Tag Archives: climate

GreenBiz

As crises collide, can California meet its climate goals? | GreenBiz

Climate. Heatwaves. Wildfires. Blackouts. Pandemic. Recession. Unemployment. Social unrest. Climate, again. 

The tangle of troubles California is struggling with has no precedent. Against a backdrop of rising environmental anxiety, with wildfires lasting longer, spreading further and damaging more acreage and communities than ever before, the pandemic triggered a sharp recession and spike in unemployment. With COVID-19 and joblessness hitting low-income and minority communities especially hard, police killings sparked months of protests against systemic racism and economic inequity. And just as the need for public safety-net programs couldn’t be higher, California faces a crippling collapse in tax revenue. 

For Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air Resources Board — the state’s key architect of climate and environmental policy — these near-term problems may be worse than we’ve seen, but they are not new, and the fix will come from commitment:

We’ve been shouting it from the rooftops for a long time that we were headed in this direction, although we hoped we wouldn’t get here quite so quickly, or quite so drastically. I have seen that people can think their way out of amazingly difficult traps if they decide to. We have the human capital and intelligence, if we have the will… You can’t fix one thing without the other. If we don’t come up with solutions that are multi-factored, we won’t get very far. 

To explore how California can solve these interlinked problems, Nichols was joined by Southern California Edison’s Carla Peterman in a dialogue moderated by Sarah Golden, GreenBiz’s senior energy analyst, during a breakout session at last week’s VERGE 20 conference. 

Nichols, a veteran of state and federal environmental and energy policy since the 1970s, is retiring from CARB soon and is a contender for a top environmental role in a Biden administration, as GreenBiz Senior Writer Katie Fehrenbacher recently reported.

As senior vice president of strategies and regulatory affairs at Southern California Edison (SCE), Peterman manages a business that serves more than 15 million Californians and more than 280,000 businesses across 15 counties, including much of Los Angeles and a swath of the state that stretches to the Nevada border. 

Double duty

For Peterman, who also served as a commissioner at the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates the state’s electricity, water and natural gas services, the economic crisis has exacerbated troubles stemming from the wildfires. Utilities have been pushed not just to stabilize a damaged grid but also to maintain energy services to some customers who are suddenly less able to pay. As Peterman said:

To give you an example of how these things all collide, we’re seeing the impact of climate change from severe heat on grid reliability. Dealing with these issues is complicated by the pandemic. It’s more difficult to help people in emergency situations. We’ve seen an increase in electricity usage during COVID of 8 percent because people are at home. We also saw an increase in use during the heatwave a couple of months ago. And we’ve seen an increase in need for our customer assistance programs of 18 percent. Utilities have stopped disconnecting anyone who’s not able to pay. It’s so important to be in a state that has those safety nets for individuals. 

Funding the recovery will be a challenge. “The pandemic has had an impact on our ability to roll out any kind of new programs until we can get the state budget back in shape,” Nichols said. Yet much of the investment necessary to transition California away from fossil fuels can do double duty, helping hard-hit communities restore jobs while also improving energy services. 

SCE is seeing wildfire mitigation and grid investment as opportunities to invest in local businesses, and to cultivate more diverse partners, including a scholarship program to bring more Blacks into the skilled energy workforce, Peterman said. 

The shift to electric vehicles (EVs), accelerated by a recent state order curtailing sales of fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2035, creates a need for investment that can rebuild and upgrade the grid in underserved communities, Peterman explained: 

We believe that a significant amount of electrification ultimately is the lowest-cost way to reach California’s climate targets. But it’s important to make sure that everyone can access all of those EVs, having access to renewable energy and building electrification. It can oftentimes be those in disadvantaged communities who don’t make that transition as quickly and then end up paying more. Ultimately, we want to make sure electricity stays affordable because we want people to use it more. 

Towards this goal, SCE recently got the OK to launch a $436 million buildout of EV charging infrastructure, the most ambitious of any U.S. utility, Peterman said. The plan calls for half of chargers to be installed in disadvantaged communities. It’s our job to set the bar high and to show the fortitude.

If all goes to plan, SCE will be able to both improve electrical service to those communities while also improving its business. This kind of synergy — with private companies innovating pragmatic strategies that help advance climate policy and benefit the public — are crucial to recovering and moving towards net-zero emissions. And the scale of the crisis demands more collaboration, faster. But not all businesses are there yet, Nichols said: 

What I see as a major impediment is the lack of willingness on the part of at least some of our business ecosystem to come to the table with their most constructive contribution. I am going to call out — because I think I have to — the debate over what we mean by zero, whether we’re going to zero or “near zero.” It boils down to: Are we going to continue to subsidize somewhat cleaner technologies versus setting our sights out on the ultimate goal and doing everything we can to get there? 

