Enterprise Resilience Management Blog

Algae and Unintended Consequences

In January, I wrote a post about research involving algae as a potential source of biofuel [The Potential of Pond Scum]. Biofuels edged their way into the news because of rising oil prices and have remained in the news because of the global food shortage. Critics have argued that extensive use of food crops (like corn, soybeans, and palm oil) as feedstock for biofuel refineries has contributed to the food shortage and rising prices. Proponents of algae a feedstock for biofuel argue that, because it is not a food crop and can be grown where food crops can't be grown, it is a good alternative to pursue. In a May post [Weeds and Biofuels -- a Warning], I focused on environmental concerns about using fast-growing "weeds" as a biofuel feedstock. Environmentalists are concerned that use of such grasses could get out of control and that fast-growing grasses could destroy local ecosystems. Now news out of the South Pacific demonstrates the unintended consequences of trying to produce commercial crops of algae by introducing a new species of algae into areas where algae had never before been a problem ["Corals, Already in Danger, Are Facing New Threat From Farmed Algae," by Christopher Pala, New York Times, 8 July 2008].

"Off the palm-fringed white beach of this remote Pacific atoll [of Butaritari, Kiribati], the view underwater is downright scary. Corals are being covered and smothered to death by a bushy seaweed that is so tough even algae-grazing fish avoid it. It settles in the reef’s crevices that fish once called home, driving them away. Dead coral stops supporting the ecosystem and, within a couple of decades, it will crumble into rubble, allowing big ocean waves to reach the beach during storms and destroy the flimsy thatched huts of the Micronesians."

Pala reports that the above scene is very reminiscent of what is happening in Kaneohe Bay on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. The seaweed doing all the damage is called Eucheuma. It was introduced to Butaritari as a source of income for locals who have few other means of producing revenue. Unfortunately, the seaweed is destroying the fishing upon which the locals rely for protein.

"Seafood is virtually the only source of protein in Butaritari, complemented by breadfruit and coconut. This equatorial island of 4,000 people is the latest victim of a 30-year global effort to encourage poor people in the coastal areas of the tropics to grow seaweed that, while not edible, produces carrageenan, an increasingly sought-after binder and fat substitute used in the food industry, notably in ice cream. Today, about 120,000 dry metric tons a year are produced, mostly in the Philippines and Indonesia, where the two main algae originate. Kappaphycus alvarezii is most desirable because of its high carrageenan content; Eucheuma denticulatum is less valuable but easier to cultivate. Both were introduced in the past three decades to 20 countries around the world from Tonga to Zanzibar and the result in most of them has been failure or worse. The alga K. alvarezii invaded the Gulf of Manmar Biosphere Reserve in south India a decade after commercial cultivation began in nearby Panban. 'No part of the coral reef was visible in most of the invaded sites, where it doomed entire colonies,' the journal Current Science has reported. In the Pacific, for example, the two algae were introduced to 10 countries and are said to be commercially cultivated in three: Kiribati, the Solomon Islands and Tonga. But in the case of Kiribati, interviews with seaweed officials in Tarawa, the capital of this nation of tiny islands sprinkled over a swath of ocean the size of India, reveal that since the first effort to cultivate algae in 1986, the industry has lost money almost every year and the farmers have shown little enduring enthusiasm for the crop."

Although these seaweed farms are not intended to support the biofuel sector, the unintended consequences that the introduction of an invasive species of seaweed has had in many of these countries serves as fair warning about the need to move cautiously. Seaweed farming ended two years ago in Butaritari, but the seaweed problem remains. Local citizens have no resources (except manpower), to apply against the problem.

"[Henry Totie, a fisherman and the] Butaritari traditional chief, says the only way to prevent Eucheuma (which locals call seaweeda, since it has no local name) from destroying the entire lagoon is for the seaweed company to offer to buy it. 'Then the people would go out and get it and it would be gone in a few months,' he said. 'If they wait, the problem will just get worse.' [Kevin Rouatu, a stocky, cheerful former banker who runs the Atoll Seaweed Company in Kiribati,] agrees that some sort of noncommercial purchase plan needs to be set up to save the Butaritari lagoon, perhaps with foreign aid."

The point here is that good intentions don't necessarily make good sense. To underscore the point (if it really needs underscoring), the algae problem now facing Hawaii was actually instigated by a college professor trying to conduct "useful" research.

"In Hawaii, three kinds of algae were brought in during the 1970s by a professor of botany at the University of Hawaii, Max Doty, who developed the techniques of cultivation that were exported around the world. One species dominates Oahu's south and the two others, mostly Eucheuma, have spread to about half of the coral heads of Kaneohe Bay. Celia Smith, the successor to the late Dr. Doty at the university, is now a leader in the effort to save the bay. 'It's not easy,' she said, for the seaweeds grow at a rate of 7 percent a week. The university, state and Nature Conservancy devised Super Suckers, vacuum cleaners on powered catamarans that are sucking up 3,000 pounds of seaweed a day each. 'At the current rate, we’ll need 10 years to clean up the bay,' says Brian Hauk, the state aquatic invasive species supervisor."

Finding a way to use algae as the feedstock for the biofuel industry might help with the development of better harvesting techniques that could be used to clean up some of the trouble spots around the globe. It could also have the unintended consequences of fostering algae farms in inappropriate areas and spread the challenges already faced by sensitive ecosystems. Rarely can a silver bullet solution be found to any challenge. Good research, good planning, and good consequence management are critical for any new venture to succeed in a way that the benefits outweigh the risks.

Privacy and Connecting-the-Dots

The seeds of my current company, Enterra Solutions, can be traced back to the days following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As a serial entrepreneur, I was between companies and looking for my next project. My sister, who was working in the now-condemned Deutsche Bank building which sat next to the World Trade Center towers, had definitely been in harm's way and I was motivated to do something to help. As the details of those tragic events emerged, it was clear that the intelligence community needed a better way to share information and I thought I could help them find it. The short story is those events catalyzed my thinking about rule set automation and how it could be used to make processes of all kinds (including information sharing) more efficient and effective. Sharing information (i.e., making sure the right person, with the right clearance, and a need to know gets the right data) is a very difficult challenge. Sources need protecting and privacy issues abound. It is the tension between the benefits of sharing information and the privacy concerns that it raises that is the focus of a recent article in the Washington Post ["Post-9/11 Dragnet Turns Up Surprises," by Ellen Nakashima, 6 July 2008]. Nakashima writes:

"In the six-and-a-half years that the U.S. government has been fingerprinting insurgents, detainees and ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa, hundreds have turned out to share an unexpected background, FBI and military officials said. They have criminal arrest records in the United States. There was the suspected militant fleeing Somalia who had been arrested on a drug charge in New Jersey. And the man stopped at a checkpoint in Tikrit who claimed to be a dirt farmer but had 11 felony charges in the United States, including assault with a deadly weapon. The records suggest that potential enemies abroad know a great deal about the United States because many of them have lived here, officials said. The matches also reflect the power of sharing data across agencies and even countries, data that links an identity to a distinguishing human characteristic such as a fingerprint."

I have repeatedly, in my posts, trumpeted the power of connectivity -- not just for law enforcement purposes but for commercial activity as well. Although there are privacy concerns about information sharing in the commercial sector, they pale in comparison to the concerns raised in the security sector. Anyone whose name is on a terrorist watch list knows that life suddenly becomes more complicated and irritating. People don't really mind making life difficult for a person who is an actual security risk, but when an innocent person is affected we all feel his or her pain. We get outraged when they find themselves caught in a Catch 22 situation where everybody sympathizes but nobody does anything about it. Nakashima reports that warning flags have been raised anew by privacy advocates as a result of a recent directive issued by President Bush.

"The fingerprinting of detainees overseas began as ad-hoc FBI and U.S. military efforts shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It has since grown into a government-wide push to build the world's largest database of known or suspected terrorist fingerprints. The effort is being boosted by a presidential directive signed June 5, which gave the U.S. attorney general and other cabinet officials 90 days to come up with a plan to expand the use of biometrics by, among other things, recommending categories of people to be screened beyond 'known or suspected' terrorists."

Privacy advocates are not just concerned that the program is expanding in the United States, their concerns include the fact that databases are being shared globally.

"Fingerprints are being beamed in via satellite from places as far-flung as the jungles of Zamboanga in the southern Philippines; Bogota, Colombia; Iraq; and Afghanistan. Other allies, such as Sweden, have contributed prints. The database can be queried by U.S. government agencies and by other countries through Interpol, the international police agency. Civil libertarians have raised concerns about whether people on the watch lists have been appropriately determined to be terrorists, a process that senior government officials acknowledge is an art, not a science. Large-scale identity systems 'can raise serious privacy concerns, if not singly, then jointly and severally,' said a 2007 study by the Defense Science Board Task Force on Defense Biometrics. The ability 'to cross reference and draw new, previously unimagined, inferences,' is a boon for the government and the bane of privacy advocates, it said."

