution, making it obviously attractive for fast-growing economies plagued with bad air like China and India.

In the United States, an ingenious website called 18seconds.org (the name derives from the time it takes to change a light bulb), provides a running tally of compact fluorescents sold nationwide since January 1, 2007. As of early May, it totaled nearly 37 million bulbs, yielding a reduction in carbon emissions comparable to taking 260,000 cars off the road. Sponsored by Yahoo! and Nielson, the site also provides data on how many dollars are being saved and how much less coal is burned. Data are available on the website for each state, providing a convenient way of monitoring local progress in replacing incandescents.

The challenge for each of us, of course, is to shift to compact fluorescents in our own homes if we have not already. But far more important, we need to contact our elected representatives at the city, provincial, or state level and at the national level to introduce legislation to raise lighting efficiency standards, in effect phasing out inefficient incandescent light bulbs. Few things can cut carbon emissions faster than this simple step.

In a world facing almost daily new evidence of global warming and its consequences, there is a need for a quick decisive victory in the effort to cut carbon emissions and stabilize climate. If we can engineer a rapid phase-out of incandescent light bulbs it would provide just such a victory, generating momentum for even greater advances in climate stabilization.

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Lester R. Brown is President of the Earth Policy Institute and author of Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.

Note: This shift to compact fluorescent light bulbs is one of a dozen or so measures to cut world carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020 to be outlined in the forthcoming book Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization by Lester R. Brown.
Copyright © 2007 Earth Policy Institute