Promising precedents

By this measure, California’s track record of pioneering climate technologies offers promising precedents. From solar panel materials to EVs and grid management software, homegrown technologies are rapidly remaking California’s energy, transportation and economic systems. Yet in the next phase of recovery and decarbonization, affordability and accessibility will be a higher priority. Peterman is hopeful that innovation can help drive down costs. She said: 

I’m starting to geek out thinking about things like sensors and technologies that help to reduce latency. How do we allow devices to communicate with each other? And how do we really bring customers’ distributed resources forward to support grid resiliency? … With technology advancements and the need for affordability, it’s important to keep pushing the envelope. That’s my shout-out to all the techie people out there: We still need your ingenuity! 

From a policy perspective, Nichols is adamant the state will continue to lead. “It’s our job to set the bar high and to show the fortitude that says we’re going to stick with these goals even if somebody gets a little bent out of shape along the way, and we have to figure out how to accommodate them,” Nichols said. “Maybe we need to be flexible about the means for getting there. But we got to be willing to say, ‘We know we can get there.’ We’ve got to set that goal.”

After all, the Golden State is already home to the largest cap-and-trade program in the United States. More recently, Sacramento has unveiled ambitious goals to be carbon-neutral by 2045, to shift the grid and its nation’s largest fleet of cars to be zero-emission by 2035. Along the way, the state has emerged as a hothouse of climate-focused businesses, from innovative manufacturers such as Tesla to renewable energy giants such as Sunrun to efficiency standard-setters such as Google.  

No state can match California’s challenges, or the scale of its possibilities, in untangling this knot of problems. “But if anyone can do it, it’s California,” GreenBiz’s Golden said. 

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Originally published at Greenbiz.com.

Corporate Knights

HOW Blue-Zone Technologies Cuts THE CLIMATE TOLL OF Anesthesia | Corporate Knights

Anesthesia is a medical miracle, but it’s costly and poses a surprising threat to the climate

gaseous anesthesia

Operating rooms are sites of some of our most advanced health technologies, where bodies are healed and lives often saved. Yet for the climate, operating rooms are surprisingly unhealthful.

The culprit: gaseous anesthesia. When anesthetized, patients only absorb about 5 per cent of an administered dosage. The leftovers – roughly 95 per cent of the original volatile anesthetic – are routinely vented to the outside world where they act as greenhouse gases thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide.

“It’s a risk to the environment, and a terrible waste of money,” says Dusanka Filipovic, who for 10 years has been building a business to fix this twin-barreled problem. The Toronto-based firm she founded, Blue-Zone Technologies, is poised to begin large-scale commercial implementation of its Deltasorb technology, which captures and recycles anesthesia emissions.

When retrofitted onto the exhaust line of a conventional anesthetic gas system, the filter recaptures and absorbs the scavenged gases. In roughly 300 pilot sites in hospitals across Ontario, the service is already helping the planet by preventing these emissions from adding to our GHG problem.

And later this year, Blue-Zone will begin to help hospitals’ bottom lines as well, by using the captured excess gases as a raw material to make and sell a generic, lower-cost supply of anesthetics, says Filipovic.

Inhaled anesthesia gases – the most common are desflurane, isoflurane and sevoflurane – are a miracle of modern medicine. They evolved from and replaced ether, the first form of inhaled anesthesia pioneered in the 1800s. Yet ether was so dangerous, it was a common cause of death during surgery.

Modern anesthesia gases, by comparison, have largely eliminated those risks, explains Stephen Brown, corporate chief of anesthesia with William Osler Health System, which operates two hospitals in Ontario.

“They allow a far finer degree of control,” he adds, “lowering patient risk during surgery. And they cut the side effects and hangover afterwards,” says Brown, who has overseen the installation of Deltasorb systems in three dozen operating rooms.

Though healthier for humans, modern anesthesia is making the planet sick.

Desflurane, the most widely used anesthesia, has global warming effects some 3,700 times greater than CO2. The gas inhaled typically includes a mix of similar agents, and is delivered via a flow of a mix of oxygen and nitrous oxide, which is also a potent GHG.

