Global Warming Solution: Green Cement

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our E-mail Digest. We will then send you the stories that are posted each day in an e-mail digest. We use a service called Feedburner for delivery of these emails. You will receive an e-mail from Feedburner after you subscribe and you must click on that email to activate your subscription. Thanks for visiting and enjoy all the information!

RV.Net Blog Admin

By Bob Difley
For the first time in 2006 China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions surpassed the US emissions—by 8%–making China No. 1 in world CO2 emissions. The study also showed that, “In the 1990-2006 period global fossil-fuel related CO2 emissions increased over 35%.”
I’m sure it comes as no surprise that the emerging mega-nations of China and India present enormous challenges to efforts to slow down and reverse the amount of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere, a major contributor to global warming. One of the major contributors to China’s CO2 emissions is its building of a new coal-fired power plant each week. EACH WEEK! And each plant emits more CO2 than that saved by all the hybrid vehicles on America’s roads. Depressing statistics.
And unfortunately, that’s not all. A CO2 molecule can travel from Beijing to our west coast in less than 24 hours, so even though California has mandated that state-wide emissions fall to 1990 levels by 2020, will it make any difference? Will all our efforts at finding alternate energy sources be in vain if we are showered with CO2 from nations as flagrant as we are—even if we decide change our ways? Do as we say we’re going to do, not as we have done.
One man who claims to be on the verge of the NEXT BIG THING, the game-changer that will take a big bite out of worldwide CO2 emissions is Brent Constantz, the one they call Cement Man.
About 2.5 billion tons of cement are manufactured every year—nearly 50% of it in China, where they are building roads and buildings in a mad frenzy as they charge forward into the world economy. But the manufacturing process of cement produces one pound of CO2 for every pound of cement made. And China has made it perfectly clear that they are not going to slow down their progress for the environment.
But Cement Man has the answer. He has a patent pending for a procedure that encapsulates the CO2 during the manufacturing process into the cement itself, making it Green cement (not the color green, of course). Zero CO2 emissions. Cement manufacturing worldwide contributes about 5% of the Earth’s total CO2 emissions. A worthy reduction if all cement plants produced Cement Man’s cement. And the best part is, he claims that it will cost only $100/ton–compared to $110/ton for regular cement. A win-win situation.
An even better part is that he claims that the cement will also sequester an additional half-ton of CO2 which he can pull from the smokestacks of power plants. If his cement plants were built right next to power plants, a half-ton of CO2 would be bound into every ton of cement made next door. The same process could also be used to make a different aggregate—the sand and gravel that goes into cement and asphalt—that would sequester even more CO2 from power plants.
You can follow the progress of Cement Man, who by the way has attracted the interest of Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, and money from venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, and his company, Calera Corp. at his Web site. And if you’re thinking he’s just another crack-pot, he has 200 patents in his name, is associate consulting professor in Stanford’s Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences, and has created and sold three other companies before founding Calera.

http://www.mnp.nl/en/dossiers/Climatechange/moreinfo/Chinanowno1inCO2emissionsUSAinsecondposition.html