People are always wary about "big brother." That is why the Defense Science Board Task Force claim that information sharing is "a boon for the government" touches a nerve that sends shivers up the spine of privacy advocates. Proponents of sharing biometric information undoubtedly have a different perspective and use different language. They would argue that sharing biometric information is a boon for the traveling public and helps make people safer. Both sides have valid points. Nakashima's focus is on the benefits of such information sharing. She continues:

"The effort, officials say, is bearing fruit. 'The bottom line is we're locking people up,' said Thomas E. Bush III, FBI assistant director of the Criminal Justice Information Services division. 'Stopping people coming into this country. Identifying IED-makers in a way never done before. That's the beauty of this whole data-sharing effort. We're pushing our borders back.'"

The U.S. military has always stressed "defense in depth," by which it means defending the country as far away from its shores as possible. Law enforcement agencies have come to appreciate this approach. Nakashima reports that the current effort to collect fingerprints of possible terrorists began shortly after 9/11.

"In December 2001, an FBI team was sent on an unusual mission to Afghanistan. The U.S. military had launched a wave of airstrikes aimed at killing or capturing al Qaeda fighters and their Taliban hosts. The FBI team was to fingerprint and interview foreign fighters as if they were being booked at a police station. The team, led by Paul Shannon, a veteran FBI agent embedded with U.S. special forces, traveled to the combat zone toting briefcases outfitted with printer's ink, hand rollers and paper cards. The agents worked in Kandahar and Kabul. They traversed the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. They hand-carried the fingerprint records from Afghanistan to Clarksburg, W.Va., home to the FBI's criminal biometric database. As they analyzed the results, they were surprised to learn that one out of every 100 detainees was already in the FBI's database for arrests. Many arrests were for drunken driving, passing bad checks and traffic violations, FBI officials said."

Although that description of offenses would lead one to believe that the offenders were not very religious (e.g., Islam teaches that people are supposed to be honest and aren't supposed to drink alcohol), the FBI learned they were very committed to their cause.

"The people being fingerprinted had come from the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan. They were mostly in their 20s, Shannon recalled. 'One of the things we learned is we were dealing with relatively young guys who were very committed and what they would openly tell you is that when they got out they were going back to jihad,' he said. 'They'd already made this commitment.'"

Nakashima provides other anecdotal evidence of the success of the fingerprinting program.

"One of the first men fingerprinted by the FBI team was a fighter who claimed he was in Afghanistan to learn the ancient art of falconry. But a fingerprint check showed that in August 2001 he had been turned away from Orlando International Airport by an immigration official who thought he might overstay his visa. Mohamed al Kahtani would later be named by the Sept. 11 Commission as someone who allegedly had sought to participate in hijackings. He currently is in custody at Guantanamo Bay. Similarly, in 2004, an FBI team choppered to a remote desert camp on the Iraq-Iran border, home to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), whose aim is to overthrow the Iranian government. The MEK lead an austere lifestyle in which men are segregated from women and material goods are renounced. The U.S. State Department considers the organization to be a terrorist group. The FBI team fingerprinted 3,800 fighters. More than 40, Shannon said, had previous criminal records in the agency's database."

The FBI is not the only organization collecting biometric data. Nakashima reports that the U.S. military also a program.

"While the FBI was busy collecting fingerprints, the military was setting up its own biometrics database, adding in iris and facial data as well. By October, the two organizations agreed to collaborate, running queries through both systems. The very first match was on the man who claimed to be a poor dirt farmer. Among his many charges were misdemeanors for theft and public drunkenness in Chicago and Utah, a criminal record that ran from 1993 to 2001, said Herb Richardson, who serves as operations manager for the military's Automated Biometric Identification System under a contract with Ideal Innovations of Arlington. Many of those with U.S. arrest records had come to the United States to study, said former Criminal Justice Information Services head Michael Kirkpatrick, who led the FBI effort to use biometrics in counterterrorism after Sept. 11. 'It suggests there was some familiarity with Western culture, the United States specifically, and for whatever reason they did not agree with that culture,' he said. 'Either they became disaffected or put up with it, and then they went overseas.'"

Nakashima also provides anecdotal evidence about why civil libertarians are concerned with such programs.

"Errors in matching, though rare, have occurred. In a noted 2004 case, Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield was erroneously named as a suspect in the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people. FBI lab analysts matched a print lifted from a plastic bag at the crime scene to his fingerprints that were stored in the FBI's criminal database because of a 1985 arrest for auto burglary when he was a teenager. The charge had been dismissed. After a critical Justice Department Inspector General audit, the FBI made fixes in its system. A recent inspector general report found the FBI fingerprint matching to be generally accurate. Civil libertarians, however, worry that the systems are not transparent enough for outsiders to tell how the government decides who belongs on a watch list and how that information is handled. 'The day when the federal government can tell people the basis they've been put on the watch list is the day we can have more confidence in biometric identification,' said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center."

Nakashima goes on to report why watch lists are so problematic.

"Vetting the data is the job of analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center, an office park-like complex in McLean run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Analysts there scour intelligence reports to create the master international terrorist watch list. 'You cannot draw a bright red line and say that's a terrorist, this person isn't,' said Russ Travers, an NCTC deputy director. 'If somebody swears allegiance to Bin Laden, that's an easy case. If somebody goes to a terrorist training camp, that's probably an easy case. What if a person goes to a camp and decides, "I don't want to go to a camp, I want to go home." Where do you draw the line?' Investigators are working on ever more sophisticated ways to evaluate the data. Analysts at the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, for instance, use software to scrutinize intelligence reports from sources such as electronic surveillance and informants. They then link the information to a person's biographic and biometric data, and look for relationships that might detect terrorists and plots. For example, a roadside bomb may explode and a patrol may fingerprint bystanders because insurgents have been known to remain at the scene to observe the results of their work. Prints also can be lifted off tiny fragments of exploded bombs, said military officials and contractors involved in the work. Analysts are not just trying to identify the prints on the bomb. They want to find out who the bomb-carrier associates with. Who he calls. Who calls him. That could lead to the higher-level operatives who planned and financed attacks. Already, fingerprints lifted off a bomb fragment have been linked to people trying to enter the United States, they said. In a separate data-sharing program, 365 Iraqis who have applied to the Department of Homeland Security for refugee status have been denied because their fingerprints turned up in the Defense Department's database of known or suspected terrorists, Richardson said."

The fact that vetting watch lists is so difficult is what makes civil libertarians so wary. While some privacy advocates insist that no personal data should be collected, stored, shared and analyzed, I believe most people understand that those activities play an important security role. There has to be some compromise reached. It may not make everybody happy, but such a compromise should make people on both sides the least unhappy it can. Nakashima concludes with an overview of how the program is changing to include the collection of domestic biometric data.

"If Iraq and Afghanistan were a proving ground of sorts for biometric watch-listing, the U.S. government is moving quickly to try to build a domestic version. Since September 2006, Homeland Security and the FBI have been operating a pilot program in which police officers in Boston, Dallas and Houston run prints of arrestees against a Homeland Security database of immigration law violators and a State Department database of people refused visas. Federal job applicants' prints also are run against the databases. To date, some 500 people have been found in the database and thus are of interest to Homeland Security officials. Steve Nixon, a director at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the effort is key to national security. 'When we look at the road and the challenges, globalization and the spread of technology has empowered small groups of individuals, bad guys, to be more powerful than at any other time in history,' he said. 'We have to know who these people are when we encounter them. A lot of what we're doing in intelligence now is trying to identify a person. Biometrics is a key element of that.'"

As I noted above, there will undoubtedly be compromises in data collection programs that will leave neither side happy. The intelligence and law enforcement communities are always pursuing perfect information and civil libertarians are always looking to keep the government out the lives of individual citizens. The resulting tension may be uncomfortable, but it is also healthy and necessary. A free society that willingly surrenders its liberties doesn't remain free for long. On the other hand, a society without some norms and enforcement mechanisms quickly erodes into anarchy and chaos. Checks and balances relating to security and privacy issues will only remain strong as long as both sides keep up the good fight.

Plant-based Plastics

Much has changed over the past 40 decades. Older readers may recall the 1967 motion picture "The Graduate," in which Dustin Hoffman got his first big break. One of the more memorable pieces of dialog in that film went like this:

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

In the past few years, plastics have taken a public relations nosedive. Environmentalists decry everything from the plastic rings that harness six-packs of drinks to the plastic shopping bags that float eerily in the wind (sort of like in the 1999 film "American Beauty"). Most plastics are virtually indestructible and are clogging landfills around the globe. Shoppers have been encouraged to buy re-usable cloth sacks to help clean up the environment. The latest bad news for plastics came in reports that claim a compound used in hard transparent plastic bottles, bisphenol A, or BPA -- a compound created by a Russian chemist in 1891 -- creates health risks. The fact is, however, that the world is as dependent on plastics as it is on oil or electricity.

Like the old adage says, "necessity is the mother of invention"; and scientists are looking for safer, greener ways to make plastics ["I Have Just One Word for You: Bioplastics," by Mara Der Havanesian, BusinessWeek, 30 June 2008 print edition].