For every hour of surgery, the effects of these gases add up to the equivalent of hundreds of miles of driving. Taken together, worldwide emissions of inhalation anesthetics have a climate impact on par with a single coal-fired power plant, or more than 1 million passenger cars, according to a 2010 study in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.

Blue-Zone is already helping to tug that toll down thanks to its bread-loaf sized canisters. Retrofitted onto the exhaust pipes of anesthesia systems, the reusable canisters are filled with a proprietary material that absorbs the volatile anesthesia gases exhausted by the anesthetic system. Blue-Zone technicians routinely pick them up from the hospitals and replace them with refills.

The fee? About $150 per month. At less than $5 per day, that’s “not a significant cost barrier,” says Brown. Hospitals receive a monthly report on the amount of gas recaptured and what that works out to in terms of CO2-equivalent GHG emissions.

Returned to Blue-Zone’s facility in Concord, Ontario, the filter packs are processed to recover accumulated anesthesia, which is then processed into generic anesthetic agents and packaged for resale.

Filipovic is excited by the opportunity to offer a lower cost alternative for gaseous anesthesia, for which the market is highly concentrated. Worldwide, just two factories – in Japan and Puerto Rico – produce these life-saving gases, which makes them not only costly but vulnerable to supply disruption.

As yet, however, there are no regulations in Canada or other major countries forcing hospitals to curb anesthesia emissions.

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  • View a PDF of the original article, here: Blue-Zone.
  • Photo courtesy of the NATO International Security Assistance Force.
Corporate Knights

HOW CARBONCURE TECHNOLOGIES IS Lowering Concrete’s Enormous Climate Impact | Corporate Knights

Injecting CO2 into concrete as it hardens is helping slash its towering toll on the climate

Concrete is a conundrum. It’s the world’s most heavily consumed manmade material, with nearly three tonnes used per person, every year. Yet for the climate, baking limestone into cement does more harm than practically any other industrial process.

To help cut cement’s supersized carbon footprint, Halifax, Nova Scotia-based startup CarbonCure Technologies is tinkering with the age-old recipe for how cement cures into concrete, its final rock-like form. The company’s answer: carbonated cement.

“Every day millions of tonnes of concrete is produced globally,” says Robert Niven, chief executive and founder. “Every tonne is a lost opportunity to sequester carbon dioxide.”

Devising greener concrete is no easy task, in part because the recipe is deceptively simple and has proven to be such a remarkably good building material for so long.

It is, quite literally, the stuff from which civilization has been built. Today’s cement traces back to formulations first used 7,000 years ago. Some Roman-era structures, such as the domed Pantheon, are as sturdy today as when they were erected two millennia ago.

Today’s megastructures are likewise possible only because of concrete’s peculiar mix of performance and affordability, from the biggest dams to our tallest towers.

The problem? The manufacturing of cement emits 5 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases, on par with about half of all emissions from car, truck and other road transport. Among industrial sources of CO2, the industry trails only the much larger petrochemicals sector.

Making cement emits roughly equal shares of CO2 at two stages: first, from the fuel used to heat a mix of limestone and traces of other minerals to 1,450 degrees Celsius; and second, from the resulting chemical reaction, where limestone breaks down into lime, giving up nearly half its mass as CO2.

Unless better recipes are devised, emissions will keep growing. A building binge across the developing world is expected to more than double global cement production this decade, according to the Carbon War Room, a London-based think tank.

CarbonCure is tackling that problem by focusing on how cement cures into concrete. The company’s proprietary process injects anthropogenic CO2 – captured from big industrial sources such as natural gas reformers – into the mix as concrete is being formed into an array of masonry products, including blocks and pavers.

As the CO2 percolates through the mix, it triggers a chemical reaction, remaking microscopic bits of limestone in the concrete matrix, permanently locking the gas into a rock-like structure. The resulting concrete block is not only greener; it turns out stronger than the standard stuff.

The carbon savings can stack up quickly. As a rule of thumb, every standard concrete block made using CarbonCure’s recipe sequesters around 30 grams of CO2. Thus, some 3,000 of them can lock up as much CO2 as a mature tree does in a single year.

The first U.S. structure to be built with CarbonCure’s green blocks was completed at the University of California, Davis in the spring. Exterior walls of the Jess S. Jackson Sustainable Winery Building, a one-storey, 8,500-square-foot research facility, were built with more than 2,500 specially manufactured blocks made by Basalite Concrete Products, based in Dixon, California. The result, says Niven, is the lowest-carbon concrete-block wall ever built in the U.S.

