CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) – The Canadian and Alberta governments said on Wednesday they will spend C$779 million ($756 million) on a carbon capture project planned by TransAlta Corp, their second such funding announcement in less than a week.

TransAlta, the country’s largest investor-owned power generator, plans the carbon capture and storage development at its Keephills 3 coal-fired power plant near Edmonton, Alberta, where it aims to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 1 million tonnes a year.

Under a letter of intent, Ottawa will invest C$343 million and the Alberta government will kick in C$436 million over 15 years.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said at a news conference at the plant that the overall cost of the so-called Project Pioneer is estimated at about C$1.4 billion.

Last week, his government and Alberta’s said they would spend C$865 million on a carbon capture and storage project proposed by Royal Dutch Shell Plc for its oil sands upgrading plant in northern Alberta.

Some environmentalists have criticized the strategy, saying public money is being funneled into projects proposed by large polluters with uncertain results when it could be invested in alternative energy sources and conservation.

“Of course, the incentive is that we all have a long-run interest, as governments, as the private sector, in developing technology that we think will be in widespread need in the decades to come,” Harper said.

TransAlta’s plan involves using chilled ammonia capture technology, developed by France’s Alstom SA, to strip out carbon dioxide from the power plant. The gas, which is blamed for global warming, would then be piped to old oil fields to boost production as well as stored in saline aquifers deep underground.

Capital Power Corp is TransAlta’s partner in the 766 megawatt power plant and the carbon capture project.

Canada has set aside C$1 billion for such ventures in a clean energy fund, and Alberta has earmarked C$2 billion for carbon capture and sequestration projects. The two governments aim to cut carbon emissions, while preventing a drop in investment in energy projects.

Ottawa has said it seeks to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent from 2006 levels by 2020.

Alberta has short-listed two other carbon capture projects that have yet to be finalized for funding commitments. They are being proposed by groups including Capital Power and Enbridge Inc as well as Enhance Energy and Northwest Upgrading.

($1=$1.03 Canadian)

Anne Trafton, News Office
February 17, 2009

In the search for answers to the planet’s biggest challenges, some MIT researchers are turning to its tiniest organisms: bacteria.

The idea of exploiting microbial products is not new: Humans have long enlisted bacteria and yeast to make bread, wine and cheese, and more recently discovered antibiotics that help fight disease. Now, researchers in the growing field of metabolic engineering are trying to manipulate bacteria’s unique abilities to help generate energy and clean up Earth’s atmosphere.

MIT chemical engineer Kristala Jones Prather sees bacteria as diverse and complex “chemical factories” that can potentially build better biofuels as well as biodegradable plastics and textiles.

“We’re trying to ask what kinds of things should we be trying to make, and looking for potential routes in nature to make them,” says Prather, the Joseph R. Mares (1924) Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering.

She and Gregory Stephanopoulos, the W.H. Dow Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, are trying to create bacteria that make biofuels and other compounds more efficiently, while chemistry professor Catherine Drennan hopes bacteria can one day help soak up pollutants such as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere.

‘Chemical factories’

Found in nearly every habitat on Earth, bacteria are chemical powerhouses. Some synthesize compounds useful to humans, such as biofuels, plastics and drugs, while others break down atmospheric pollutants. Most rely on carbon compounds as an energy source, but species differ widely in their exact metabolic processes.

Metabolic engineers are learning to take advantage of those processes, and one area of intense focus is biofuel production. At MIT, Prather is developing bacteria that can manufacture fuels such as butanol and pentanol from agricultural byproducts, and Stephanopoulos is trying to make better microbial producers of biofuels by improving their tolerance to the toxicity of the feedstocks they ferment and products they make.

The recent spike in oil prices and growing greenhouse-gas emissions have catalyzed the push to find better pathways to produce biofuels and other chemicals such as bioplastics. “You see a visible boost when you have a crisis linked to energy problems,” says Stephanopoulos.