"For half of his life and all of his 25-year career as a bioengineer, Oliver P. Peoples has wanted to prove two things: that he could reengineer plants to grow biodegradable plastic in their cells and that he could make a lot of money doing it. On the first goal, Peoples has had astonishing success. His Cambridge (Mass.) company, Metabolix has harnessed the complex genetics of plant-cell metabolism and collected hundreds of patents on a process for manufacturing 'bioplastics' in large vats of microbes. A $200million factory is under construction and could start producing Metabolix's bioplastic, called Mirel, early next year. But Peoples' second mission, amassing wealth for himself and his investors, is glaringly incomplete. ... The company is now in a crucible every struggling biotech encounters. As it awaits commercial production, it is burning through cash. And it must carefully pick the right customers to showcase Mirel's wide range of applications, from gift cards and cosmetics cases to plastic bags and computer parts."

Despite the fact that Peoples burn-rate is high, so are his expectations of success. Peoples believes the timing of his product is just about perfect.

"As oil prices spike up, so does the cost of plastic materials, virtually all of which are petroleum-based. In addition, consumer groups and environmentalists around the world are in an uproar over the billions of tons of plastic waste that get dumped at sea or buried in landfills and over the health effects of related toxins. Almost 30 million tons a year of plastic solid waste is dumped into the U.S., and about 5% is recycled. These trends fuel demand for novel bioplastics that aren't linked to pricey fossil fuels and don't harm the environment."

Peoples' greatest concern should be about competitors. Even producers of traditional petroleum-based plastics are muscling their way into the bioplastics field.

"DuPont fired up its first biomaterials plant in 2006, selling more than a $100 million worth of products in the past year, including its bioplastic called Sorona. Starting in 2009, Cargill's NatureWorks unit hopes to ship 140,000 metric tons a year of a bioplastic called Ingeo, for use in fresh food containers and textiles, among other things. Brazilian petrochemical giant Braskem is spending $300 million on a factory for sugarcane-based bioplastics, while Toray Industries of Japan is making plastics from fermented plant starches and sugars. There's also a host of U.S. startups with names such as Novomer and Cereplast that make plastics from wheat, tapioca, potatoes, soy, and more. 'We've gone from being mad scientists to being visionaries,' says Frederic Scheer, CEO of Cereplast, based in Hawthorne, Calif."

Peoples, however, believes he has an edge over the competition.

"All [of the competitor] materials are green in the sense that they reduce dependence on fossil fuels. But while rival bioplastics must be incinerated or composted at high temperatures, Mirel will decompose if it is simply tossed in a home compost heap or dumped at sea. 'Mirel is the one that works in all environments,' says Joseph P. Greene, a professor in mechanical engineering and manufacturing at California State University at Chico, who was hired by the state to find the best bioplastic on the market. 'It breaks down nicely with food or yard waste. Boom, 180 days later and it's nice brown dirt.' What's more, the manufacturer determines how fast the plastic biodegrades into harmless plant materials and the conditions under which that happens."

Mirel's environment edge hasn't gone unnoticed. Organizations concerned about their "green" image from Target to the U.S. military are testing Mirel in products.

"About 50 potential customers, including Target, Revlon, Hewlett-Packard, medical supply company Labcon, and the U.S. military, are testing Mirel in more than 70 different products. 'We have to do something [because] most plastic just ends up in a bad place,' says Jim Happ, president of Labcon, which is testing Mirel to replace some 3 million pounds of plastic it uses each year in 800 products for hospital labs. 'We love their polymer,' says JoAnn Ratto, an engineer at a U.S. Army research center in Natick, Mass., which is evaluating Mirel as a liner for waste bags that are thrown overboard by naval ships. 'We can't get enough of it.'"

Der Havanesian reports that the process for producing Mirel can be simply explained but such an explanation doesn't capture the genius and hard work behind the techniques that were used to create it.

"Mirel is made in large vats of genetically modified microbes. They gorge on glucose from corn, then convert the sugar into fatty globules, which make up more than 80% of the cells by weight. These are harvested, dried, and turned into pellets. It all sounds painless enough, but getting the microbes to comply requires marvels of genetic engineering."

Peoples journey from a young boy in Scotland to entrepreneur in America is interesting and provides some insight into an entrepreneur's mindset.

"He grew up poor in Slamannan, a remote, windswept coal mining town between Glasgow and Edinburgh. His father died when he was 16, leaving little for his family of 11 children. 'Olly' was spared a life in the mines by the attention of his high school chemistry teacher, who helped him get into the prestigious University of Aberdeen. After he earned his PhD in molecular biology in 1983, he landed a postgrad spot at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pulling himself out of poverty and cultivating a competitive streak at MIT prepared him for the life of an entrepreneur, says Pamela Bassett, a Cantor Fitzgerald analyst in New York. 'Most scientists want to publish, especially if you're at MIT,' she says. 'Olly wants to commercialize.' With a background in biochemistry, Peoples sensed early on that genetic engineering would open up whole new commercial landscapes. Most of his lab mates were interested in medical biotech, and several started companies that hit the jackpot, with lush buyouts by drug giants. Peoples yearned for a similar fate. But unlike many of his peers, he bypassed medicine and plunged into industrial applications. MIT filed for patents on his work in 1987, and by the time they were approved four years later, Peoples had negotiated exclusive licenses and mapped out a business plan for a new company."

In previous posts, I've noted that entrepreneurs are driven to see their ideas take shape and then take hold. Entrepreneurs are often a combination of idea generator, salesman, and motivator. They are not idealists, but passionate, hard-nosed business people who can't understand it when others fail to grasp their vision. Peoples is no exception. According to Der Havanesian, Peoples believed that others would immediately grasp the potential of his idea and that venture capital would flow freely. It didn't. To stay afloat, he went through eleven rounds of financing, plus an initial public offering. The market for bioplastics remains small but is growing.

"Total global production of bioplastics is still minuscule. All the manufacturers combined will generate only about 1 million tons a year by 2010, analysts say, compared with 500 million tons a year of the petro-based variety. But these ordinary plastics, which account for up to 10% of total U.S. oil consumption, are quickly becoming an extravagance at $138 for a barrel of crude. A switch to bioplastics not only would help reduce oil dependence but also could save companies and consumers serious money."

The one big drawback facing Mirel at the moment is that it is made from food crops. With crop prices rising and humanitarians urging companies to stop using food crops for purposes other than feeding people and livestock, Peoples is conducting more research and development to try and make Mirel even more attractive to customers.

"Having proved his science is valid, Peoples wants to scale up production of Mirel without relying on food crops such as corn. Funded by the U.S. Energy Dept., he's trying to bioengineer switchgrass and other plants to produce the plastic in their leaves. If he can pull it off, Metabolix could reap billions of pounds of bioplastics on just a fraction of the acreage currently given over to corn. It'll be a challenge, but Peoples, ever the scientist, says: 'The stuff that is easy to do is not that interesting.'"

Another BusinessWeek article written by Joshua Schneyer, reports that Brazil has big plans about becoming the world's leading producer of bioplastics ["Brazil's 'Organic' Plastics," 24 June 2008]. The country currently produces biofuels from sugarcane and is also looking to sugarcane to produce bioplastic.

"Already the No. 8 producer of petro-based plastics, Brazil will soon be the largest producer of organic ones, according to Dow and Braskem. Both companies say they've mastered technologies to turn sugar cane into polyethylene, the most popular plastic. By 2012, about 10% of Brazil's plastic will come from cane instead of petroleum."

As noted above, however, Mirel has a distinct advantage over sugarcane-based plastic in that it is biodegradable. In addition, sugarcane crops are already a source of contention for environmentalists.

"Not everyone believes that sugar cane should be used for plastics. Dow and Braskem plan to burn 300 million gallons of ethanol in 2012, around 6% of Brazil's current output. Critics say using edible crops for energy has fueled the runup in global food prices. Some say cane farming is pushing Brazil's agricultural frontier north into the Amazon forest, and that pre-harvest cane-burning, a common practice, lifts Brazil's carbon emissions. And, like conventional plastic, Brazil's cane plastic won't break down easily in the environment. That which isn't recycled may end up in landfills, or worse, swirling around the Great Garbage Patch, a Pacific Ocean vortex that eventually sucks in large volumes of plastic floating at sea."

The technology challenges involved with bioplastics will eventually be solved (Peoples has proven that) and the economics of oil will make bioplastics commonplace in the future. As a result, the plastics industry should remain sustainable and plastic products remain affordable even after the "oil age" passes. That is why BusinessWeek wrote, "I have just one word for you: bioplastics." Mr. McGuire may have been right all along.

The Future of Desalination

In a recent post, I discussed efforts to harness the power of the ocean's waves to generate electricity [Harnessing the Power of Waves]. Scientists and engineers are also looking to the oceans for an even more important resource -- potable water ["Tapping the oceans," The Economist, 7 June 2008 print edition]. Many pundits have raised the possibility of future resource wars and high on most lists of resources over which nations could fight is water. The Economist puts it this way:

"There are vast amounts of water on earth. Unfortunately, over 97% of it is too salty for human consumption and only a fraction of the remainder is easily accessible in rivers, lakes or groundwater. Climate change, droughts, growing population and increasing industrial demand are straining the available supplies of fresh water. More than 1 billion people live in areas where water is scarce, according to the United Nations, and that number could increase to 1.8 billion by 2025."

