Vortex Tools shares five insights on the shifting views of green business in the U.S.
Each year, the Cleantech Open holds a national conference. In order to attend this conference, your company needs to be a semi-finalist in their competition to accelerate emerging green technologies. As Vortex Tools qualified in the energy efficiency category in the Rocky Mountain region (for transforming harmful CO2 waste from oil and gas wells to recovered high-value energy), some of our team attended the event.
Although I’ll comment more on the Cleantech Open in later blogs, as this national conference brings together leading minds in green industries—both the proven standards for today and hopefully the better standards of tomorrow—there’s a lot of insight as to what’s shifting in the world of green.
While these may be obvious to many in the green energy market, for the Average Joe, here are the top five green insights from the Cleantech Open:
1. Global Warming is Dead; Long Live Climate Change
There are certain words the green industry doesn’t say anymore. Clearly, Solyndra is out—I suppose these things happen when a California solar company gets $527 million from the Obama administration to go out of business with an inferior product—but global warming was officially announced as debunked, dead and a term to ditch (yes, at a green conference).
In the mean time, climate change is still alive and well. Like the vague buzzword green, climate change is broad enough to mean different things to different people, giving it wiggle room to be easily updated.
2. Wind Power is Down; Solar Power is Up
Despite the variety of companies at the Cleantech Open, I expected to see a number of innovators from solar and wind power. While there were nearly a dozen solar companies, only a couple of wind power companies qualified from around the country. Five years ago, the split would’ve been 50/50, maybe even slightly in the favor of wind power, but now the solar power market is heavily saturated.
According to a solar energy expert, these companies are playing a game of last man standing, because many believe solar will be huge… sometime. However, most solar companies know that the market can only handle a fraction of them, so barring acquisition from a larger company on the way through, most will falter before the boom. In many ways, it’s the behemoth companies with infrastructure—the BPs, the GEs: the very companies these smaller startups want to replace—who’ll do the best when (and if) solar does go big.
3. Trending Companies Include Nanotechnologies and Green Roofs
As for newer representation and buzzwords, nanotechnologies and green roofs are taking off in the American green world.
Nanotechnologies is a broad market, as all nano really means is that it’s small, so there are benefits for coatings, electronics, bugs, material strength, etc. You name an industry, nanotechnologies are improving it, but the added cost is often prohibitive to success.
Green roofs are popular in Europe—1 out of every 5 houses in Germany has a green roof—but with the benefits of shading and improved insulation (especially in lowered AC costs), the trend is rising in the States now, too. The problem is that many older buildings, both commercial and residential, can’t handle the weight of 4-6” of soil, especially if it’s loaded with water. With this in mind, newer, lighter green roofs (likely with lesser benefits) are increasing in demand.
Hotter, arid climates like California, Arizona and Texas are slated to benefit the most from green roofs.
4. Natural Gas is Still the Bad Guy
This isn’t a new insight so much as a maintained trend. A couple of the main speakers expressed their (disgruntled) opinion that low natural gas prices are standing in the way of emerging green technologies. While I understand this viewpoint—as natural gas is a proven and plentiful energy source that’s been depressed for far too long—it seems as though many in the green crowd miss this point: Overall, the oil and gas industry is as unhappy about the price of natural gas as they are. The oil and gas industry wants the value of their proven resource to not be so low that it’s competing with emerging green alternative energies.
Finally, the other maintained trend:
5. Europe and Japan are Still Held Up As the Standard; China is Still Catching Up to the U.S.
This one is no surprise, as Europe has a greater need for more efficient means, thus the reality reflects the necessity. Meanwhile, China’s current waste is still nearing where the U.S. was in the 1970s.
One ongoing trend I dislike is that many European and Japanese trends are held up as the standard for America without qualification. For example, one of the panel members cited Japan’s recent minor emphasis on solar energy as indicative that clean tech has finally arrived in the world, so I asked how less than $10 billion in projected (not actual) solar energy could offset the $1.5 trillion juggernaut of Japanese nuclear power. While this panelist stated that he never argued that solar would replace nuclear energy, if your technology isn’t replacing an incumbent solution—likely in a cheaper, greener, more effective way—it doesn’t have a place, period.