Manufacturing plastics and textiles using bacteria can be far less energy-intensive than traditional industrial processes, because most industrial chemical reactions require high temperatures and pressures (which require a great deal of energy to create). Bacteria, on the other hand, normally thrive around 30 degrees Celsius and at atmospheric pressure.

Metabolic engineering involves not only creating new products but also developing more efficient ways of making existing compounds. Recently, Prather’s laboratory reported a new way to synthesize glucaric acid, a compound with multiple uses ranging from the synthesis of nylons to water treatment, by combining genes from plants, yeast and bacteria.

Prather is also working on bacteria that transform glucose and other simple starting materials into compounds that can be used to make biodegradable plastics such as PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate). In Stephanopoulos’ laboratory, researchers are developing new ways to produce biodiesel, plus other compounds including the amino acid tyrosine, a building block for drugs and food additives; biopolymers and hyaluronic acid, a natural joint lubricant that can be used to treat arthritis.

Both labs collaborate in a project to engineer the isoprenoid pathway in yeast and bacteria, which is responsible for the biosynthesis of many important pharmaceutical compounds. The two labs are investigating methods to make different compounds with higher activity as well as improving productivity.

Microbes express a huge range of metabolic pathways, offering great opportunities but also challenges. “Biology has a lot of diversity that’s untapped and undiscovered, but the flip side is that it’s hard to engineer in precise ways,” says Prather. “Nature has evolved to do what it does, and to get it to do something different is a nontrivial task.”

Bacterial cleanup crew

Drennan is also looking to bacteria, but with a different goal in mind. Instead of using bacteria to build things, she’s studying how they break things down — specifically, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and other atmospheric pollutants.

Her microbes, found in a range of habitats including freshwater hot springs, absorb carbon dioxide and/or carbon monoxide and use them to produce energy. Such microbes remove an estimated one billion tons of carbon monoxide from Earth and its lower atmosphere every year.

“These bacteria are responsible for removing a lot of CO and CO2 from the environment,” says Drennan, who is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “Can we use this chemistry to do the same thing?”

To answer that question, Drennan and her students are using X-ray crystallography to decipher the structures of the metal-protein enzymes involved in the reactions, which they believe will allow them to figure out how the enzymes work. That understanding could lead to development of catalysts to lower carbon monoxide levels in heavily polluted areas.

“If you’re going to borrow ideas from nature, the first step is to understand how nature works,” she says.

Four students who spent the spring semester determining whether MIT should install rooftop wind turbines uncovered both good news and not-so-good news.

The group was blown away by MIT students’ overwhelming support of wind power on campus. The problem is that even an MIT-owned 29-story apartment building–the best option for locating a wind turbine–does not get a whole lot of wind. Still, Team Wind recommended placing a 12-foot diameter wind turbine on the building to help make a dent in MIT’s electric bill, offset carbon dioxide emissions and serve as an educational resource for future projects related to energy and wind.

First-year students Richard Bates, Samantha Fox, KT McCusker and Katie Pesce were among a dozen MIT students in a class–offered for the first time last semester–that investigated ways to help MIT and the City of Cambridge reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

On May 11, Team Wind, as the four called themselves, presented their results assessing the economic, technical, aesthetic and policy issues connected with installing small and micro-sized wind turbines on MIT buildings to capture wind energy. In the audience were MIT and Cambridge decision-makers who could help implement the proposed projects.

Nowhere near the scale of commercial turbines with 100-meter-wide blades, the Skystream 3.7 made by Arizona-based Southwest Windpower has compact 12-foot rotors.

The Skystream system has an installed cost of around $7,900, although it has never been installed on a building before, and would be eligible for around $2,700 in rebates through the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative. It would provide 2,600 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy annually. The cost to MIT would be nine cents per kWh compared with 15 cents per kWh from a utility company. A turbine installed on Eastgate would have a payback time of 11 years, the group calculated.

