Talk by Mike Cheiky, President and Founder of CoolPlanet Energy Systems, which is developing carbon negative fuels with Biochar.

Marc Gunther from GreenBiz.com writes:
So says Robert Brown, a professor of engineering at Iowa State University and a leader of the university’s Initiative for a Carbon Negative Economy and its Bioeconomy Institute. Those are interdisciplinary campus efforts to develop ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by growing plants or algae, making them into fuels and burying their carbon residues in soil -- and make money doing it.

The notion that we can generate wealth and remove CO2 from the air is obviously appealing. As atmospheric concentrations of CO2 rise and climate risks grow, so does the need for carbon-negative technologies that pull CO2 from the air, as plants do, and then store it underground or deep in the ocean.

The world's first commercial solar tower plant gives a breathtaking glimpse of the future of power generation. What's stopping the technology's widespread adoption? - Guardian

Seville, Spain hosts the first commercial operation of solar tower technology in the world. According to the report, it features over 1,000 freestanding heliostat mirrors that follow the arc of the sun. In a process referred to as Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), the mirrors reflect solar rays to the tower, where water is boiled, and then steam is generated to drive a turbine, which in turn produces electricity. This electricity is sold to the national grid.This is all possible because Spain's government has provided subsidies and incentives in support for the solar industry.

Without government support, it's possible that the entire operation could not exist. That is because the upfront investment is huge, as most of the money goes into building the plant. The investor community tends to see solar plants as high risk.But according to the video report, once economies of scale are achieved, solar power is one of the cheapest sources of energy. The report argues that it's hard to detect the value of solar power because currently, conventional sources of electricity are subsidized, artificially making them appear to be cheap.

GOOD reports that "concentrated solar power... will be a core element of the transition from dirty coal to clean energy."As Gus Schellekens of PricewaterhouseCoopers argues, "Solar has a huge role it can play, the fact that it's an endless supply of energy...the one thing that's needed to unlock much of that is the political leadership and will." - Huffington Post

An Example of Small-Scale, Locally-Appropriate Action

This is a guest post by Ryan King. Ryan is a biologist, independent journalist, and community “eco-preneur” in Costa Rica. Below, he provides a brief introduction to decentralized biodiesel and biochar production in Costa Rica. His story will interest readers for at least two reasons: (1) he outlines specific and repeatable measures to address peak oil and climate change through the synergy of local energy production and carbon sequestration; and (2) he provides a working example of the benefits of increasing localized self-sufficiency. Ryan is expanding biodiesel, biochar, environmental projects through eco-hotels and sustainability projects, as well as looking for funding and experienced and non-experienced participants to contribute.

Though Costa Rica markets itself as a pioneer in environmental protection, its national oil refinery, ‘RECOPE’ is still failing after more than two years since its pledge to introduce biodiesel, and the country has not been able to provide legitimate carbon negative programs. While some reforestation programs have received significant funding under the assumption that planting trees in tropical forests sequesters carbon in a way that is easily quantifiable, research indicates that tropical forests may increasingly become sources and not sinks of carbon as drought and climate change events worsen.

Costa Rica’s economy depends primarily on “eco-tourism,” and within areas dependent on fragile biodiversity and rapidly changing ecosystems decentralized energy and environmental solutions are desperately needed. My interest has been to begin exploring the means to introduce emerging non-hierarchical social organizational theory in environmental and alternative energy applications by spreading biodiesel and biochar programs through existing environmental education and eco-tourist projects.

While simple, local-scale projects such as the biodiesel and biochar projects discussed below individually make minute contributions to global change threats, their ease of application and potential to spread rapidly through networking, the internet, and community programs as well as ability to provide immediate economic and environmental benefits make them especially appealing. The last detail is crucial: solutions that are economically viable without reliance on outside subsidy or centralized control are urgently needed to directly benefit local biodiversity in threatened areas and to build community-scale self-sufficiency through improved soils and local energy and food production. Previous top-down approaches have been unable to distribute the technology or the awareness to adjust in the wake of the overwhelming failures of mainstream organizations and governments. As a result, and especially as the current economic downturn continues, alternative, networked distribution models will find increasing popularity and success.

Large tech companies like to claim that they need broad patents to encourage their investment in innovative new technologies. And they are poised to make a fortune by selling patent licenses for new “green technologies” designed to abate carbon emissions.

But David E. Martin, an intellectual property activist who works with many developing countries, argues that a great many green technologies are already in the public domain and ready to be developed. They just need to be identified and used.

Die RWE-Tochter Innogy ist bei dem niederländischen Start-Up-Unternehmen Topell eingestiegen. Deren Spezialität: Ein spezielles Verfahren für die Umwandlung von Biomasse in Kohle-Pellets. Jetzt plant RWE den nächsten Schritt.

http://www.handelsblatt.com/technologie/umwelt-news/rwe-steigt-in-geschaeft-fuer-biokohle-pellets-ein;1437778