One cannot help but be reminded of Samuel Taylor Coleridges' famous poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The Economist article asks the question, "As concern over water's scarcity grows, can desalination offer a quick technological fix?" The challenge is not just technology (because it's been around for awhile):

"References to removing salt from seawater can be found in stories and legends dating back to ancient times. But the first concerted efforts to produce drinking water from seawater were not until the 16th century, when European explorers on long sea voyages began installing simple desalting equipment on their ships for emergency use. These devices tended to be crude and inefficient, and boiled seawater above a stove or furnace. An important advance in desalination came from the sugar industry. To produce crystalline sugar, large amounts of fuel were needed to heat the sugar sap and evaporate the water it contained. Around 1850 an American engineer named Norbert Rillieux won several patents for a way to refine sugar more efficiently. His idea became what is known today as multiple-effect distillation, and consists of a cascading system of chambers, each at a lower pressure than the one before. This means the water boils at a lower temperature in each successive chamber. Heat from water vapour in the first chamber can thus be recycled to evaporate water in the next chamber, and so on. This reduced the energy consumption of sugar refining by up to 80%, says James Birkett of West Neck Strategies, a desalination consultancy based in Nobleboro, Maine. But it took about 50 years for the idea to make its way from one industry to another. Only in the late 19th century did multi-effect evaporators for desalination begin to appear on steamships and in arid countries such as Yemen and Sudan."

Anyone familiar with sea-going vessels knows that they have been using evaporators to generate potable water for some time. In fact, the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln used its evaporators to desalinate water that was used to save survivors of the Indonesia tsunami in 2004. The challenge for desalination remains cost, especially with rising energy prices. As the article notes:

"One time-tested but expensive way to produce drinking water is desalination: removing dissolved salts from sea and brackish water. Its appeal is obvious. The world's oceans, in particular, present a virtually limitless and drought-proof supply of water. 'If we could ever competitively—at a cheap rate—get fresh water from salt water,' observed President John Kennedy nearly 50 years ago, 'that would be in the long-range interest of humanity, and would really dwarf any other scientific accomplishment.' According to the latest figures from the International Desalination Association, there are now 13,080 desalination plants in operation around the world. Together they have the capacity to produce up to 55.6m cubic metres of drinkable water a day—a mere 0.5% of global water use. About half of the capacity is in the Middle East. Because desalination requires large amounts of energy and can cost several times as much as treating river or groundwater, its use in the past was largely confined to wealthy oil-rich nations, where energy is cheap and water is scarce."

As climate change spreads water shortages to areas unfamiliar with droughts, more and more people are thinking about desalination.

"In California alone some 20 seawater-desalination plants have been proposed, including a $300m facility near San Diego. Several Australian cities are planning or constructing huge desalination plants, with the biggest, near Melbourne, expected to cost about $2.9 billion. Even London is building one. According to projections from Global Water Intelligence, a market-research firm, worldwide desalination capacity will nearly double between now and 2015."

Big projects, however, always raise big concerns -- especially if they increase energy consumption. Desalinating seawater to make potable water is no exception.

"Some environmental groups are concerned about the energy the plants will use, and the greenhouse gases they will spew out. A large desalination plant can suck up enough electricity in one year to power more than 30,000 homes. The good news is that advances in technology and manufacturing have reduced the cost and energy requirements of desalination. And many new plants are being held to strict environmental standards. One recently built plant in Perth, Australia, runs on renewable energy from a nearby wind farm. In addition, its modern seawater-intake and waste-discharge systems minimise the impact on local marine life. Jason Antenucci, deputy director of the Centre for Water Research at the University of Western Australia in Perth, says the facility has 'set a benchmark for other plants in Australia.'"

Although cost remains a daunting challenge for desalination plants, there are also some technical challenges.

"[In early systems,] mineral deposits tended to build up on heat-exchange surfaces, and this inhibited the transfer of energy. In the 1950s a new type of thermal-desalination process, called multi-stage flash, reduced this problem. In this, seawater is heated under high pressure and then passed through a series of chambers, each at a lower pressure than the one before, causing some of the water to evaporate or 'flash' at each step. Concentrated seawater is left at the bottom of the chambers, and freshwater vapour condenses above. Because evaporation does not happen on the heat-exchange surfaces, fewer minerals are deposited. Countries in the Middle East with a lot of oil and a little water soon adopted multi-stage flash. Because it needs hot steam, many desalination facilities were put next to power stations, which generate excess heat. For a time, the cogeneration of electricity and water dominated the desalination industry."

Scientists are constantly looking for better ways to desalinate seawater and, like in many other areas of research, they have looked to nature to find breakthroughs.

"Research into new ways to remove salt from water picked up in the 1950s. The American government set up the Office of Saline Water to support the search for desalination technology. And scientists at the University of Florida and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) began to investigate membranes that are permeable to water, but restrict the passage of dissolved salts. Such membranes are common in nature. When there is a salty solution on one side of a semi-permeable membrane (such as a cell wall), and a less salty solution on the other, water diffuses through the membrane from the less concentrated side to the more concentrated side. This process, which tends to equalise the saltiness of the two solutions, is called osmosis. Researchers wondered whether osmosis could be reversed by applying pressure to the more concentrated solution, causing water molecules to diffuse through the membrane and leave behind even more highly concentrated brine. Initial efforts showed only limited success, producing tiny amounts of fresh water. That changed in 1960, when Sidney Loeb and Srinivasa Sourirajan of UCLA hand-cast their own membranes from cellulose acetate, a polymer used in photographic film. Their new membranes boasted a dramatically improved flux (the rate at which water molecules diffuse through a membrane of a given size) leading, in 1965, to a small 'reverse osmosis' plant for desalting brackish water in Coalinga, California."

Although reverse osmosis solved some problems, it exacerbated the energy challenge.

"The energy requirements for thermal desalination do not much depend on the saltiness of the source water, but the energy needed for reverse osmosis is directly related to the concentration of dissolved salts. The saltier the water, the higher the pressure it takes (and hence the more energy you need) to push water through a membrane in order to leave behind the salt. Seawater generally contains 33-37 grams of dissolved solids per litre. To turn it into drinking water, nearly 99% of these salts must be removed. Because brackish water contains less salt than seawater, it is less energy-intensive, and thus less expensive, to process. As a result, reverse osmosis first became established as a way to treat brackish water. Another important distinction is that reverse osmosis, unlike thermal desalination, calls for extensive pre-treatment of the feed water. Reverse-osmosis plants use filters and chemicals to remove particles that could clog up the membranes, and the membranes must also be washed periodically to reduce scaling and fouling."

All of that, of course, adds to the cost of desalinating water. Continued research has addressed some of these problems.

"In the late 1970s John Cadotte of America’s Midwest Research Institute and the FilmTec Corporation created a much-improved membrane by using a special cross-linking reaction between two chemicals atop a porous backing material. His composite membrane consisted of a very thin layer of polyamide, to perform the separation, and a sturdy support beneath it. Thanks to the membrane's improved water flux, and its ability to tolerate pH and temperature variations, it went on to dominate the industry. At around the same time, the first reverse-osmosis plants for seawater began to appear. These early plants needed a lot of energy. The first big municipal seawater plant, which began operating in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 1980, required more than 8 kilowatt hours (kWh) to produce one cubic metre of drinking water."

When energy is cheap and environmental concerns have a lower priority than access to potable water, building and operating such plants made a certain amount of sense. As energy prices rose, however, so did research in how to bring down energy usage and generating costs.

"The energy consumption of such plants has since fallen dramatically, thanks in large part to energy-recovery devices. High-pressure pumps force seawater against a membrane, which is typically arranged in a spiral inside a tube, to increase the surface area exposed to the incoming water and optimise the flux through the membrane. About half of the water emerges as freshwater on the other side. The remaining liquid, which contains the leftover salts, shoots out of the system at high pressure. If that high-pressure waste stream is run through a turbine or rotor, energy can be recovered and used to pressurise the incoming seawater. The energy-recovery devices in the 1980s were only about 75% efficient, but newer ones can recover about 96% of the energy from the waste stream. As a result, the energy use for reverse-osmosis seawater desalination has fallen. The Perth plant, which uses technology from Energy Recovery, a firm based in California, consumes only 3.7kWh to produce one cubic metre of drinking water, according to Gary Crisp, who helped to oversee the plant's design for the Water Corporation, a local utility."

That is less than half of the energy required by early plants. That means you can desalinate 1000 litres of water for about the same amount it costs to run a central air conditioner for an hour in a typical U.S. home (about a dime). It also makes reverse osmosis plants a little more economical than thermal plants.

"Thermal plants suck up nearly as much electricity, but also need large amounts of steam. 'A thermal plant only is practical if you can build it in such a way that it can take advantage of very low-cost or waste heat,' says Tom Pankratz, a water consultant based in Texas, who is also a board member of the International Desalination Association. Economies of scale, better membranes and improved energy-recovery have helped to bring down the cost of reverse-osmosis seawater-desalination. Although the cost of desalination plants and their water depends on where they are, as well as the local costs of capital and operations, prices decreased from roughly $1.50 a cubic metre in the early 1990s to around 50 cents in 2003, says Mr Pankratz. As a result, reverse osmosis is preferred for most modern seawater-desalination (though rising energy and commodity prices mean the cost per cubic metre has now risen to around 75 cents). Experts reckon that further gains in energy efficiency, and hence cost reductions, will be increasingly difficult, however. According to a recent report on desalination from America’s National Research Council, energy use is unlikely to be reduced by much more than 15% below today’s levels—though that would still be worthwhile, it concludes."