“It has high value proportional to its size and the potential for good cost savings,” said Dan Wesolowski, a materials science and engineering graduate student who served as a teaching assistant and helped develop the course. Nevertheless, it would take a wind turbine one year to offset the amount of greenhouse gases than MIT produces in six minutes.

The students measured wind speeds at seven campus locations before settling on Eastgate tower, which houses graduate students and their families in 203 apartments at the east end of campus. The building is close to the Charles River, generally considered a good option for wind power density. A site needs class 3 wind power density, translating to mean wind speeds of around 12 mph, to be economically attractive. MIT’s campus is largely class 1.

The new class, “Energy, Environment and Society,” focused on solving real-world problems. Jeffrey I. Steinfeld, professor of chemistry and director of the Laboratory for Energy and Environment (LFEE) education program; Jefferson W. Tester, the H.P. Meissner Professor of Chemical Engineering; and Amanda Graham, manager of the LFEE education program, designed and led the class, aided by three graduate student teaching assistants.

“We feel strongly that having students develop projects leading to real-world products rather than more abstract outcomes provides a very different learning experience,” Graham said. “The students meet the people who care about the material they generate, and there’s a sudden shift in their investment and motivation that we hope will deepen their experience and commitment and extend their learning.”

The d’Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in Education supported the development of this class.

By Doug Palmer

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – China and other developing nations must help “pay” for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said on Monday, backing off a recent statement that put a greater burden on the United States.

As the United States and other developed countries make costly commitments to address climate change, “developing countries like China must do the same,” Locke told members of the Manufacturing Council, a private sector advisory group.

“They’ve got to step up. They’ve got to pay for the cost of complying with global climate change. They’ve got to invest in energy efficiency and conservation, but also very definitive steps in reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” Locke said.

The comment followed Locke’s statement last week in China that U.S. consumers should pay for the carbon content of goods they consume from countries around the world.

“It’s important that those who consume the products being made all around the world to the benefit of America — and it’s our own consumption activity that’s causing the emission of greenhouse gases, then quite frankly Americans need to pay for that,” Locke told the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai after meetings with Chinese officials in Beijing.

A Commerce Department spokesman said Locke was not endorsing a tax on imports or any other particular policy option to reduce the carbon content of imported goods.

Instead, Locke was trying to say U.S. companies must not be put at a trade disadvantage as the United States moves to pass legislation to rein in greenhouse gas emissions that come primarily from burning fossil fuels, the spokesman said.

“There’s an obvious concern that U.S. companies compete on a level playing field. As the voice in the cabinet for American business, that’s the concern the secretary was trying to convey,” the spokesman said.

China recently passed the United States as the largest overall greenhouse gas emitter, though U.S. per capita emissions still far exceed China’s.

Locke and U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu were in China last week to discuss how the two countries could work together on clean energy technologies to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.

At a closing press conference in Beijing, the two cabinet secretaries praised China for the steps it was already taking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and said it was a model for other developing countries to follow.

The Commerce spokesman said Locke had in fact stressed to Chinese leaders throughout his visit that they needed to take further steps to reduce the country’s “carbon footprint.”

(Reporting by Doug Palmer; editing by Anthony Boadle)

Today’s release of a widely anticipated international report on global warming coincides with a growing clamor within the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent the potentially devastating consequences of global climate change.

“There’s more interest in this now than at any time in the last 20 years,” says Ronald Prinn, TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT, who was a lead author of the report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The report issued today in Paris, a 21-page summary of a much longer study on the science behind climate change, concludes there is a greater than 90 percent chance that greenhouse gases from human activity are responsible for most of the steadily rising average global temperatures observed in the past 50 years.

“There’s clear evidence that greenhouse gases have been increasing by very large amounts since preindustrial times, and the vast majority of these increases are due to human activity,” said Prinn, whose specific task on the panel was to assess this issue.

This is the fourth climate report issued by the IPCC since it was established by the U.N. in 1988. Prinn, who is the director of MIT’s Center for Global Change Science, was one of more than 100 lead authors for the three-year study, which involved climate researchers from around the world.