Energy Visionaries: T. Boone Pickens and Shai Agassi

By Bob Difley

Sometimes it takes a certain indefinable caliber of a person, one who not only sees the big picture but have the chutzpa, vision, and means to go after it. Such is the case of T. Boone Pickens, who is changing the energy landscape with his grandiose plans for alternative energy sources, one of which is to build vast wind farms to generate energy from our windiest areas, like Texas. Another is to rally people to his Pickens Plan and the power of numbers to influence the new president and the congress “to make major changes towards cleaner, cheaper and domestic energy resources.” As he says on his Web site,
“America is in a hole and it’s getting deeper every day. We import 70% of our oil at a cost of $700 billion a year - four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.
“I’ve been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of. But if we create a new renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil.”
And then there is also Shai Agassi, who plans to bring electric cars into the mainstream faster than any major car manufacturer thinks possible. And it looks like he might just pull it off, if it’s any indication of the number and status of the people jumping aboard his bandwagon. In an article in the September issue of Wired Magazine, writer Daniel Roth follows Agassi from his electrifying speech in December 2006 at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy Conference on how to get the world off oil.
At 38 he was the youngest of 60 prominent invitees (Bill Clinton, former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer among others) and he presented his audacious plan to install a nationwide grid of charging stations for his electric cars, which he would sell cheap and make money off drivers’ electricity usage and from leasing the expensive batteries—instead of selling them along with the car—an idea no one had thought of yet.
His working model figures that the average driver would pay about $1,050 per year for electricity and battery depreciation compared to $3,000, the current driver’s annual average for gasoline at $4 a gallon (15,000 miles at 20 mpg).
Agassi also had the money to back his plan, having sold his software company for $400 million. But he needed somewhere to set up a trial, a small island nation, where a nationwide charging station infrastructure was feasible as a test. Working with an enthusiastic Shimon Peres, Israel seemed like a good choice for his initial set up (maybe not an island, but surrounded by hostile countries on three sides and the Mediterranean Sea on the other). Today the building of the infrastructure is well underway, and another test is in the works in Denmark. Keep an eye on this project, it just might change the way we drive in a much shorter time frame than anyone thought.
The more I look at world changing plans, electric vehicles (EVs) seem to be at the top of my list, though I think we should continue to pursue all modes of fuel and energy generation. The mission and goals that personal transportation in America–if not the world–will embrace in the future, could be labeled the Transportation Triumvirate (TT): (1) Reducing dependence on foreign oil, (2) Reducing use of fossil fuels (America uses a quarter of the world’s oil), and (3) The creation of clean, cheap, and efficient vehicles and fuel (we are far behind the European and Asian miles-per-gallon standards).
EVs fit into this TT plan even better than hybrids and diesels. Here’s how:
• Central energy production for charging batteries (i.e.: power plants, wind farms, and solar arrays) is much more economical than the energy produced by individual vehicles burning their onboard fuel supply.
• Fossil fuels are needed only for central electricity production in coal fueled power plants (which can all be set up to both scrub and sequester CO2 before it reaches the air) and from solar, wind, and other alternative energy sources.
• Pollutants, particulates, and greenhouse gasses of EVs are zero.
• Noise level is next to nothing–more coming from the tires on the road than from the motor.
So what are the negatives, or problems? Two major ones, when once resolved, will push EVs forward like Usain Bolt out of the starting blocks. First is the battery. They are expensive, bulky, heavy, and take too long to charge. But there is a lot of venture capital money flowing into breakthrough battery technology, and improvements are coming quickly. The next generation lithium batteries show much potential and new concepts are in the works to replace batteries with a newer technology. Secondly, charging time is currently in hours instead of minutes, which works for those who commute each day the number of miles that is within the range of the EV’s battery. Drive to work, drive home, plug it in, charge it overnight.
But what about those that do not return home every night, like us RVers. That’s where Agazzi’s charging station infrastructure comes into play. His plan is for charging stations as ubiquitous as gas stations, battery exchange stations (much like swapping barbeque propane tanks), and the development of short term charging solutions. Grid power would benefit also, since most at-home charging would occur overnight when electricity demand is low. Old, spent, batteries would be recycled, so nothing goes into land fills or produces toxic waste.
Grid electricity generation would be the key to it all, and could go in different ways. Solar and wind could supply part of a regional power plant’s needs, reducing both coal use and the distance fuel had to be moved to get to the power plant. Nuclear would have to be considered, plant safety as well as disposal of nuclear waste. New, small scale, regional nuclear power generators are being built in China, without the size or capacity to wreak havoc on the neighborhood in case of accidents or terrorist attacks. But mainly, going to centrally generated electrical power instead of individually fueled vehicles would reduce our need for oil immediately, since power plants do not use oil for generating electricity.

Check Out These Innovative New Energy Possibilities

By Bob Difley
With the world’s concentration focused on alternative energy sources, inventors, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists are scrambling to come up with the next big thing in power supply. A new type of wind power device is the Windspire, a 30 foot tall, two foot wide, vertical tower with a rotating core that turns at the same speed as the wind blows. Without the rotating blades of a wind turbine (that rotate faster than the wind speed), it is safer for birds, as they can see the slower moving core. Another big advantage is its relatively quiet operation, quieter than turbine blades. This would be a big plus if adapted to RV use. It is also aesthetically more pleasing, since it looks like a metal lawn sculpture. It is designed to be easily erected in a backyard by any home handyman, and will supply about 1,800 kw of annual power in an eleven-knot average wind speed, which would require a rather windy area. Not very practical for an RV yet, and it is still expensive at $4,000. But the concept is interesting and presents a new idea for RV sized units.

Read more

Coastal Oregon’s Umpqua Discovery Center

By Bob Difley.
If you do your RVing in the West, sooner or later you will find yourself wandering the Oregon coast. When you pass through Reedsport, be sure to stop at the Unpqua Discovery Center, a fine interactive museum a few blocks off the highway depicting the history of the area where the Umpqua River empties into the Pacific Ocean. Read more

New Diesels. Gas Usage Down. Oil Drops. Yippee!

By Bob Difley
It was good news when Mercedes Benz announced that they are building three new SUVs with the new wave of diesel engines that use low-sulfur diesel fuel (the cleanest burning diesels in history). Though diesel fuel now costs more than gasoline, it can get up to 33% more miles per gallon and emissions are so clean that the new diesels are approved for use in all 50 states. They also announced that they have reduced the premium for diesels to about $1,000, competing effectively with gasoline engines and opening the doors to biodiesel fuel on a larger scale. Mercedes diesels are already being used in small Class C RVs (Winnebago’s View and Itasca’s Navion, both about 24 feet, for example) so it won’t be long before efficient smaller diesel engines will move into slightly larger RVs as well. Could it be the age of diesel for RVs?

Read more

Reducing Fuel Usage: Option or Necessity?