CarbonCure is currently working with four partners in North America that are producing its low-carbon blocks, pavers and other masonry products. Atlas Block, a major Canadian concrete manufacturer, is in negotiation to supply the low-carbon blocks for several sports complexes being built for the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto. “This is easily the most exciting technological improvement I’ve seen in years,” says Atlas chief executive Don Gordon.

Another dozen partners are in the pipeline, says Niven. In time, he hopes to expand the company’s reach to China – where more than half of the world’s concrete is currently being produced – and other global markets.

He also hopes to see CarbonCure move beyond masonry to apply its process to larger precast structures and ready-mix, the wet slurry of concrete and aggregate delivered in big mixing trucks.

Given that roughly 12 billion tonnes of concrete is produced every year around the world, if CarbonCure can adapt its technology to all concrete types, “the potential to reduce carbon is huge,” Niven says.

Indeed, green efforts are advancing in other aspects of concrete production. Industrial waste, such as fly ash or slag, offers a low-carbon alternative to cement. And major manufacturers such as Lafarge and Holcim are using more low-carbon or carbon-neutral fuels, such as biomass, to replace fossil fuels used in cement kilns.

Taken together, these green steps suggest that concrete could someday be “carbon neutral, or even carbon negative,” says Niven.

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GreenBiz

Cheap natural gas drives manufacturers, energy companies to shift gears | GreenBiz

Last week, Joe Nocera reminded me of how disconnected and angry the debate over fracking — the process of injecting fluids into deep, dense rock formations to fracture them and release natural gas — has grown. At The New York Times Energy for Tomorrow conference, Nocera moderated a series of panels that were focused on a broad variety of energy issues, but repeatedly returned to the hot button issue of fracking.

In a rhetorical question, he asked if the tradeoff in environmental harm and public health one we just have to accept. The answer is no, of course. But, as Nocera added, the fact is that fracking is already happening in a very big way. For those not following this issue, he’s an op-ed columnist for the Times who supports fracking as an innovation that, done responsibly, can lead to game-changing new supplies of energy, job growth and economic expansion.

Nocera’s position crystalizes much of the debate around this energy technology. His writing has drawn ire, especially in greater New York City and its hinterlands, where proposals to drill for natural gas in the city’s upstate watershed have sparked enough protest to turn the Hudson Valley into the epicenter of national anti-fracking efforts.

There’s good reason for alarm. ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism entity has — in my opinion — amassed the best work documenting the environmental harm done by fracking. Here are just a few of the key environmental harms associated with the practice:

These issues make a strong case against the practice, and explain why Nocera’s “develop responsibly” position is controversial. The mixed reactions to his endorsement of the practice highlight the schisms dividing interest groups, coming between neighbors who are fighting over whether to frack or not and between national environmental groups who disagree about the environmental pluses and minuses of the practice.

For example, Nocera draws some of his analysis from work done by the Environmental Defense Fund, which is also pushing for tightly regulated fracking. Nocera’s approach has drawn heavy fire from climate activists such as Bill McKibben, a writer and scholar who backs a moratorium, arguing the risks of fracking are simply too high, as well as from Joseph Romm, a former Clinton-era energy official and now an influential climate commentator at Climate Progress.

Putting aside the fight over whether fracking should extend into new areas, Nocera’s talk drew my attention to a facet of fracking that gets less attention. Away from the main boxing ring where the issue is being fought out, large-scale industrial investment is rapidly reorganizing based on the long-term promise of low-cost gas. In short, industry is betting that fracking is here to say. Here’s where fracking already is impacting industry:

Power generation

The fracking binge has already altered the outlook for the U.S. power and manufacturing sectors. More than the rise of renewables, cheap natural gas has paved the way for the retirement of more than 100 coal-fired powered plants, too aged to meet federal clean air rules.

Efforts to build new coal plants are constrained too. Because natural gas power plants are cheaper to build and fuel, the natural gas boom has radically lowered the count of new coal-fired plants being proposed. According to data tracked by the National Energy Technology Lab and Sierra Club, plans for more than 160 coal plants have been shelved in recent years, partly due to natural gas’ cost advantage, as well as soft growth of demand for power.

“Natural gas has done more than other legislative initiative to push coal out of the equation,” said panelist Michael Levi, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the center for foreign aaffairs, and by my reckoning, one the smartest observers out there on this issue.

Manufacturing

Cheap natural gas is rewriting the rules for other manufacturers too. Less than a decade ago, natural-gas-reliant manufacturers were decamping from the U.S., transplanting operations to the Arabian Gulf, Latin America and other gas-rich regions.