For the first time, the IPCC provides extensive evidence of the regional signals of climate change, including rising continental-scale temperatures, rising sea levels, shrinking of Arctic summer sea ice and decrease in snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere. It also offers predictions for how rising temperatures will affect the planet in decades to come.

Taken as a whole, the report presents a strong case that the United States, which is responsible for about 25 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, should take much more vigorous steps to curb its emissions along with the other major emitters around the world, Prinn said.

“Overall, the scientific evidence for human influence on climate has strengthened significantly in the past half dozen years, and the case for decreasing greenhouse gas emissions is significantly more compelling than it was six years ago,” he said.

Greenhouse gases, which include methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, chlorofluorocarbons and their replacements (hydrofluorocarbons) as well as the better-known carbon dioxide, trap infrared radiation in the Earth’s atmosphere, inhibiting the planet’s cooling capability. Burning of fossil fuels is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, but agricultural activities and deforestation also contribute.

“It’s not just the highly industrialized nations that are involved here,” Prinn said. “To some degree, every person on the planet is responsible, but some are much more responsible than others.”

There is now a near-universal scientific consensus that human activity is driving climate change, but 10 years ago, Prinn himself was not convinced that that was the case. But, as the evidence mounted, Prinn concluded that the changes were too great to be explained by natural climate variations.

Other highlights of the report include:

• While global temperatures have risen significantly, the rise is less than expected from the greenhouse gases alone, because of the cooling effect of sulfate aerosols, another type of pollutant caused by fossil fuel combustion. Efforts already underway to reduce those aerosols, which cause acid rain and are harmful to human health, could lead to greater future warming.
• For the first time, the IPCC has placed odds on the accuracy of its climate predictions: The report offers several different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios and, for each one, predicts the likelihood of a certain temperature increase–for example, a two-thirds chance that global temperatures will rise 2.4 to 6.4 degrees Celsius for one high-emissions scenario.

Those odds will help policy-makers decide how much effort is needed to lessen or adapt to the potential impacts of climate change, according to Prinn.

“I’m very pleased because this has been a quest by the climate researchers at the Center for Global Change Science and the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT for more than a decade,” he said. “In order to help make policy decisions, scientists have got to provide the uncertainties on their key numbers.”

In recent weeks, several climate change bills have been introduced in Congress, and Prinn anticipates that he and other MIT researchers will be asked to testify on the scientific, technological and economic aspects of the proposed legislation.

In late November, Prinn spoke to a group of 36 newly elected members of Congress at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The representatives were very interested in the topic of global warming, he said.

“It was very clear that this is something they are hearing from the people that elected them,” whose attention to climate issues has been drawn in part by destructive storms like Hurricane Katrina and decidedly un-winter-like temperatures in the Northeast, said Prinn.

“Many of the newly elected members were beginning to ask whether the United States is doing what it should be doing on this issue,” he said.

In addition to reducing emissions, the world should also be thinking about the need to prepare for and adapt to the effects of climate change, Prinn said. For example, it may not be wise to build new infrastructure in coastal areas that may be inundated with rising waters, he said. The IPCC report emphasizes that we are already committed to future warming due simply to the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere.

Later this year, the IPCC will issue two more reports. One focuses on possible mitigation strategies, while the other will address the impact of climate change on global ecosystems and economies.

Mary Tamer, News Office correspondent
August 20, 2008

Why is the general public not more concerned about the potential consequences of climate change? For many risks, such as the risk of a plane crash, the public is far more fearful than the evidence shows, observes John Sterman, the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. But on the issue of climate, he notes, the situation is just the opposite.

“The science is unequivocal now. It’s urgent that we reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions,” he says. “That debate is basically over.” However, Sterman adds, the public at large remains complacent.