In addition to looking for further energy reductions (which could be a case of diminishing returns), scientists and engineers are looking at new materials (like making membranes out of nanotubes) to increase plant efficiency as well as tackling other challenges.

"As desalination becomes more widespread, its environmental impacts, including the design of intake and discharge structures, are coming under increased scrutiny. Some of the damage can be mitigated fairly easily. Reducing the intake velocity enables most fish species and other mobile marine life to swim away from the intake system, though small animals, such as plankton or fish larvae, may still get caught in the intake screens or sucked into the plant. A bigger problem may be the leftover brine, which typically contains twice as much salt as seawater and is discharged back into the ocean. So far little scientific information exists about its long-term effects. In the past, most big seawater-desalination plants were built in places that did not conduct adequate environmental assessments, says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a think-tank based in California that published a report on desalination in 2006. But as plants are built in areas with tighter environmental restrictions, more information is becoming available. Some recent measurements from Perth are encouraging. Initially scientists from the Centre for Water Research feared that the brine discharge from the plant would increase the saltiness of the coastal environment. But a monitoring study found that salinity returns to normal levels within about 500 metres of the plants’ discharge units. ... A separate problem may be that some metals or chemicals leach into the brine. Thermal-desalination plants are prone to corrosion, and may shed traces of heavy metals, such as copper, into the waste stream. Reverse-osmosis plants, for their part, use chemicals during the pre-treatment and cleaning of the membranes, some of which may end up in the brine. Modern plants, however, remove most of the chemicals from the water before it is discharged. And new approaches to pre-treatment may reduce or eliminate the need for some chemicals. Based on the limited evidence available to date, it appears that desalination may actually be less environmentally harmful than some other water-supply options, such as diverting large amounts of fresh water from rivers, for example, which can lead to severe reductions in local fish populations. But uncertainties over the environmental impacts of desalination make it hard to draw definite conclusions, the National Research Council concluded. Its report suggested that further research on the environmental impacts of desalination, and how to mitigate them, should be a high priority."

The article concludes by noting that most countries are going to have to take a "portfolio" approach to secure ample water supplies. This means utilizing traditional water sources as well as new ones, including seawater and waste water. In the latter case, what people don't know doesn't hurt them. As I recall, President Richard Nixon, visited a water treatment facility and famously refused to take a sip of recovered waste water when it was offered to him. The fact is, however, that making waste water potable is more energy efficient and produces better quality water than treating seawater. Within a few years, we will see water shortages grab as many headlines as the current global food crisis. We don't want to wait until there is a crisis to address seriously the water shortages that everyone knows is on the way.

Harnessing the Power of Waves

As long as people have turned their eyes from the shore to the sea, they have seen and recognized the power of waves as they relentlessly hurl themselves toward the shoreline. I assume that for all those eons someone has also dreamed of harnessing that power. In the modern age, serious efforts to harness wave power remain in their infancy ["The coming wave," The Economist, 7 June 2008 print edition].

"The first patents for wave-power devices were issued in the 18th century. But nothing much happened until the mid-1970s, when the oil crisis inspired Stephen Salter, an engineer at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, to develop a wave generator known as Salter’s Duck. His design contained curved, floating canisters, each the size of a house, that would be strung together and then tethered to the ocean floor. As the canisters, known as Ducks, were tossed about by the waves, each one would rock back and forth. Hydraulics would convert the rocking motion to rotational motion, which would in turn drive a generator. A single Duck was calculated to be capable of generating 6 megawatts (MW) of electricity—enough to power around 4,000 homes. The plan was to install them in groups of several dozen. Initial estimates put the cost of generating electricity in this way at nearly $1 per kilowatt hour (kWh), far more than nuclear power, the most expensive electricity at the time. But as Dr Salter and his team improved their design, they managed to bring the cost-per-kWh down to the cost of nuclear power. Even so, the research programme was shut down by the British government in 1982."

Interest in wave power has never waned and with skyrocketing energy prices it appears to be rising like the incoming tide.

"As soaring oil prices and concern over climate change give added urgency to the search for new, renewable sources of energy, the sea is an obvious place to look. In theory the world’s electricity needs could be met with just a tiny fraction of the energy sloshing around in the oceans. Alas, harnessing it has proved to be unexpectedly difficult. In recent years wind farms have sprouted on plains and hilltops, and solar panels have been sprinkled across rooftops and deserts. But where the technology of wind and solar power is established and steadily improving, that of wave power is still in its infancy. The world had to wait until October 2007 for the first commercial wave farm, consisting of three snakelike tubes undulating with the Atlantic swell off the coast of Portugal."

Although trying to harness the power of nature found in open stretches along the coastline might sound like a no-brainer, people living along the coast often object to such projects. They pay big bucks for those ocean views and don't want them spoiled by manmade objects, especially objects the size of wind-powered generators. One would think that harnessing waves would have less visual impact on the coastline, but, as The Economist notes, harnessing wave power is extremely difficult.

"The story of wave power ... has been one of trials and tests followed by disappointment and delays. Of the many devices developed to capture wave energy, none has ever been deployed on a large scale. Given wave power’s potential, why has it been so hard to get the technology to work—and may things now be about to change?"

The article notes that in "December [2007] Pacific Gas & Electric, an American utility, signed an agreement to buy electricity from a wave farm that is to be built off the coast of California and is due to open in 2012. Across the world many other wave-power schemes are on the drawing board." It also reports that Dr. Salter's legacy lives on. 

"One example [of the next generation of wave power generators] is the Pelamis device, designed by some of Dr Salter’s former students, who now work at Pelamis Wave Power, a firm based in Scotland. Three such devices, each capable of generating up to 750kW, have been deployed off the coast of Portugal, and dozens more are due to be installed by 2009. There are also plans for installations off Orkney in Scotland and Cornwall in England. As waves travel along the 140-metre length of the snakelike Pelamis, its hinged joints bend both up and down, and from side to side. This causes hydraulic rams at the joints to pump hydraulic fluid through turbines, turning generators to produce electricity. Pelamis generators present only a small cross-section to incoming waves, and absorb less and less energy as the waves get bigger. This might seem odd, but most of the time the devices will not be operating in stormy seas—and when a storm does occur, their survival is more important than their power output."

Since the Pelamis device is submerged beneath the ocean's surface, it is aesthetically more acceptable than some other designs now being considered (pictures are available at the article's link). Surprisingly, the design selected to be installed the California coast one of the semi-submerged designs.

"The Aquabuoy, designed by Finavera Renewables of Vancouver, takes a different approach. (This is the device that Pacific Gas & Electric hopes to deploy off the California coast.) Each Aquabuoy is a tube, 25-metres long, that floats vertically in the water and is tethered to the sea floor. Its up-and-down bobbing motion is used to pressurise water stored in the tube below the surface. Once the pressure reaches a certain level, the water is released, spinning a turbine and generating electricity. The design is deliberately simple, with few moving parts. In theory, at least, there is very little to go wrong. But a prototype device failed last year when it sprang a leak and its bilge-pump malfunctioned, causing it to sink just as it was due to be collected at the end of a trial. Finavera has not released the results of the trial, which was intended to measure the Aquabuoy’s power output, among other things. The company has said, however, that Aquabuoy will be profitable only if each device can generate at least 250kW, and that it has yet to reach this threshold."

According to the article, the "bobbing" idea seems to be popular among designers, but it is not the only idea being tested.

"Similar bobbing buoys are also being worked on by AWS Ocean Energy, based in Scotland, and Ocean Power Technologies, based in Pennington, New Jersey, among others. The AWS design is unusual because the buoys are entirely submerged; the Ocean Power device, called the PowerBuoy, is being tested off the coast of Spain by Iberdrola, a Spanish utility. The Oyster, a wave-power device from Aquamarine Power, another Scottish firm, works in an entirely different way. It is an oscillating metal flap, 12 metres tall and 18 metres wide, installed close to shore. As the waves roll over it, the flap flexes backwards and forwards. This motion drives pistons that pump seawater at high pressure through a pipe to a hydroelectric generator. The generator is onshore, and can be connected to lots of Oyster devices, each of which is expected to generate up to 600kW. The idea is to make the parts that go in the sea simple and robust, and to keep the complicated and delicate bits out of the water. Testing of a prototype off the Orkney coast is due to start this summer. The logical conclusion of this is to put everything onshore—and that is the idea behind the Limpet. It is the work of Wavegen, a Scottish firm which is a subsidiary of Voith Siemens Hydro, a German hydropower firm. A prototype has been in action on the island of Islay, off the Scottish coast, since 2000. The Limpet is a chamber that sits on the shoreline. The bottom of the chamber is open to the sea, and on top is a turbine that always spins in the same direction, regardless of the direction of the airflow through it. As waves slam into the shore, water is pushed into the chamber and this in turn displaces the air, driving it through the turbine. As the water recedes, air is sucked back into the chamber, driving the same turbine again. The Limpet on Islay has three chambers which generate an average of 100kW between them, but larger devices could potentially generate three times this amount, according to Wavegen. Limpets may be built into harbour breakwaters in Scotland and Spain."