By Bob Difley
“This year’s record-shredding spike in gasoline prices has finally ended,” says the San Francisco Chronicle in an article last Tuesday (July 29), “with prices falling by more than a penny per day.” Data from the US Energy Information Administration showed that American drivers used 3.2% less gasoline in the last four weeks than during the same period last year. The AAA Auto Club found that 1.3 fewer Americans traveled during the 4th of July weekend than a year ago, the first time travel has dropped in a decade on major holiday weekends. “Consumers have definitely sent a message,” said an AAA spokesperson.

Could it be that the lesson of supply and demand we learned in Economics 101 really works? Don’t rush out to buy that 40-foot diesel pusher just yet, however. Oil prices, being an international commodity, will rise and fall on rumors, fluctuating demand, threats of disruption to oil fields from terrorists, severe weather, interpretations of new events, statements by the political candidates, and the whims of oil futures speculators to name a few. An economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University says that oil could swing anywhere from $50 a barrel during a global recession to $250 if we end up at war with Iran. But the underlying force that will ultimately drive oil prices is the rising consumption of energy and oil of the emerging nations of India and China, whose billion plus populations want the quality of life that we have, including an automobile in every garage.

Read more

RVers, Choose Your Fuel

By Bob Difley

How would you like to pull into a filling station and have a choice of different fuels, all of which you can use efficiently in your existing gasoline engine. That’s the ‘Holy Grail of Energy Security,’ says Don Hillebrand, director of Argonne National Laboratory’s* Center for Transportation Research. “An engine that can run on whatever is available has several major security advantages.”

With today’s strangle-hold on fuel by the oil industry, your options are gasoline, gasoline, or gasoline. If you want to use another fuel, your choices include diesel, also a petroleum based fuel for which you need an entirely different engine, or electric—also requiring a different motor/engine configuration—and which has yet to become part of mainstream transportation.

The spark-ignition engine being developed by Argonne’s “omnivorous engine project” would run on a variety of liquid fuels, such as gasoline, ethanol and butanol. Butanol is an organic alcohol that can be fermented from biomass or made entirely with solar energy from algae. It has an octane rating closer to that of gasoline than ethanol, which is also an alcohol fuel. Vehicles able to run on straight gasoline or 10% ethanol will run on butanol. Butanol tolerates water contamination better and is less corrosive than ethanol and more suitable for distribution through existing pipelines used for gasoline. These factors piqued the interest of both DuPont and BP that formed a joint venture to bring butanol, currently more expensive to produce than ethanol, to market at competing prices.

But the ability to get the engine to run on any of the three fuels—or any combination of the three—is the breakthrough needed to make it work, a process that involves adjusting the spark timing and fuel injection automatically based on the blend. Tom Wallner, an Austrian PhD engineer working on the project, admits, “It’s more on the controls than it is on the hardware. The engine must determine what fuel it is, then tune itself to run efficiently on that fuel.”

Your choice, as you stand with pump handle in hand gazing at the multi-fuel selection, would be whatever fuel is cheapest at the time, effectively unlocking petroleum’s handcuffs on fuel pricing, while causing different fuels to compete with each other on the street. But that’s not all. A nation’s economy that is held captive by foreign suppliers is a major national security risk, as has been demonstrated by OPEC, terrorist threats, and hostile governments.

Could we thereby reduce our need for foreign oil, if not completely, at least from unstable or hostile countries? And wouldn’t this also reduce the stress of an unstable, roller-coaster fuels market, enabling additional domestic alternative fuels to be developed without our backs to the wall trying to pump yet more oil?

*The government established Argonne National Laboratory, 30 miles southwest of Chicago’s Loop, after WWII as the country’s first national laboratory. The lab, funded by the Department of Energy, does research into nuclear energy, as well as basic scientific inquiries, and operates several user facilities for the benefit of scientists from all over the country.

Forget Oil! The Future is in Electricity

By Bob Difley
A lot of experts and theoretical think tanks are looking at ways to quickly and drastically reduce our oil requirements, rather than pursuing ways to increase supply to meet demand with unpopular options like increased drilling in places like ANWR and the continental shelf. They are suggesting that we instead put our efforts into producing most if not all of our energy needs from domestic sources.

• No to foreign oil.
• No to war with foreign nations to stabilize their shaky governments and whose oil we want.
• No deals with disruptive, threatening, unfriendly, and unstable governments and rulers just so we can buy their oil.
• No to competing with China and India for oil, whose exploding economies have them gobbling up all the oil they can buy from any source at any price.
• No more oil tanker spills.
• Reduction of CO2 emissions and air pollution.

A pipe dream?

Read more

Drilling ANWR: More Questions and Thoughts

I am at the Life On Wheels RV Convention at Lewis-Clark College in Lewiston, Idaho this week, but had a few more thoughts and questions on drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

(1) If we need ANWR’s oil so much, why haven’t the oil companies drilled the 65 million acres they already have leases on?

Read more

Is There an Electric Toad in Your Future?

By Bob Difley
How close are we to an electric vehicle? A bit far, I suspect, for motorhomes or trucks powerful enough to pull trailers and fivers, but maybe not as far for a toad. GM has pulled out all the stops for the Volt PHEV (plug-in hybrid electric vehicle) due out in the spring of 2009. Read more

Next Page »