* * *
In upcoming blogs, I’ll share my experience with Cleantech Open competition. If you have any questions or comments, please email me at blog (at) spiroflo (dot) com
Colin McKay Miller is the Marketing Manager for the SpiroFlo Holdings group of companies:
–SpiroFlo for residential hot water savings (delivered 35% faster with up to a 5% volume savings on every hot water outlet in the home) and industrial water purification (biofilm removal).
–Vortex Tools for extending the life of oil and gas wells (recovering up to 10 times more NGLs, reducing flowback startup times, replacing VRUs, eliminating paraffin and freezing in winter, etc.).
–Ecotech for cost-effective non-thermal drying (for biosolids, sugar beets, etc.) and safe movement of materials (including potash and soda ash).
U.S. Ethanol Standards Remain Above What Can Be Produced
Posted in Green Commentary, Oil & Gas, Vortex, tagged alternative fuels, ethanol, Green Commentary, Oil & Gas, Vortex, Vortex Tools on June 28, 2012| 3 Comments »
Vortex Tools looks at the history of corn ethanol and the modern-day flaws of cellulosic ethanol.
You know the stereotype of the dumb son around the office who only has a position of power because his dad is the boss? I’m going to go ahead and call ethanol the dumb son of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Whether it’s the former failure of corn ethanol standards or the current failure of cellulosic ethanol standards, the EPA can’t find an ethanol solution that works for the U.S.
The final kicker was the food vs. fuel debate. Although it was largely debunked — as corn crops for food and crops for ethanol are different — the stigma stuck. Although correlations were never fully established, many argued the rising costs of consumer goods — especially dairy, poultry, and meat products — were directly tied to the increasing price of corn for ethanol use. (I won’t even note the contradiction of using fossil fuels to run alternate energy plants… at least not outside of these parentheses.)
So corn ethanol went down, but a new ethanol hero arose: Cellulosic ethanol.
Lignocellulose is basically the stuff that makes up the structure of plants. There’s lots of it around, and people can’t eat it, so the food vs. fuel debate is out. Like corn ethanol, cellulosic ethanol may have less power to it, but it’s environmentally cleaner than gasoline. No wonder the EPA set standards to blend billions of gallons of cellulosic ethanol back in 2005.
The problem? Cellulosic ethanol doesn’t actually exist in the mainstream. The EPA just assumed that technology solutions would rise to meet their mandates.
According to an article by Fox News, “not one drop of cellulosic ethanol has been produced commercially. It’s a phantom fuel,” says Tom Pyle, a representative of the Institute of Energy Research. “It doesn’t exist in the market place.”
Charles Drevna, a refinery representative, stated that, “forcing us to use a product that doesn’t exist, they might as well tell us to use unicorns.”
Considering the Congress Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandated (that then largely corn) ethanol production to be raised to from 9 billion in 2008 up to 36 billion by 2022 — rates that couldn’t be met then and can’t be met now (and even if they could, they might destroy the corn soil in less than 30 years) — there’s a trend of ethanol standards being set in the hope of jumpstarting solutions.
Regardless of the reality, the EPA fines the refineries when they can’t meet these unattainable standards. As the EPA can lower these rates at their discretion, they’ve done so, but not completely: “We are going to reduce your blending obligation by 98 percent because we feel that that’s the right thing to do,” says Brooke Coleman, the executive director of the Advanced Ethanol Council of the Renewable Fuels Association. “We are going to maintain your blending obligation on the gallons that we think are going to emerge.”
As cellulosic ethanol rates will rise to 16 billion by 2022, the refineries are suing the EPA now, hoping to force a firm change in standards.
Me, I’m still banking on the unicorns.
* * *
Colin McKay Miller is the Marketing Manager for the SpiroFlo Holdings group of companies:
–SpiroFlo for residential hot water savings (delivered 35% faster with up to a 5% volume savings on every hot water outlet in the home) and industrial water purification (biofilm removal).
–Vortex Tools for extending the life of oil and gas wells (recovering up to 10 times more NGLs, reducing flowback startup times, replacing VRUs, eliminating paraffin and freezing in winter, etc.).
–Ecotech for cost-effective non-thermal drying (for biosolids, sugar beets, etc.) and safe movement of materials (including potash and soda ash).
Read Full Post »