What’s behind this puzzling complacency? Sterman’s research suggests some clues. In experiments conducted with Linda Booth Sweeney, an educator who received her doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Sterman, director of the System Dynamics Group at MIT Sloan, found that even highly educated people have a poor understanding of the basic dynamics of climate change, underestimating how much GHG emissions must decrease to limit the risks of severe climate change.

And if people don’t have good mental models for understanding climate change, they may come to faulty conclusions about policy. For example, if people erroneously think that climate change is easily reversible, they may support waiting to see what the effects of climate change will be before taking action to reduce emissions of GHGs such as carbon dioxide.

The bathtub metaphor

To help people better understand climate change, Sterman uses the metaphor of a bathtub. Imagine pouring water into your bathtub twice as fast as it drains out. Even though water is constantly flowing out through the drain, the inflow exceeds the outflow, so the water level in the tub will rise. Eventually, the tub will overflow.

Similarly, each year we humans now add about twice as much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as natural processes remove. Unchecked, the tub will soon over flow — that is, the concentration of GHGs will rise until severe, irreversible climate change is inevitable.

To halt greenhouse gas-induced climate change, it’s not enough to stop the growth of GHG emissions. Stabilizing the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere requires that emissions fall to the rate at which GHGs are removed from the atmosphere — a drop of at least half.

To test whether people understand these basic “bathtub dynamics,” Sterman and Booth Sweeney gave highly educated university students a nontechnical summary of information about climate change drawn from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including the fact that carbon dioxide emissions are currently twice the rate of natural carbon dioxide removal.

Study participants were then asked to draw a simple graph showing what GHG emissions and removal rates would have to be to stabilize the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere by the year 2100.

Surprisingly, most people answered incorrectly — even graduate students with strong technical backgrounds. Most drew patterns in which emissions stopped growing but remained higher than removal — in effect, claiming that the water in the tub won’t rise even when the faucet pours more in than the drain removes.

The study was published in the journal Climatic Change.

Flawed reasoning not unique to climate change

The errors the study revealed are not specific to climate change. In related research, Sterman and Booth Sweeney found that people generally don’t understand systems involving accumulations — whether those systems are bathtubs, business inventories or the concentrations of GHGs in the earth’s atmosphere.

Unfortunately, on the question of climate change, the stakes are extremely high. “There’s no purely technical solution to the climate challenge. We have to change the way we think about our personal energy choices,” Sterman observes.

“The good news,” Sterman said, “is that you don’t need to know any math to understand that the level of water in a tub rises as long as you pour water in faster than it drains out. Once people understand that we’re pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere far faster than they are removed, they are better equipped to understand why we can’t wait and see — why we have to reduce GHG emissions today to protect the world we will pass on to our children.”

Using a model developed at MIT, authors John M. Reilly, associate director for research at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Climate Change; Henry D. Jacoby, professor at the Sloan School of Management; and Ronald G. Prinn, the Tepco Professor and head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, show that including all greenhouse gases in a moderate emissions reduction strategy increases the overall amount of emissions reductions and also reduces the overall cost of mitigation.

Although carbon dioxide (CO2), a byproduct of fossil fuel combustion, is the principal greenhouse gas contributing to global warming, methane, nitrous oxide and man-made, industrial-process gases such as hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride also are important contributors to climate change.

From an environmental and an economic standpoint, effective climate strategies should address both CO2 and these other greenhouse gases, the report says.

Due to the high potency of the non-CO2 gases and the current lack of economic incentives, the researchers conclude that control of these gases is especially important and cost-effective in the near term.

“The non-CO2 gases contribute a great deal to climate change, yet there is currently little or no incentive to control these emissions,” said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. “Curbing emissions of these greenhouse gases is both environmentally important and cost-effective.”

The report, “Multi-Gas Contributors to Global Climate Change: Climate Impacts and Mitigation Costs of Non-CO2 Gases,” discusses the sources and amounts of these emissions, the atmospheric interactions of the various gases, and the relative costs of reducing them. The researchers use a general equilibrium modeling framework to analyze the costs and climate impacts of controlling various greenhouse gas emissions.