Now many are returning. Makers of chemicals, fertilizer and pharmaceuticals, all of which use natural gas as both an energy source and a raw material are returning stateside, lured by natural gas for under $2.50 per thousand cubic feet, less than fifth of the price in Europe or East Asia.

As Jim Motavalli reports in The New York Times, Nucor, which uses natural gas to make steel, is building a $750-million facility in Louisiana, just eight years after shutting down a similar plant in the same state and shipping it to Trinidad, to tap the island’s recently-developed natural gas supplies.

The cost advantage provided by cheap natural gas is even sharper for companies that use methane as a raw material — to make plastics, for example. Kevin Swift, chief economist at the American Chemistry Council, tells the Times that because European chemicals companies use oil-based raw materials derived to make plastics, the U.S. has a 50-to-1 advantage. “‘Shale gas’ is really driving this,” he says. “A million [British thermal units] of natural gas that might cost $11 in Europe and $14 in South Korea is $2.25 in the U.S. Partly because of that, chemical producers have plans to expand ethylene capacity in the U.S. by more than 25 percent between now and 2017.”

Add up the impact of investments like these and high rates of shale gas recovery could result in a million new manufacturing jobs by 2025, according to a 2011 PricewaterhouseCoopers study cited by Motavalli.

Transportation

Compared to current petroleum prices, natural gas costs $1.50 per gallon equivalent, nearly two-thirds less than current pump prices for gasoline or diesel. Large fleets of heavy-duty vehicles — from buses to garbage trucks to delivery vehicles — have been among the earliest converts. One-quarter to a half of Navistar’s new vehicle sales in these markets opt for natural gas.

Long-distance highway trucking may be the next to switch. Speaking with the Times, Navistar chief executive Dan Ustian, predicts that natural gas could capture up to a fifth of sales of highway tractor-trailers within a year.

The need for on-road refueling infrastructure remains a constraint. There simply aren’t many publicly accessible natural gas refueling sites. The count is under 1,000, less than 1 percent the number of gas stations. Last month, GE and natural gas producer Chesapeake Energy inked a joint venture to build 250 natural gas refueling points around the country.

Policy

Industry is clearly digging in even as environmental opposition gains momentum. Complicating the politics of this debate is that fracking is an intensely regional issue. State-level cultural perceptions of energy vary, for instance. Some families in Texas welcome gas rigs in their backyards, while some landowners in New York are suing to prevent nearby drilling.

Geology is different everywhere too, of course. So what was done safely in Oklahoma may not be replicable in Pennsylvania. “Local conditions matter significantly,” said Mark Brownstein, a panelist at the Times event and chief counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund’s energy program.

These polarizations have driven the debate to unproductive levels of ire, the panelists at the NYT event argued. “This is the perfectly dysfunctional fight,” said Levi, from the Council on Foreign Affairs. “There are environmentalists who believe this cannot be done safely. And there are those in the industry who say regulations will destroy their business.” The loudest voices amount to an all-or-nothing proposition, Levi added, which makes the process of brokering a solution to the fracking question very difficult.

There is a web of substantial existing regulation covering fracking, Brownstein explained, including the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act. “The fundamental question is whether they are sufficient,” he said, and how to improve them if not. Another weak link he pointed to is variations in state level rules and enforcement of well construction, where one poorly built well, after all, can do enormous environmental damage.

Indeed, pointing to these weakest links, Levi made a case for the role of federal regulation. If one state underinvests or underenforces, a single disaster could stir up a far-reaching political backlash that could ultimately slow or halt development.

Some state-level policies, such as Texas’ tough disclosure rules on what frackers inject into the ground, can be cut and pasted to other state or national rules. New York State’s rules are also shaping up to be a benchmark in this respect. And some rules, such as the “Halliburton exception,” which excluded fracking from Clean Water Act standards for what is injected into wells, can only be fixed by an act of Congress.

With the scale of fracking rising, the stakes to get regulation right are growing — and making the fight harder to resolve. Some in the industry are beginning to welcome tougher regulation, recognizing that it could help level the playing field. If tougher regulations could ensure fracking can be done safely, but added 10 or 20 percent to unit cost of gas, the fuel remains cheap, Levi pointed out. “If I were a fracker, I’d rather have 20 cents extra charge” than the environmental and political risks facing the energy today, he said.

Check out Nocera, Levi, Brownstein and others here at The New York Times Energy for Tomorrow conference.