Those designs are the ones closest to deployment, but The Economist indicates that other designs are on the drawing boards. The reason there are so many designs, the article laments, is that finding one that maximizes the power of waves remains illusive.

"Dozens of wave-energy technologies are being developed around the world: ideas, in other words, are not what has held the field back. So what has? Tom Thorpe of Oxford Oceanics, a consultancy, blames several overlapping causes. For a start, wave energy has lagged behind wind and solar, because the technology is much younger and still faces some big technical obstacles. 'This is a completely new energy technology, whereas wind and photovoltaics have been around for a long time—so they have been developed, rather than invented,' says Mr Thorpe. ... Once interest in wave power revived earlier this decade, practical problems arose. A recurring problem, ironically enough, is that new devices underestimate the power of the sea, and are unable to withstand its assault. Installing wave-energy devices is also expensive; special vessels are needed to tow equipment out to sea, and it can be difficult to get hold of them. 'Vessels that could potentially do the job are all booked up by companies collecting offshore oil,' says Trevor Whittaker, an engineer at Queen's University in Belfast who has been part of both the Limpet and Oyster projects. 'Wave-generator installation is forced to compete with the high prices the oil industry can pay.' Another practical problem is the lack of infrastructure to connect wave-energy generators to the power grid. The cost of establishing this infrastructure makes small-scale wave-energy generation and testing unfeasible; but large-scale projects are hugely expensive. One way around this is to build a 'Wave Hub', like the one due to be installed off the coast of Cornwall in 2010 that will provide infrastructure to connect up wave-energy arrays for testing."

Thorpe goes on to warn that we should expect some spectacular and costly failures going forward and he fears that such failures could set back development another generation. Despite all of these challenges, however, The Economist notes that big utility companies are starting to consider wave power seriously and venture capitalists are beginning to jump on board. There doesn't appear to be a single design destined to sweep the field, which means that R&D is likely to continue for the next several decades before any true breakthrough is achieved.

The Comeback of Electric Cars

Conspiracy theorists have long rumored that solitary inventors, toiling in their garages and basements, have created technologies that can make internal combustion engines (choose your favorite): (1) run on water, (2) achieve gas mileage of over 100 mpg, (3) run on garbage (like in the movie Back to the Future), and so forth. The conspiracy involved in these rumors is that the big auto makers and oil companies have bought the technologies and silenced the inventors. 'Twere it only true. I guarantee that the big auto and oil companies, which are now under heavy criticism, would be trotting out these inventions and declaring themselves heroes. That is especially true for big auto makers, some which are drowning in debt. General Motors has invested heavily in hydrogen technology, but widespread use of hydrogen is years way at best. In the meantime, hybrid cars are selling like hotcakes and electric cars are getting a lot more attention. The latest individual to jump on the bandwagon is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain ["McCain Proposes $300 Million Prize for Electric-Car Advance," by Michael D. Shear, Washington Post, 24 June 2008].

"Sen. John McCain [has] proposed a $300 million prize, paid by the government, for the inventor of a better battery to power electric or hybrid vehicles, with the goal of spurring innovation to get Americans off their gasoline habit. The Republican presidential candidate proposed the reward -- which equates to about $1 for every person in America -- along with tougher mileage standards for automakers and large tax credits for the purchasers of alternative-fuel, hybrid or electric cars. ... The $300 million prize would be given for 'the development of a battery package that has the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars,' he said."

In a recent online BusinessWeek article, Matt Vella writes about a new electric car on the market that hopes to make it big ["The Electric Car Lives," 16 June 2008].

"Clean, quiet, and relatively profitable to produce, electric vehicles have had a rough start in the U.S.: Five years after General Motors nixed its innovative EV1 electric car program, just a handful of automakers have committed to making and selling electric vehicles on a mass scale any time soon. Enter Think Global, a Norwegian upstart plotting a U.S. invasion via pint-size, affordable electric cars. Think has been selling gas-free, Lilliputian city cars in Europe and will start peddling them to fuel-crunched Americans in 2009. The company's newly formed North American division has high hopes for Think's existing models—and even higher ones for the upcoming Th!nk Ox, a concept unveiled at the Geneva International Motor Show earlier this year."

That fact that Think Global is a Norwegian company demonstrates that even oil producing nations are starting to see the end of the oil economy. Norway has been remarkably far-sighted in investing its oil profits so that it will continue to prosper after its oil runs out. This long-view philosophy undoubtedly encouraged Think Global to get into the electric car business. According to Vella, the Ox may fill a niche that is missing in the current U.S. auto market.

"An electrified people's car for the 21st century, the Ox is a preview of Think's next-generation production vehicle, due out in 2011. Roughly the size of a Toyota Prius, the Ox can travel between 125 and 155 miles before needing a recharge, and zips from zero to 60 miles per hour in about 8.5 seconds. Its lithium-ion batteries can be charged to 80% capacity in less than an hour, and slender solar panels integrated into the roof power the onboard electronics. Inside, the hatchback includes a bevy of high-tech gizmos such as GPS navigation, a mobile Internet connection, and a key fob that lets drivers customize the car's all-digital dashboard. Pricing has yet to be announced, but the company's current vehicles cost less than $25,000. ... The Ox's killer app could be its design. To date, most electric cars available in the U.S.—small, unsafe, and underpowered—have been intended strictly for the earliest early adopters and the most faithful green believers. In contrast, Think's senior vice-president for design, Katinka von der Lippe, says the Ox is a 'real car, a big step away from the cuteness of [other] electric vehicles.' All that distinguishes the Ox from name-brand, fuel-sipping compact cars, in fact, is its silent hum and zero emissions. The Ox also embodies the characteristic simplicity of Scandinavian design, featuring uncomplicated lines and clean, uncluttered surfaces. A band of unpainted metal stretches from the front of the vehicle to its rear, revealing the Ox's interior architecture, an aluminum frame. An unassuming grille is tucked between sophisticated sloping headlamps. 'The Ox is a leap forward for the design of electric cars,' says von der Lippe."

Not everyone is sanguine that the electric car will sell in America.

"The American market for electric vehicles 'is virtually nonexistent,' says John O'Dell, a senior editor specializing in green vehicles for car-buying site Edmunds.com. Even well-established gas-electric hybrids such as the Prius and Honda's Civic account for barely 3% of U.S. auto sales. 'Until you've got a compelling product, you won't have a market,' adds O'Dell. Aside from the sleek Tesla Motors Roadster, which carries a price tag of nearly $100,000, there are almost no fully functional electric vehicles that meet average drivers' requirements. The Ox could fill that gap. 'It'll take a lot of time,' Wilber James, RockPort's managing general partner and acting president of Think North America, says of the challenge of selling electric vehicles to American drivers, who still overwhelmingly prefer trucks to thriftier small cars. 'We're going to focus at first on niche markets—cities, universities, and fleets.'"

It might not be as difficult to break into the market as some think. In some states hybrid cars are selling above sticker price. Although hybrid car sales are predicted to remain flat this year, the problem is on the supply side not the demand side. Shortages of key components such as the hybrid batteries are reportedly dampening sales. According to the Los Angeles Times, "Sales of hybrid cars surged 25% during the first four months of this year compared with the same period last year. And the pace accelerated last month, when sales jumped 58%. That outpaced the overall April sales gain of 18% for small fuel-efficient cars and comes as total new-vehicle sales are slumping." ["Hybrid sales are zooming," by Martin Zimmerman, 23 May 2008] In concluding his article on the Ox, Vella discusses its innovative business model.

"The company's business model, says James, is similar to that of PC maker Dell, which fueled its rise by ruthlessly optimizing its manufacturing and supply chain. Think's ultralean manufacturing system lets it build production facilities for about $10 million, compared with the billions invested in new plants by old-line manufacturers. That means more factories closer to customers, further cutting costs. In addition, factories 'could also be the retailers,' says James, which would add a unique element to Think's branding. The company, he says, will be profitable if it can sell 10,000 vehicles a year. At 20,000 to 30,000 units in annual sales, Think can cut its component costs in half. That focus on innovative manufacturing, in addition to the high-tech Ox itself, may ultimately set the company apart from previous attempts—and, Think is betting, finally help jump-start the U.S. market for electric cars."

There are people, of course, who need cars that go further than 150 miles and can't be delayed for an hour waiting for the batteries to recharge. That is why McCain's proposal to offer a prize for better battery technology plays a role in the future. It may take a while for electric cars to catch on, but for most people, most of the time, I suspect they would suffice. It's those long cross-country treks that keep tripping up sales. Once manufacturers figure out how a family can take a long vacation in an electric car, I suspect sales will soar.

Revolution or Ruse in Rice Production?

Science involves the search for understanding and truth. It's about generating hypotheses and then testing them to either prove or disprove them. Although we are used to seeing competing theories debated, we normally associate such debates with high level physics rather than agriculture. With the world locked in the grips of a food shortage (which will be exacerbated by the flooding taking place in America's breadbasket states), a controversy has arisen about the best way to grow rice -- one of the world's most important food crops ["Food Revolution That Starts With Rice," by William J. Broad, New York Times, 17 June 2008]. The controversy surrounds the theories of Norman T. Uphoff, an emeritus professor at Cornell University.