The report discusses opportunities and difficulties associated with incorporating non-CO2 greenhouse gases into a climate policy framework.

If, for example, total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States were held at year 2000 levels through 2010, many cost-effective reduction opportunities would come from the non-CO2 greenhouse gases.

In developing countries like India and Brazil, non-CO2 gases currently account for more than half of total greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, any cost-effective effort to engage developing countries in climate change mitigation should also include these other gases.

Biofuels based on ethanol, vegetable oil and other renewable sources are increasingly popular with government and environmentalists as a way to reduce fossil fuel dependence and limit greenhouse gas emissions.

But new research led by a biologist at the University of Washington, Bothell, shows that some of the most popular current biofuel stocks might have exactly the opposite impacts than intended. The authors of a paper published in the June issue of the journal Conservation Biology offer a dozen policy recommendations to promote sustainability and biodiversity in biofuel production.

The study looked at factors such as the energy needed to produce a renewable fuel source compared with how much energy is produced, the impact on soil fertility and effects on food supply when fuels based on crops such as corn and soybeans are mixed with fossil fuels. Based on those factors, the authors determined that corn-based ethanol is the worst alternative overall.

“It’s foolish to say we should be developing a particular biofuel when that could mean that we’re just replacing one problem with another,” said lead author Martha Groom of the UW Bothell. Co-authors are Elizabeth Gray of The Nature Conservancy and Patricia Townsend of the UW Seattle.

The authors argue that precise calculations are needed to determine the ecological footprints of large-scale cultivation of various crops used for biofuels. They note, for example, that because such large amounts of energy are required to grow corn and convert it to ethanol, the net energy gain of the resulting fuel is modest. Using a crop such as switchgrass, common forage for cattle, would require much less energy to produce the fuel, and using algae would require even less. Changing direction to biofuels based on switchgrass or algae would require significant policy changes, since the technologies to produce such fuels are not fully developed.

The paper’s policy suggestions are “not definitive at all,” Groom said, “but rather each category calls out a question and is a starting point in trying to find the proper answers.”

These concerns are becoming more acute with the rapid rise of both food and fuel prices, she said. The issue is especially touchy for farmers who might for the first time be realizing significant profits on their crops, but it also is a serious concern for motorists.

“I’ve heard about people getting their gas tanks siphoned, and I hadn’t heard of that since the ’70s,” she said.

A difficulty, Groom said, is that while escalating prices add pressure to find less costly fuel sources, acting too hastily could create a host of other problems. For example, farmers who plant only corn because it is suddenly profitable, and don’t rotate with crops such as soybeans, are likely to greatly deplete their soil, which could limit crop growth and promote soil erosion.

Also, some plants are better than others for absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, while others perhaps need more cultivation, which requires more fossil fuel for farm equipment. In addition, fertilization, watering and harvesting all require energy.

The study took about a year to conduct and is a synthesis of peer-reviewed research published in a various journals. The scientists examined the literature looking for indicators of biofuels that are more sustainable and carry a smaller ecological footprint, then used that information to derive the policy recommendations.

The primary audiences for the work are policy makers, students and other biologists, Groom said. The primary goals are to establish a logical basis to evaluate options for biofuel development and to spur new research to find the most ecologically promising alternatives.

“We don’t want to make new mistakes. If we don’t ask the right questions to start with, we’re going to replace old problems with new ones,” she said.

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Policy Recommendations
• Calculate a biofuel’s ecological footprint
• Promote only biofuels that can be produced sustainably
• Select highly efficient species for biofuels
• Work to minimize land needed for biofuels
• Encourage reclamation of degraded areas
• Prohibit clearing areas for more cultivation
• Promote use of energy crops that require less fertilizer, pesticide and energy
• Promote native and perennial species
• Prohibit use of invasive species
• Promote crop rotation on cultivated lands
• Encourage soil conservation
• Promote only biofuels that are at least net carbon neutral