Amsterdam: Dairy - a city transformed in the summer
If I subtract all the pains of working here, I am encountering some extraordinary situations. There is a growing awareness that although hydrocarbon energy will not run out in the foreseeable future, when the end arrives, it will not be due to the lack of human ingenuity in removing the last drop of black gold but because there will be no more to extract. We are now in the age of difficult oil, in other words there are no easy fields left to extract.
Combined with growing pressure from governments and communities to minimise CO2 emissions, the search is on for clean, efficient hydrocarbon energies and alternative sustainable energy sources. The arguments in favour and against the variety of alternatives, such as nuclear, are seldom given in a rational manner. Every argument is tinged with polemic, vested interest and irrationality.
Britain's ill-advised lurch to nuclear is unsurprising for most of us but the arguments about its relative safety were unexpected. One argument has been that other clean energy generation methods such as Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) combined with CO2 sequestration has equally large risks of catastrophe. This depends on how the risk is assessed. In terms of explosion, this is true--the pressure of exploding LNG holders would be equivalent to that of a small nuclear explosion. Equally, the risk of CO2 leaking from non-mineralised holding bays, such as empty gas caverns deep underground, has not been given a definite number. However, complex modelling, experience with similar geologies and engineering expertise on gas-fields indicate that the probability for a catastrophic leak is low. The consequences for such a leak however, are enormous since CO2 is denser than air and would spread over a large area suffocating all in its wake.
Against this lies the concerns of revitalising the nuclear industry. We risk leaving behind a legacy of contaminated waste that could easily affect not only our generation but at least two generations after us. At least with other forms of clean energy sources, the risks are not hedged across time. Should things go wrong, we will be fully culpable and suffer the consequences. But this biblical attitude--an eye for an eye--doesn't go down well in the corridors of power, and the ability to disperse the risk over time and generations is seen as being a tenable solution. It is a stagnant base at the moment, with the most talented people working abroad--Russia, France, Japan and India--and then there are the health and security concerns.
The security issue is particularly interesting since nuclear is touted as the alternative to relying on the gas supply from beyond the Caucasus and being held to account by Russia and Gazprom. One alternative to nuclear addressing this point, is the use of clean coal technology to produce gas for houses; a technology that would revive the coal industry in Britain. The main and rather obvious drivers behind this transition in energy creation in Britain are energy security and cost. Couple this with a growing platform for green energies, increasing CO2 legislation and numerous scientists from industry and academia working on green energy sources, we should expect there to be a diversified energy model with sources ranging from bio fuel to solar to gas. However, change is precipitated by catastrophe and until the catastrophe is upon the developed nations, change will be the long and arduous path.
Yet again, serious investment in and use of solar and wind power over the long term have been left off the agenda. We are currently looking at a new form of solar energy--the use of dyes to selectively absorb certain wavelengths of light and then transfer this energy to certain metal oxides. As these oxides are semiconductors, any excitation of electrons by light can lead to the electrons moving to an energy level where they can be collected by a positively charged electrode and from there being fed into a grid. The possibilities of using these more efficient solar cells, which operate across a range of wavelengths, are large but these new technologies will not provide dividends for shareholders for some years. The long view needs to be taken and the government needs to acknowledge the tranche that renewables will play in the future by creating a platform for them now.
The other source that we hear a lot about in the media is bio fuels. Although we are looking at 3rd and 4th generation fuels generated in 2 ways, the current economic and political climate results in encouragement of the 1st and 2nd generation fuels. These are untenable in the long run and hinder the development of the more sustainable but more complex solutions that 3rd and 4th generation fuels offer.
What is a 1st generation fuel? One can take the example of bioethanol. Sugar beet is grown on arable land to be harvested, transported to a large refinery and then treated with yeasts to provide highly concentrated ethanol. However, this is not an energetically efficient process--the growth of beet is fertilizer dependent, the harvest is mechanised and the transport of solids means that, per truck, a relatively low amount of raw energy (carbon and hydrogen atoms) are transported. And once we reach the refinery, as we all know, fermentation needs warmth, stirring and other energy intensive functions. Another method of creating bio fuel is by the esterification of fatty acids. Most the fields of rapeseed in Britain are devoted to this cause, subsidised to the tune of hundreds of dollars per hectare. The fields produce rape oil, which is a skeleton of carbon atoms topped by an acid group. This oil can be used to fire up a diesel engine but the properties of the oil will cause such inefficient burning that most engines will seize up pretty quickly. Instead, the oil can be treated to remove the acid group--in a process called esterification-- and this material can then be added to standard mineral fuels to give a blended fuel that can operate in a standard diesel engine. The big drive is to get petrol engines to also accept these blends and continue to operate at maximum efficiencies. In Brazil, most car engines are modified to run on very large concentrations of ethanol and are called flex-fuel engines. In between dancing on the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema this summer I will also pay a visit to some of the cutting-edge developments in Brazil that have allowed this type of forward thinking planning to occur.
In the meantime, I am immersing myself in the intricacies of designing a material that will react very particularly with one substance out of hundreds to create one compound that it really rather wouldn't. But we rather hope it will.
To this end, I have the great pleasure of working with one of the top professors in this field and if we are playing the game of connections, then through this gentleman I am two steps away from Tony Blair. Professor G. is close friends with Sir David King, you see, who is Britain's chief scientist and has the ear of Blair. I am planning the dinner party at this very moment.