"Many a professor dreams of revolution. But Norman T. Uphoff, working in a leafy corner of the Cornell University campus, is leading an inconspicuous one centered on solving the global food crisis. The secret, he says, is a new way of growing rice. Rejecting old customs as well as the modern reliance on genetic engineering, Dr. Uphoff, 67, an emeritus professor of government and international agriculture with a trim white beard and a tidy office, advocates a management revolt."

It is not just Uphoff's methods that have spawned the controversy it is his claims concerning them.

"Harvests typically double, he says, if farmers plant early, give seedlings more room to grow and stop flooding fields. That cuts water and seed costs while promoting root and leaf growth. The method, called the System of Rice Intensification, or S.R.I., emphasizes the quality of individual plants over the quantity. It applies a less-is-more ethic to rice cultivation. In a decade, it has gone from obscure theory to global trend — and encountered fierce resistance from established rice scientists. Yet a million rice farmers have adopted the system, Dr. Uphoff says. The rural army, he predicts, will swell to 10 million farmers in the next few years, increasing rice harvests, filling empty bellies and saving untold lives."

Critics argue that his claims about harvest yields and the number of farmers using Uphoff's methods are both exaggerated. But Uphoff continues to argue his case.

"'The world has lots and lots of problems,' Dr. Uphoff said recently while talking of rice intensification and his 38 years at Cornell. 'But if we can't solve the problems of peoples' food needs, we can't do anything. This, at least, is within our reach.' That may sound audacious given the depths of the food crisis and the troubles facing rice. Roughly half the world eats the grain as a staple food even as yields have stagnated and prices have soared, nearly tripling in the past year. The price jolt has provoked riots, panicked hoarding and violent protests in poor countries. But Dr. Uphoff has a striking record of accomplishment, as well as a gritty kind of farm-boy tenacity."

His critics, however, are powerful, also enjoy a global reputation, and have a proven record of accomplishment.

"[Uphoff] and his method have flourished despite the skepticism of his Cornell peers and the global rice establishment — especially the International Rice Research Institute, which helped start the green revolution of rising grain production and specializes in improving rice genetics."

The reason that the controversy continues is that critics argue that Uphoff uses anecdotes rather than controlled experimentation to make his case.

"Critics dismiss S.R.I. as an illusion. 'The claims are grossly exaggerated,' said Achim Dobermann, the head of research at the international rice institute, which is based in the Philippines. Dr. Dobermann said fewer farmers use S.R.I. than advertised because old practices often are counted as part of the trend and the method itself is often watered down. 'We don't doubt that good yields can be achieved,' he said, but he called the methods too onerous for the real world. ... In 2006, three of Dr. Uphoff's colleagues at Cornell wrote a scathing analysis based on global data. 'We find no evidence,' they wrote, 'that S.R.I. fundamentally changes the physiological yield potential of rice.' While less categorical, Dr. Dobermann of the rice research institute called the methods a step backward socially because they increased drudgery in rice farming, especially among poor women."

Nevertheless, Uphoff has a broad base of support and it seems to be growing.

"His telephone rings. It is the World Bank Institute, the educational and training arm of the development bank. The institute is making a DVD to spread the word. ... He lists top S.R.I. users as India, China, Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam among 28 countries on three continents. In Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India, Veerapandi S. Arumugam, the agriculture minister, recently hailed the system as 'revolutionizing' paddy farming while spreading to 'a staggering' million acres. Chan Sarun, Cambodia's agriculture minister, told hundreds of farmers at an agriculture fair in April that S.R.I.'s speedy growth promises a harvest of 'white gold.'"

Uphoff has even managed to win over some former critics.

"A former skeptic sees great potential. Vernon W. Ruttan, an agricultural economist at the University of Minnesota and a longtime member of the National Academy of Sciences, once worked for the rice institute and doubted the system’s prospects. Dr. Ruttan now calls himself an enthusiastic fan, saying the method is already reshaping the world of rice cultivation. 'I doubt it will be as great as the green revolution,' he said. 'But in some areas it’s already having a substantial impact.' Robert Chambers, a leading analyst on rural development, who works at the University of Sussex, England, called it a breakthrough. 'The extraordinary thing,' he said, 'is that both farmers and scientists have missed this — farmers for thousands of years, and scientists until very recently and then some of them in a state of denial.' The method, he added, 'has a big contribution to make to world food supplies. Its time has come.'"

Uphoff's story is an interesting one. Broad reports:

"Dr. Uphoff's improbable journey involves a Wisconsin dairy farm, a billionaire philanthropist, the jungles of Madagascar, a Jesuit priest, ranks of eager volunteers and, increasingly, the developing world. ... On Cornell's agricultural campus, Dr. Uphoff runs a one-man show from an office rich in travel mementos. From Sri Lanka, woven rice stalks adorn a wall, the heads thick with rice grains. His computers link him to a global network of S.R.I. activists and backers, like Oxfam, the British charity. Dr. Uphoff is S.R.I.’s global advocate, and his Web site (ciifad.cornell.edu/sri/) serves as the main showcase for its principles and successes. 'It couldn't have happened without the Internet,' he says. Outside his door is a sign, 'Alfalfa Room,' with a large arrow pointing down the hall, seemingly to a pre-electronic age. ... Dr. Uphoff grew up on a Wisconsin farm milking cows and doing chores. In 1966, he graduated from Princeton with a master's degree in public affairs and in 1970 from the University of California, Berkeley, with a doctorate in political science. At Cornell, he threw himself into rural development, irrigation management and credit programs for small farmers in the developing world. In 1990, a secret philanthropist (eventually revealed to be Charles F. Feeney, a Cornell alumnus who made billions in duty-free shops) gave the university $15 million to start a program on world hunger. Dr. Uphoff was the institute’s director for 15 years. The directorship took him in late 1993 to Madagascar. Slash-and-burn rice farming was destroying the rain forest, and Dr. Uphoff sought alternatives. He heard that a French Jesuit priest, Father Henri de Laulanié, had developed a high-yield rice cultivation method on Madagascar that he called the System of Rice Intensification. Dr. Uphoff was skeptical. Rice farmers there typically harvested two tons per hectare (an area 100 by 100 meters, or 2.47 acres). The group claimed 5 to 15 tons. 'I remember thinking, "Do they think they can scam me?"' Dr. Uphoff recalled. 'I told them, "Don't talk 10 or 15 tons. No one at Cornell will believe it. Let's shoot for three or four."' Dr. Uphoff oversaw field trials for three years, and the farmers averaged eight tons per hectare. Impressed, he featured S.R.I. on the cover of his institute's annual reports for 1996 and 1997. Dr. Uphoff never met the priest, who died in 1995. But the success prompted him to scrutinize the method and its origins."

So what is System of Rice Intensification? Broad continues:

"The priest [who developed SRI], during a drought, had noticed that rice plants and especially roots seemed much stronger. That led to the goal of keeping fields damp but not flooded, which improved soil aeration and root growth. Moreover, wide spacing let individual plants soak up more sunlight and send out more tillers — the shoots that branch to the side. Plants would send out upwards of 100 tillers. And each tiller, instead of bearing the usual 100 or so grains, would puff up with 200 to 500 grains. One drawback was weeds. The halt to flooding let invaders take root, and that called for more weeding. A simple solution was a rotating, hand-pushed hoe, which also aided soil aeration and crop production. But that meant more labor, at least at first. It seemed that as farmers gained skill, and yields rose, the overall system became labor saving compared with usual methods."

Until a controlled field trial is conducted and the results confirmed, the controversy will undoubtedly continue. Fortunately, such a trial is coming.

"Opponents have agreed to conduct a global field trial that may end the dispute, he said. The participants include the rice institute, Cornell and Wageningen University, a Dutch institution with a stellar reputation in agriculture. The field trials may start in 2009 and run through 2011, Dr. Uphoff said. 'This should satisfy any scientific questions,' he added. 'But my sense is that S.R.I. is moving so well and so fast that this will be irrelevant.' Practically, he said, the method is destined to grow."

Obviously, the field trial and its subsequent impact won't impact the current food crisis unless it lasts several more years. Although current climatic conditions aren't helping this crisis pass, hopefully the food shortage will be short-lived. Regardless of the current situation, the field test should help drive the direction of rice production in the future. If SRI proves as effective as Uphoff claims, I suspect that technologies will be developed to help reduce the manpower requirements to make the method even more effective and efficient.

R&D in the Intelligence Community

This past April I wrote a blog entitled Happy Birthday DARPA that focused on an article celebrating that agency's 50th anniversary. DARPA has been a remarkably successful agency with a notable number of scientific and technological achievements that can be traced back to research it sponsored. Stephen Barr, on whose column I focused in that blog, wrote this about the agency:

"Unlike most federal agencies, DARPA operates with little red tape. It has only two management layers, encouraging the rapid flow of ideas and decisions. About 240 people work at DARPA, and 120 of them are program managers and office directors on appointments of four to six years. The agency does not own or operate labs, but sponsors research carried out by industry and universities. By rotating technical professionals every few years, DARPA has 'a constant freshness of people and energy,' Tether said. 'Everything else we do stems from that.'"

Apparently the intelligence community has suffered from "agency envy" and it has now established an R&D activity of its own ["Intelligence Agency Joins U-Md. Research Center," by Anita Huslin, Washington Post, 15 June 2008].

'The University of Maryland's newest tenant is not in the business of advertising its existence or its work. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is the new corollary of the military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, created in 1958 in the wake of the Sputnik launch to develop new defense technologies. Among other things, DARPA's work led to the development of the Internet, global positioning systems and unmanned aircraft. IARPA is expected to perform similar work for the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies."

The intelligence community certainly has a requirement for an advanced research arm. Obtaining, sharing, and analyzing data so that it can be turned into actionable intelligence has always been a daunting challenge. In the information age, it has become almost impossible to keep up with the mountains of data that can be generated and with the technologies potential adversaries can use to conceal their activities. Don't expect to hear a lot of fanfare about IARPA. It will gladly operate as quietly as DARPA has operated over the past fifty years.

"IARPA is temporarily located in the university's Center for Advanced Study of Language, which is supported by the National Security Agency and, among other things, teaches Arabic to Iraq-bound Marines and researches cross-cultural interrogation techniques. Ground is expected to be broken this summer on IARPA's new digs: a 120,000-square-foot sensitive compartmentalized information facility designed to provide the highest level of security for government intelligence work. It will be in the university's M Square research park, just off campus. Similar to DARPA, in a nondescript, unlabeled brick building in Arlington, IARPA is not expected to advertise its presence, nor are officials permitted to discuss any details about it."

Although it may conduct its business quietly, its economic impact on the university and the surrounding community is expected to be big.

"This is what the region's first research park has been waiting for, members of the university and research community say. 'Projections are, it's going to become an enormous enterprise and there will be undoubtedly lots of companies, both as contractors and otherwise, that will locate around the building,' said William E. Kirwin, chancellor of the University of Maryland system. 'I think it will be substantial,' University of Maryland president C.D. Mote Jr. said of the new IARPA presence. 'This is expected to be the premier supporter of the most advanced thinking in far-reaching intelligence research -- new stuff that hasn't been thought of.'"

It's not just that intelligence community is establishing a research activity that is generating all of this enthusiasm it's the fact that it is bringing money with it.

"What does that mean in terms of budgets, employees, contracting jobs? No one at the university can say. And the agency's new director, who just recently put up help-wanted postings on the Internet for her top three project management jobs, is not available to talk about it, according to a spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The organization's budget is classified. In seeking congressional funding for the agency, officials last year said that IARPA will be significantly smaller than DARPA, which has a $3 billion annual budget. Its staff will consist of 35 national intelligence and 21 CIA employees, and research will be outsourced to contractors. Focuses will be language processing, quantum science, nanotechnology, biometrics, deception detection, counter-biological warfare and tagging, tracking and locating."

According to Huslin, IARPA will operate using the same philosophy embraced by DARPA. It will promote high risk, high payoff ideas.

"Last month, in an interview with the technology trade group IEEE, IARPA Director Lisa Porter suggested that the agency's new location at the University of Maryland indicates that it will be open to people and organizations, like academia and industry, that traditionally may not be able to access the intelligence research world. 'It sends a nice message that we're embracing the broad community to help us solve these challenging problems,' she told the IEEE. 'This is a great place for people with a great idea. It's really risky, the potential payoff is huge, and failure is okay -- that kind of environment is pretty hard to find.'"

Porter is right that it is difficult to find an environment where failing is "okay." Every credible study about innovative organizations concludes, however, that failure must be viewed as part of the learning process if the organization is going to foster an environment where people feel secure in pursuing their wildest ideas. Such an environment will attract innovative people like moths to a flame and that is exactly what the intelligence community is hoping to do. I suspect that the innovations that come out of IARPA will have an impact far beyond the confines of the intelligence community. That has certainly been the case with DARPA innovations.

GE Chairman Urges Pursuit of Cheap, Green Energy

For years people have been looking for technological breakthroughs that would make clean alternative energy sources competitive with electricity produced by coal and natural gas powered power plants. Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric, has declared that "much of the technology to make energy generation cleaner and more efficient is available now." ["GE calls for cheaper, cleaner energy," by Steve Hargreaves, CNNMoney.com, 21 April 2008] The rub, according to Immelt, is that those technologies remain costly. He has encouraged energy sector executives to invest more heavily in research and development so that the costs of implementing existing technologies can be decreased.

"A lot of the technology is already there," Immelt told a crowd of electric utility executives at an industry meeting sponsored by the Edison Electric Institute, a utility trade group. "This is a business model issue, not a technical issue. Our job is to make them cheaper."

Immelt, of course, has a vested interest in having others spend money on R&D in the energy industry. General Electric "makes a variety of energy products - from light bulbs and appliances to coal and nuclear power plants - many of them marketed to utilities." I'm sure GE will be happy to assist any innovator to get an improved technology to market, especially if they can get a piece of the action. In addition to calling for more R&D, Immelt has also been part of the group urging the U.S. government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Hargreaves reports:

"[GE] is part of a consortium of manufacturers and utilities urging lawmakers to pass nationwide restrictions on greenhouse gasses. The Bush administration has so far resisted immediate mandatory restrictions, largely on the grounds that waiting for better, cheaper technology would yield better results. [Both] presidential candidates support mandatory restrictions."

If you're living in the U.S., you would have to have been living in a cave not to have seen, heard, or read about General Electric's "ecomagination" advertising campaign. Immelt sees a big future in engaging in "green business" because the sense of urgency and emergence of technologies seems to be coming together at just the right time. Hargreaves notes:

"The climate debate comes as the world is facing a surge in energy demand and a simultaneous desire to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Energy consumption globally is estimated to grow by 50% over the next few decades, while scientists say the world needs to at least halve its greenhouse gas emissions over the same time period if it is to avoid the worst effects of global warming."

Immelt is concerned that inertia could win out over the daunting but necessary task of upgrading infrastructure in the near term.

"In facing this challenge, Immelt urged utility executives to keep all technologies on the table - from solar and wind to nuclear and cleaner coal - and to not let new technologies languish at the expense of maintaining the status-quo. He said low oil and gas prices historically led to massive underinvestment in the sector, with energy companies spending only about 2% of their revenue on research and development. By way of comparison, healthcare companies have invested about 8% of their sales on R&D, Immelt said. (GE also is a big player in the medical devices industry.) But with high energy prices now soaring, Immelt believes investments in energy will follow suit. 'There's plenty of incentive now to drive technology into the industry,' he said."

In concluding his remarks, Immelt observed that many of the green technologies that will emerge will likely be invented and proved elsewhere. In a globalized world, there is nothing wrong with that. He also predicted a bright and growing future for the green sector and urged utility companies to get on board.

"Immelt said GE is investing in a wide range of energy technologies. He specifically mentioned solar as one that has great potential. The cost of solar power should fall from 30 cents a kilowatt hour today to under 15 cents 'in a relatively short time,' he said. 'That should open up a sweet spot for solar.' By comparison, American consumers currently pay about 10 cents an hour on average for electricity, according to the Energy Information Administration. The U.S. utility industry will likely be a recipient of clean technologies developed outside the U.S., Immelt added, whether it be cleaner coal processes fine-tuned in China or renewable technology pioneered in Europe. But he encouraged the industry and U.S. government to take the lead in capping greenhouse gas emissions and developing clean sources of energy. 'The time to act is now,' he said. 'When you lead in clean energy, you create jobs. This is a place the U.S. could lead.'"

In a year when the economy, energy prices, and job creation are dominating the presidential election agenda, Immelt's message should be well-received by policymakers, workers, businesses, and environmentalists alike. Whether he's listened to or not, he's right about one thing -- now is the time to act. In a New York Times op-ed piece, Verlyn Klinkenborg is worried that words are being used as a substitute for action ["Some Doubts Upon Entering a New Carboniferous Era," 24 June 2008]. She writes:

"Has any phrase in the English language ever spread more quickly than 'carbon footprint'? There are contenders — 'hanging chad,' for instance — but they don't reflect the potential revolution in consciousness that carbon footprint suggests. After all, carbon footprint captures something we've never really had a simple phrase for before: the measurable totality of your environmental impact, or, to put it more simply, what your way of life actually costs the planet. ... the phrase sounds conscientious. You feel as though you're reducing global warming by saying it. Which is why advertisers are saying it everywhere. ... Companies of every description have taken up the phrase. Wal-Mart announced last fall that it would ask its suppliers to assess and lower their carbon footprints, one way that Wal-Mart is trying to green itself. BP, the much-fined petroleum giant, has a carbon footprint calculator on its Web site, as well as a link to its conservative thinking on climate change. Consumers who wish to buy voluntary carbon offsets to compensate for the size of their personal carbon footprints are beginning to be able to do so close to home. Why not buy local carbon offsets at the farmers’ market along with your locally grown produce? The swiftness of this change in consciousness — and the linguistic change that goes with it — is staggering. And a little worrying. For one, it is vastly easier to find new words than it is to overturn old habits, and all too easy to mistake the ubiquity of the new carbon-speak for substantive change."